Martín Vukovic
Writing sparks
Writing sparks are ideas to help you start writing, suggested by Zachary Kai.
I decided to give some a try.
25-Word Universe: Paint a vivid world within twenty-five words.
You are here. You are born, grow and die here, along with the others. Nobody really knows why, but everyone wonders. There is no answer.
Alphabetic Fables: Let each sentence start with sequential letters from A to Z.
A kind of life was extinct, but another started in them. Beastly and grotesque, they crept down the mountain that made them be. Callous looks and muttered words with spite and disgust are their only welcome.
Day and night they walk, but they feel no sense of advancing or getting nearer to an end. Every frowning face, every word that is spit out, every door slammed in disgust, every reproach given to children who dare to feel curious about them, every rock that is thrown at them, they all feel the same to them.
Fever dreams and painful feet. Gashes and slashes and broken bones. Hideous reflections on calm waters, fear of wild beasts, stabs of hunger.
Intimacy, forbidden; pleasure, unknown; rest, interrupted; awareness, overwhelming.
Justice may come one day when their purpose is revealed, they think, but now they need to endure, escape, subsist, exist.
Kindred pain forges bonds stronger than rock. Lost souls are found when they are together.
Months and mountains pass. Never knowing where they are or where they are going, they still soldier on. Omens are waited, signs are seeked after.
Puny menaces from puny creatures of puny flesh. Quickly they learn that the monsters are not they.
Reassured by the promise of their unrevealed grandiosity, their minds are soothed, their bodies hardened, and they know they can endure everything.
Silence, sudden and absolute.
Then they start falling. Ushered by a sense of urgency, they run and try to escape what hunts them in the night. Violent deaths. Whispers of calamity.
“Xenos”: strangers they always were, doomed to run and hide. Yet, something made them fight until life abandoned the last of them . Zeal for meaning, or maybe the fear of the lack of it.
Invisible Character Sketch: Describe someone without mentioning appearance at all.
They hate getting up early, but they love mornings once they are up. Early mornings are quiet, just like late nights, and in that quiet they can hear their thoughts more clearly.
Multiple universes are born and destroyed in their mind every day.
There’s an economy to their movements. They trace optimal routes between the living room table and the kitchen sink and calculate the best distribution of objects in each hand, so that the trips needed to clear the table after dinner are minimized.
You could recognize them in the middle of a crowd by the way they walk, even if they are walking away from you, from a block away, at night.
Sometimes they feel small, other times, giant. Some people utterly frighten them, others compulse them talk their ears off and they don’t know why.
Their house is a bit of a mess, but there is structure there, and a kind of obscure order too.
They like what they like.
Thank you for reading.
Send your comments via email.