Welcome to this week’s featured writing prompt. Write about a character’s experience while exploring unfamiliar terrain alone.
Photo by Melodi T
Enjoy! and don’t forget to post your finished work in the comments section.
About Shana ThorntonShana Thornton serves as Editor-in-Chief of Her Circle Ezine. She has an M.A. in English from Austin Peay State University, and writes fiction, interviews and features. She recently completed her first novel about the conflicts and traumas of militarized culture in a family and is currently seeking publication. Read more at http://www.shanathornton.wordpress.com/
Each of us are born alone and die alone so each character that is created in the mind walks upon each experience new or otherwise alone even someone with DID (dissociated identity disorder) I read a recent novel in which the protagonist had this symptom of PTSD(post traumatic stress disorder) and it was treated by the author as a device for humor.I did not think it was funny. Maybe because I had it. I have a friend who complains that her life is the same thing, day in and day out, so her new trips that start when the sun comes up is not new. She does not see what I do and that everyday is different, every moment, every breath is different. One foot steps in front of the other in a different place so does the character who moves to a new city in her retirement convinced that her adventures are over and finds they are not. I suspect they never are for any and all of us. At the end of the train track is the greatest adventure of them all; but I am getting ahead of myself, the steam engine, the Iron Rooster of an adventure. It is nice to explore unfamiliar terrain but everything starting from the sunrise is unfamiliar terrain but it looks less familiar when one travels, moves to some place new: The senior citizen in a new city alone, the English teacher in a foreign country alone, the bride coming to the country of her new husband alone, the child coming to a new family in a new place alone and on and on. We as human beings do this often but it is never easy; but our ancestors did often and our future grandchildren will do it too. We started as a small band of people in a corner of Africa and spread to the whole of the world as the science of genetics tell us. Our characters are stepping into new places and experiencing alone what it is to see things for the first time at least in this life. Maybe, we are travelers, as the Buddhists say, in different lifetimes and then none of these things will be for the first time. Karma is the deciding factor on where we will walk next. Each foot stepping in front of the other or we can close our eyes as my otherwise delightful friend does and say everything is the same and just turn on the television and watch some re-run.