Day 311 Writing Short Stories

Weight

To weigh a soul, she had to use a special scale. It was made of earthly materials like spider silk and gold, enchanted with ethereal materials invisible to the human eye. She had made the scale from scratch. Her judgments of human souls were the most accurate there was in the known Universe. She always got it right, whether the soul should be doomed or redeemed. It was in the weight. It was in not caring. She had no conviction about where the soul ended. She looked at the facts: the deeds that brought the human in front of her. She had no passion. She had duty.

Dreams

The neon sign flickered over him, changing from pink to green to blue. It discolored the puddle on the ground. The dark asphalt shone with every color. He looked over his shoulder and saw the street lamps going out.

He turned his gaze back to the neon sign of the tarot parlor. The door was within his reach. He should step in. That was what the dream guided him to do. The street was pressing down on him. The sense of threat was ever-present. All he had to do was step in, and there would be release. He wouldn’t die. He would hold all the cards in his hand and watch the cups, clubs, and major arcana burn.

But he had played this scene over and over again. He wouldn’t wake up. He couldn’t escape the sickness, which had taken him to this hell. The dream kept swirling in a loop, and thus far, he had always taken the exit, ending back at this same spot.

The lights over him died. The asphalt went away. So did the street. There was only a sick tree pressing out in the darkness. There he was, himself standing under the tree, looking like death itself.

He stared himself into his eyes, and there were all the years that he had lived, all the years he was supposed to live, and there was the tarot parlor and the neon sign in the dead eyes of his. The sickness wasn’t letting him go. It needed him to keep this part of himself alive. It needed him to feed it.

To escape was to kill. He stepped backward into the neon sign. He stepped backward into the tarot parlor and felt his soul, his heart, his mind grow weaker.

Ambiguous Ending

I skipped this one. I want to go outside to play. This one was about writing a story with an ambiguous ending.

The prompts are from the book A Year of Creative Writing Prompts.

I have been thinking about the concept of show and don’t tell. I was listening to a video about how fiction shapes our thoughts. And the YouTuber spoke about what the “original” show, don’t tell meant. That it was about the themes, about what the characters portrayed. And I think I have so much to improve on in that aspect. I love writing about morals and what it means to be human, but I too often spell it out, rather than letting the reader discover and feel it in my story. As I edited that in my mind today, I could see some missteps I have taken before. I want the characters to be what they are without me having to underline it with unnecessary lines. Their actions should be theirs, with their contradictory beliefs to mine. Their actions should hold the themes I’m exploring.

I like this about writing. You are never done. You can always learn and explore writing itself or concepts that you are interested in.

Thank you for reading ❤ Have a day full of exploration!