Brick walls

Lately writing has felt like hitting a brick wall.

I sit at the table staring out at the darkness waiting for the pond to appear and listening to the rhythmic patter of the rain on the roof, avoiding today’s writing topic of “Shapes like stars,” and wondering how anyone can come up with such prompts.  What does that mean?  A car whizzes by and the house heat kicks on with the usual drone and hum, warm air swirls around my feet.  I put the pen to paper, to the brick wall, seeing the worn rusty color of each brick, the mortar that holds them together, the nooks and crannies and dings.  I think about the brick wall we built last summer.  Mortar, made with cement.  I write:  “Marilyn Monroe was shaped like a star and has a star on a sidewalk to show for it.”  The bricks begin to crumble and fade as I write about those posing as the shapes of stars, and somehow journey in writing towards the miniature suns that appear on the waves of the water on a sunny day, and find my words in the shapes of stars.

Day 23.

I’m occasionally using writing prompts from A Writer’s Book of Days by Judy Reeves.  I think the one I used this morning (“shapes of stars”) is for the 10th of January or thereabouts.  I haven’t been using it daily as there are mornings when I prefer to empty out with morning pages or I spend time working on my small stone for the day.  I don’t want to skip any of the prompts so it is going to take me more than the usual year to work my way through the book and prompts.  I’ve noticed that those I find challenging and/or like the least tend to be the prompts that make me dig deeper.