I was the second one to show up out of a grand total of 26 writers who came, when there was only room for 15. Only 3 had actually signed up. (Writers are so unreliable. Did I sign up, you ask? Oh, let’s not bother with trivialities…) Not wanting to deprive anyone the right to write, the facilitators graciously accepted everyone. Dedicated writers sat on table tops, carpets, and stairways when all the chairs were taken up.
I forgot to take a picture, so here is a picture of a loft.
One of the women there was one whom I had seen at the Death and Dying discussion earlier in the day. I recognized her by her signature socks-in-Crocs that I had seen hogging the bathroom stall for a good 20 minutes as I and a line of other women waited eagerly with crossed legs, each taking our turn to peer under the stall door to see what the holdup was.
Because… who could forget something like that?
She smiled at me as if our brief and sordid encounter earlier in the day made us comrades-in-restroom-arms. No, lady… you inconvenienced me. I am not your friend. But I smiled back anyways, because, well… I’m a nice person.
The session went for an hour and a half and covered a range of prompts such as “write about a character that just woke up at the end of a public transit line without wallet or phone” and “write about something significant from your childhood home” or “write about the things that DON’T flash before a person’s eyes moments before they die” or “write about a character who realizes their home is being broken into,” etc.
Apparently there are very few things I can take seriously. In evidence of this, here is what I wrote for the prompt I mentioned last:
You never expect to have an intruder while you’re doing your laundry. You never expect to have an intruder at all. That defeats the purpose of intruding. Yet, there I was, being intruded upon with nothing but my dirty socks to defend me. I thought of the indignity of it all… being robbed or raped or murdered in my “laundry day clothes”… and all before I had even gotten to the rinse cycle.
My fright instincts took flight and my heart beat hard enough to make me think it was trying to escape out the door ahead of my feet.
I just googled “dirty hipster” and found my laundry day outfit…
Further evidence was witnessed in the “write an instruction manual for something.” I chose How to Fool People into Thinking You’re a Professional, as this pertains to my daily life:
To appear professional, it is imperative that you make people believe that you’re a busy woman. To achieve this, simply make an excessive amount of phone calls in the office. Call the guys who deliver the office’s fruit every week and ask them in a condescending voice, loud enough for everyone to hear… “Did you update our order to the medium size box?” And just for good measure, throw in words like implement, synergy and optimization. For example, “Oh yes, fruit guys, we are implementing the optimization of our ecommerce plan. It’s going to be synergetic!” If you say it belligerently enough, no one will care that you don’t know what those words mean.
At the end of the session, we all got up and mingled. I heard a voice say,
“If anyone would like to write some flash fictions pieces and have them published on our website, I can give you a business card.”
I turned. It was socks-in-Crocs. Good thing I smiled at her
earlier despite her egregious restroom faux pas. I introduced myself and gladly accepted a business card as we chatted about non-restroom related topics.
At the very end we were told to each grab a fortune cookie and use the fortune as the beginning to a story.
This was mine:
And my story went: Once upon a time, an aspiring young writer opened a fortune cookie that told her to write a book…
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