Dating : “Hemingway didn’t use writing prompts…”

“…So why do you have to!?” She lifted her arms in frustration.

In hindsight, she was right to be mad. She slaved away at her job to support me. Now, it had been weeks and I hadn’t written a single word.

“You’re telling me you can’t write anything good because you need the right prompt?” She was the kind of person who got really, really quiet when she was mad instead of yelling. At this point, she was barely audible.

She pointed at my desk, piled high with books like The Art of the Science of Writing, So You Wanna be a Best-Seller, How to Plot a Plot, and The Science of SEO.

“Do you really think this stuff makes you a writer?” her voice whispered daggers while her eyes beamed fire, “Last time I checked, writing makes you a writer. Not all this crap I keep spending money on for you!” She threw a pencil at me.

“And, now, you’re saying you haven’t written anything because you’re waiting for the right prompt?”

“Well…” I croaked a response, a mouse to a grizzly bear, “the webpage I follow gives out prompts, but none of them have really been speaking to me lately, and the random word generator I’ve been using hasn’t been very inspira-.”

“Random word generator!” she laughed a whispering demon’s laugh. She reached over to my bookshelf and grabbed a few titles, “Do you think this guy needed a word generator?” She tossed the book to the floor. It was an Ian Fleming novel. “What about this guy?” she held up the next one, “do you think he found inspiration through some writer’s webpage?” Bill Bryson flew across the room. I had to stop her before she made it to Leo Tolstoy and cracked my skull open with it.

“What am I supposed to write, then?” I said back to her, less confidence in my voice than I had hoped, “It’s not like I can just snort a bunch of cocaine and whip up twenty best-sellers like S-”

“Write something that people care about, dummy!” she sighed, “Quit looking for inspiration in some fake thing. Write what matters to you. Teach people something about life. Don’t just write a bunch of pointless adjectives and metaphors.” She threw another pencil at me.

It was quiet for moment as each of her words pricked at my pride.

“You don’t know that,” I finally said.

“I don’t know what?” she said, exasperated.

“You don’t know that Hemingway never used writing prompts.”

She grabbed a book with his name on it — a collection of his short stories. She thumbed through it and muttered, “Well, if he did. He used the same prompt for every story: liquor.” She chuckled at her own joke, then looked at me with kinder eyes, “Look. you can write. I know you can. You used to show me all sorts of stories full of fun and color. And that was all before you decided to ‘become a writer’ and suddenly started needing all these tricks and crap. Why do you have to write about random prompts instead of being inspired by…life?”

“Fine. Maybe I’ll write a story about this argument. And I’ll color you a Grizzly bear.” I meant it as a joke. Seeing her face, I was obviously wrong and started fearing for my life again. For a second, I thought for sure she would grab the Tolstoy novel and end me right there. Instead, she said something at such a small whisper that I couldn’t hear her.

She slammed the door.

I started writing.