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From the Bookshelf

 From the Bookshelf

A black bookshelf filled with books. On top is a lamp and some branch decorations.

December 2024

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the December 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
“Feeding the Hungry,” by Roland Topor, trans. by Margaret Crosland and David LeVay, in Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories, edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1982)

I confess: I am currently reading this book of flash in preparation for a semester-long course I’m proposing to teach, so it was very handy on my bookshelf. There are some wonderful beauties inside, and I encourage all flash writers to read the book if you haven’t already.

I opened to French writer Roland Topor’s story “Feeding the Hungry,” whose first paragraph reads:

You’re bound to think I’m a liar: but I’ve never felt hungry. I don’t know what hunger means. As far back as I can remember I’ve never known what it was like. I eat, of course, but without appetite. I feel absolutely nothing, not even distaste. I just eat.

I love this concept of removing such a basic drive from the narrator. I also love the confessional tone. It’s as if someone were explaining this to you at a cocktail party, in a corner, away from the noisy crowd. And now, I’d like you to do something similar. Write a flash in which the narrator explains how they have no desire to do something that most other humans do. Maybe they cannot love another person. Maybe they’ve never once read a book for pleasure, even though they know how to read. Maybe they have no sexual drive at all. Tell a story that makes us revel in the drive they’re lacking; in other words, by showing the opposite try to get us thinking (and feeling) about what it means for us to read, love, have sex, etc.  

To get you started, you might replace the words in the excerpted first paragraph with the drive/desire you’re focusing on. Then, in revision, scrap that paragraph so it sounds nothing like it.


Take this wherever it leads, and have fun,

 

Cheryl