RIP Story: June 20th, 2024

Maybe I am out of practice, but I started the timer on this one, I’m 20 minutes into my regular 30-minute time and I have nothing. The best I have is a story about three cats that live in a house and one of them watches a TV show with their guardian about the history of cats. Then yada yada and there is a story about this cat living like they are an Egyptian god.

Sounds interesting but the problem I’m running into is I have about two paragraphs of a story and no excitement in what I’m writing. So what’s the lesson? How do we salvage this exercise today in the 6 minutes and 45 seconds I have left on my timer? When I hit a block, I need to detach from the “literal” nature of the image. Use the image as a rough guide rather than a direct connection to the story. I’m sure if we go back to past RIP stories, I will have done just that, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fall into the “literal trap” again.

I felt like I couldn’t find a voice for the three cats in this case. Building a dialogue that was more than three interesting lines wasn’t coming to me. Almost like this was designed to be a comedy piece and I don’t feel like a comedy writer. The story doesn’t make me laugh and the basics of the story are not interesting. In a RIP story, the stakes are very low, but this isn’t the sort of writing I’m looking to reinforce. I am looking for the dissection of writing experience.

I sort of this we turned this into a useful exercise. Hopefully tomorrow has something more fulfilling in terms of story and vibes.

Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow.

EPILOGUE: The whole this was an epilogue :)