After discussing the book Loud Silence of Francine Green we moved on to another writing exercise. I’d been hoping we’d get to read the piece we’d revised as homework because I’d made some pretty big changes and revisions and I was curious what my peers would think. So I was a little disappointed when we didn’t do that.

Instead we wrote something completely new. And the prompt was very difficult for me to apply to my character. My character’s biggest trait is her fearless and fiesty attitude. The prompt was: Have your character confront a challenge and not make the brave decision.

Well, if you have a fearless and fiesty character, that presents a problem. My character is not a coward in the least bit. So I tried to work through my frustration with the prompt by brainstorming things my heroine may be scared of. I came up with three things: getting caught, trusting people, and losing her younger brother.

Then I knew at some point they were going to run away, so I wrote about some hypothetical situation where they were running away and ran into people, and “Jane” made a decision not to trust them. It wasn’t my best writing. It was a very cliche scenario. And so now, after I finish this post, I’ll write for fun without a prompt.

And at some point today… I’ll read Alice in Wonderland.