One of the most well-loved writing prompts is where each member of a group chooses a single word and then everyone in the group has to write something — poetry or prose — including all the words chosen.
At the new Louth Library writing group I’m running, this was chosen by the group’s members as our first exercise in order to ‘ease us in’. It is a prompt which — given its constraints — I suspect rarely leads to high-quality output; so a bit of ‘fluff’ really.
Here are the seven words offered up — and my response to them:
Autumn
But
Derision
Chimney
Spiral
Effervescence
Squirrel
~
One of our number claims that waiting for James to walk back through the front door of the club is like waiting to discover who the new Pope is; the news presaged in the white smoke from the chimney, if you recall. Perhaps for a few of us that is the case, but what I think we did originally agree on was the folly of the notion — not that it was unusual for his plans to be met with derision. We’d thought him a little unhinged and eccentric since we’d all met at school. ‘Nuts’ is, I believe, the schoolboys’ chosen colloquial expression, hence his nickname of ‘Squirrel’. But this new idea of his was something in the extreme! And to undertake it at the end of Autumn too! We imagined him missing connections early on, one delay leading to another, a spiral of lost time — time he didn’t have. But then the telegrams started to arrive, missives filled with excitement, his typical effervescence: a near thing here, a close call there. And all the while making progress, progress.
Incredulous of course, yet here we are waiting for him. In spite of our initial reservations — and irrespective as to how we’ve wagered — to a man we’ll be happy to see him achieve his goal of travelling around the world in eighty days.