SUSAN TIPPETT BRAITHWAITE

Welcome to Week 10 of the Friday Fiction Writing Challenge! Here’s a complete list of all the posts so far. Feel free to join in.

This week’s random word is: Childhood

When the generator spat out the word childhood, I groaned. Loudly. I think all my characters have some kind of damaged childhood—though, weirdly, not my bad guys—and the idea of creating a new one that I’m not going to use in a story annoyed me. Maybe not annoyed, more it made me not want to play. But, I forced my bahookie into the chair, set the timer for the first five-minute sprint, and got my head down.

Here’s my first sprint (unedited):

Kay stared at Rex, her mouth still hanging open. How was she supposed to respond to that? Her mind raced for something comforting to say, but she had nothing.
Rex cleared his throat. “You’ll catch flies, sweetheart.” He crossed the room until he was right in front of her and tapped under her chin for her to close her mouth. “That’s better. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we get back to blowing the bridge?”
Back to business. Kay shook her head, trying to catch up with his mental gymnastics. “No. Wh–what did you mean by you spent your whole childhood training for this?” 
Rex tipped his head back as if he couldn’t believe they were still talking about this. “Exactly what it sounds like.”
“So, when everyone else was playing with Play-Doh, you were playing with C-4 and det cord?”

I actually like what I came up with for the first sprint. Since I only put up a single sprint last week for the same reason, I didn’t want to give myself a way out of doing the second one. So, I went ahead and looked for something that piqued my interest to a higher level than the rest of the text. One of the sentences really stood out for me because I could see it so clearly in my head. The sentence I chose to spark the second sprint is: Rex tipped his head back as if he couldn’t believe they were still talking about this.

Here’s my second sprint (basic editing):

“Again,” yelled Shiny Suit as his fist slammed into Rex’s gut.
Rex couldn’t stop the yelp of pain from escaping. Three days they’d been at this. Rex cuffed to a chair and Shiny Suit being a dipshit. “I’m cuffed to a fucking chair,” he raised his hands as high as the metal would normally have allowed, “how could I have killed the guard?” Rex tipped his head back. He needed Shiny Suit to get closer. Needed him to inspect the cuffs.
The man moved behind Rex and wrapped an arm around his throat in a chokehold as he used his other hand to check the cuffs. Rex jerked his hands up, the empty cuffs clanking against the metal chair, and stabbed Shiny Suit’s hand with a sharpened piece of chair.

I ran out of time before I could really come up with something better than the first sprint. As mentioned above, I liked the first sprint. And, to be honest, I wanted to spend more time on that than working on something new. The first sprint will definitely make it into my story seed bank.

Until next week, thanks for reading!

HOW IT WORKS

1. Don’t think too hard on the noun; just write about it for five minutes.
2. Once the five minutes are up, walk away for about five/ten minutes.
3. Now, come back to the text and re-read it,
4. Pick out something that piques your interest and write about that for five minutes.
5. Be courageous and post your results to your blog. (Both sets of writing sessions or just the one, it’s up to you.)

RULES

1. Complete the challenge on your blog before 1700 UTC of the following Friday.
2. Link to the original prompt post and make sure to use the tag Genre Scribes so that we can see all the posts together in WP Reader.
3. Your text must be fiction (preferably one you publish in (or plan to).
4. No real-life stories.
5. The text can be dialogue, an interior monologue, a scene, flash fiction, anything… so long as it’s fiction.

Full information is on the Genre Scribes: Friday Fiction Writing Challenge page.