Prompt primer (as in the bottom layer of paint, not as in a reading primer) in Flash Friday

Another avoidance entry.

How I look at flash prompts. Please, not a tutorial or even suggestions, just what I do with them.

Blood on the court. Let’s say that’s the prompt. The first thing I think of is the obvious; the place the prompter is going with a prompt that is so very leading. They meant something like a basketball court or racquetball or tennis, you know, leading it towards a sport story. Even if I wasn’t so, I don’t know, asocial is wrong, well, not wrong, just not what I mean, and anti-authority is the same, not wrong, just not what I mean, predictable perhaps. You can predict I won’t take the predictable path. It’s why every once in a while I do because otherwise …

Anyhow so I reject sports arenas right off the bat. Often I’ll think of homonyms, like, say, quart, and if I’m feeling particularly lazy I’ll go on ahead and do that and say, afterwards in the shower, “I can’t wash the pun off no matter how much I scrub”. Then, either before or after the homonyms I think of all the meanings of the word that I can, like, for instance, what the first thing that actually would spring to my mind with each given word. Blood and On and The pretty much can’t be fucked with, not without going all punny, so it’d be court and I think of court rooms first. It’s a problem to think in terms of blood in a court-room, it’s as leading as the original.

Typically I’ll play with a while before rejecting it, like, for instance, it being traffic court and the janitor being pissed off and later discovering he’d cleaned a crime scene or something. I’d probably play with the idea that not all court rooms are sanctioned and some trials are metaphorical and, if you’re (or you know me’re) going all esoteric not all blood is literal either, and I’d either come up with something I like or not.

Sometimes I am too stubborn to let an idea go and I’ll write the flash without having it clearly fleshed out. Sometimes that even works. Mostly my flashes don’t work. Not being modest, I’m just saying they don’t. It’s not the point. I could put in the time and energy where everything worked. I could write tidy little pieces about blood on a basketball court too. I could only post second and upward drafts or, I don’t know, edit shit once.

The whole point of flashes and especially peer prompted flashes is exploration. I have money. I could buy books. I have my tastes; I could buy only books I like. I do. But I also read your messy single draft working-through flashes and they cannot disappoint. Neither can mine.

I suppose you could read an inherent message on leaving prompts in this little distraction; don’t. It’d suck to be even the slightest bit self-conscious about leaving prompts. Here’s my feeling on leaving prompts; they are no longer my problem, they’re yours.