writing without fear, part two

A few days ago, I talked about dealing with writer’s block. It’s that internal editor that acts as judge, jury, and executioner when you’re writing pretty much anything. It has no value when you’re composing a first draft because it blocks you and gives you nothing but frustration. That internal editor will have value later in the writing process, and I will describe that in an upcoming blog post. Right now, when you are writing a first draft, you need to turn that internal editor off.

One of the things that I did when I wrote the first post was to give you a creative writing exercise to do. It’s a timed exercise that is basically the equivalent of stretching before working out. I’m providing a link here in case you would like to do the writing exercise now: https://sunmoonstarshine.com/writing-without-fear/

In today’s post, I am going to model this exercise. Tools needed are just the computer and a cell phone timer. If you like, you could handwrite the exercise. That would be fine. If you want to use your cell phone for writing, that’s okay if you turn off predictive text. This is your time to create and having a phone that thinks that it knows your story better than you is super annoying.

And here we go!

I am going to set the timer for fifteen minutes and then start with the phrase that was given to me by the random sentence generator. There are eight words that I need to incorporate into the story, and they were given to me by a random word generator. The words that the random word generator gave me were: hurt, prick, liberate, lavish, elegant, school, heaven, beer.

She had to find the necklace before darkness fell. She felt stressed and pressured by this need to find the necklace. It had been either lost or stolen years ago, but she really wasn’t certain about how that happened. She had gone to a lavish party where she wore the necklace. It felt heavy and bulky, but it was expensive and full of rare gems and other some sort things. She loved that necklace because she loved the grandmother who gave it to her, who left it to her in her will.

But she was hurt. So hurt because everything else that the grandmother left went to that horrible brother of hers. He was so selfish, so greedy, such a prick. She really detested him. He was fifteen years her senior, and he was angry when she was born. Angry because she got the attention that he thought was rightly hers. Angry because he thought that she was a useless little creature, not an actual sister.

And now, here she was at this elegant party that celebated her grandmother. She knew that she would be liberated from dread and fear of that terrible brother, who had been so cruel to her. They never attended school together, fortunately. The age gap was too great. But it didn’t matter. He visited her teachers when she was unaware of it. He pretended that he was an expert on her behavior. He told the teachers that she behaved badly at home and that she was a spoiled little brat and that she snuck into the kitchen and drank beer at the tender age of eight.

But now, that was in the past, and she was trying to figure out where the necklace went. She would not be able to ask her brother. He would never tell her. Besides, he was dead. He was always a terrible driver and he had a lot of money after grandmother’s will was read. So, he bought an expensive sports car for himself. He drove fast and recklessly. Why did he do that? Well, because he could. Because he liked speed. Because he wanted to impress his rich friends. Because he was focused on himself. So he drove drunk one day after consuming far too many beers and he hit a guard rail at a very high rate of speed, and he was ejected from the vehicle. And he died.

She didn’t feel sorry for him. She didn’t feel anything. She wondered why she didn’t feel anything. She also wondered where the necklace was and what secret the necklace carried. She had absolutely no idea. Everything felt strange and different after her brother died. She went to therapy and the therapist suggested that she forgive her brother.

“Forgive that piece of dirt? Why?”

“Because,” the therapist said. “You can let go. You don’t have to carry him with you forever. You will be freed, liberated from your anger. It’s eating you up.”

She thought about that, and she realized that the therapist was right. She was carrying her anger and her hatred toward her brother. And a lot of it was probably exaggerated. They never got along, but that didn’t mean that…

Oh wait. The necklace. Where is the necklace. She kept thinking about that because after that one night, the necklace was gone. She thought that she might have taken it off. It was very heavy and very clunky and she felt like a turtle with it on. It was sort of like the crown jewels. Well, there were a lot of jewels in the necklace. She had believed that the jewels were fake and that she got the short end of the stick because her precious brother got everything else, including the estate.

But, what if she was wrong? What if those jewels had been more valuable about the estate? What if?

Her mind swirled with the what ifs for hours and hours.

The sun was rising and she had not found the necklace. She didn’t know where it was. As far as she could tell, it mysteriously vanished.

Or did it?

Not possible, she thought.

She looked among the papers that her grandmother left and she found a note.

The note said something about a necklace and about rare gems.

Was that her necklace? Would she ever see it again?

What happened?

Also, was her brother actually dead? For sure, not in heaven.

His viewing was not a real viewing because the casket was closed.

There were a lot of things that didn’t seem right. Something was wrong here besides the anger that was still festering in her heart.