From the Bookshelf

November 2025

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 . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“leave,” The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language: Encyclopedic Edition (New York: Lexicon Publications, 1987)

I had trouble finding the right book this morning. After walking around my bookshelves, tracing my finger along spines of potentials, it finally stood out to me: my 1987 copy of the New Lexicon dictionary. It is so large (over 1,149 pages) that I have to place it on its side, because the shelf isn’t tall enough. My father had it for years and gave it to me for college. The book doesn’t appear to be still in print, and it feels more of a cherished relic than before. It’s probably 5 pounds. I always saw it as a treasure box when I was younger; I would open it up to a random page and just start reading an entry. Not one pixel involved. (There is an essay that’s already likely been written about how writers may find themselves staunchly turning away from the digital to reclaim reading only printed books like this, to appreciate how much we had without realizing it.)

And I found my word today, one with a deliciously long entry, which I’m excerpting here:

leave, 1. v. pres. part. leav•ing past and past part. left (left) v.t. to depart, go away || to cease to reside in a certain place, attend school, serve an employer etc. || v.t. to allow to remain by oversight, he left his hat on the train || to deposit before going off, to leave a tip || to cause to remain as a consequence, sign etc., the wound left a scar || to be survived by, he leaves a wife and three children || to produce as a remainder, 4 from 6 leaves 2 || to let remain, his interpretation leaves room for argument || to bequeath, he left her all his money || to omit to eat, don’t leave any of your dinner || to put off dealing with, he’ll leave the letters till tomorrow.

There are several more meanings of this word listed, but this is enough to get you started. Those italicized sentences are just itching to form a story. I hope you can already see it! The man tips the waiter on the train going to London (or the café car attendant on an Amtrak going to Boston, etc.), leaves his Yankees baseball cap on the train, which his late father had given him when he graduated high school . . .

You see what I’m getting at. You can either create a hermit crab flash using this dictionary entry form and create a narrative with these wonderfully tiny sentences (using a variant of these or making up your own) or just take these sentences out of the entry form altogether and tell a story using multiple forms of “leave.” Again, you can use your own or make slight changes to what is already here. I prefer to mostly use what’s given, because the more restrictions there are, the more free you are to play. If you keep it in entry form, what might you do with the definitions? I wonder, too, if you might mix up the order of events in the story, so it’s not strictly chronological. And, of course, you could choose another word. There’s just so much to work with here.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl