Publisher's Prompt

Use the following, January 18 prompt from “Prompts & Practices” by Judy Reeves to begin, end, or use in the middle of a piece.

“It was noon and nothing is concluded.” (after Donald Rawley)

She sat at her desk, staring blankly at an even blanker computer screen. She had been sitting that way for almost fifteen minutes. Somewhere between what she thought was a good idea and plunking out words on the keyboard for four hours, she decided it was all a waste and deleted everything from the word document she had begun at half past seven.

She had been taught never to delete her work. That even if what she had written seemed all for naught, there might be a seed of a beginning, or a sprout to a middle or a perfect flower of an ending. She cursed that instructor in this moment for putting all those gardening metaphors in her mind. She decided to take a head hoe to them and get rid of all that she had planted. With one click she was able to make her digital harvest disappear.

So she sat, as she knew Hemingway once had, at her desk, for the set amount of time she had prescribed for herself. The clock at the bottom of the monitor turned over to 11:51 AM. Nine more minutes to go. She could sit and stare at the screen, envision what she would like to write, or maybe simply restart writing whatever came into her head.

She sat and stared at the screen.

After what seemed like hours, the monitor clock struck 12:00 PM. It was noon and “nothing is concluded,” she thought.

With a sigh, she rose and pushed her chair in under her desk, stretched, and decided to go out in the back yard and look at the nasturtiums.