PROMPT: Write about a time you held your breath. keep your pen moving for 6 minutes. (From Kicking in the Wall: A Year of Writing Exercises, Prompts, and Quotes to Help You Break Through Your Blocks and Reach Your Writing Goals, by Barbara Abercrombie)
Peek into the hidden corners of your characters by having them do this prompt.
As always, you’re encouraged to post your unedited response(s) to the prompt in the comments section of this post. By doing so, you stand up for this important, but oft-neglected, wild and wooly part of the creative process.
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Everyone was in and I was out, and I was as frozen as if it has been mid-January north of the Arctic instead of early Fall in one of those mid-Atlantic states that had, they’ve said, Confederate leanings in that long-ago war. And then flying, as fast as my 5 year-old legs would carry me, away from the high wooden doors, laced with a black wrought iron catch that was locked – locked against me, closing me out. I was late, I was wrong, and I had no thought in my head except hide. I loved to hide. My sisters and I and sometimes our cousins hid in the attic, in the yard, in favored places throughout the rooms of our house on 5th St., every chance we got. But this was different – it felt like my very death, and I hid in the first alley that I came to. And held my breath . . . as though the very act of breathing would betray me, announce my presence, my badness, my wrongness, my very lack of worth to be alive, my not-withness for the other children inside that far-away now classroom that I was outside of. Everyone was in and I was out, and I couldn’t breathe.