The woman who might tell the story won’t wake up. You can’t forget the waitress in IHOP, the tiredness in her face – in her every move. Yet, somehow when you try to write about her, she is a cartoon. You remember starting to read a book and realizing that you didn’t give a damn about the people in it. You won’t inflict that on your readers. You wonder why you have imagined you can write.
Stop thinking. And follow me:
Somewhere a woman walks out to her car in the IHOP employee parking lot. She wonders if anyone will ever know about her. Will she slog through the rest of her life and die, just another anonymous human. Her best friend – her only real friend – moved away six months ago. They’d met working graveyard shift at the International House of Please let this shift be over. Now, the only grown-up person in her life is her husband. And, he is more a child than their three kids. She loosens the brace on her left wrist…
You write the next sentence. It can be gibberish. It can be Pulitzer Prize brilliant. More likely, it will be somewhere in between. Please send me what you’ve written. So far, no one has responded to my requests to send me your Breakthrough tip writing. Let me guilt trip you by pointing out that these prompts are free – but energy always needs to flow both ways.
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