From the Bookshelf

November 2024

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the November installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
Leonardo da Vinci: The Artist, Inventor, Scientist, in Three-Dimensional Pictures, by A.&M. Provensen (New York: The Viking Press, 1984)

Today is the first of November, and for some it’s a day to honor all the Christian saints—those who tried something unimaginable and succeeded. For us regular people, it can be a day of just trying.

I came upon this pop-up book about Leonardo I’d bought for my kids years ago. Whether for children or adults, a book about Leonardo is for everyone. It’s good to be reminded of what a person can do. So many of Leonardo’s inventions didn’t work out, but he did try a lot.

Here is this month’s excerpt:

Leonardo was the greatest artist in the world. He was also an astronomer, an architect, and an engineer who made hundreds of inventions. He loved to make wonderful machines. He made a machine to lift a model of the Church of San Giovanni high up into the air and onto a flight of steps. The Florentines were amazed and impressed but thought moving a church was a risky proposition, and it was never attempted. Gifted though he was, Leonardo had but one great weakness. His imagination made him impatient, and it was hard for him to finish anything.

For this exercise, write a story about someone trying and failing at something repeatedly. It could a menial task, such as trying to open a can of soup, or it could be monumental, such as trying to get a life-changing job. It could also be a sequence of activities—as long as the focus is on the trying. They could be related or unrelated activities, but if you go for this, make some pattern with them (the tasks can progress from small to large, for instance, or the opposite). Whole novels have been written about someone trying and failing to do something correctly (I’m thinking of Elana Ferrante’s protagonist in Days of Abandonment, when her front door lock is jammed and she can’t get out). Focus on the trying to find out what the real story is.

Take this wherever it leads, and have fun,

Cheryl