Today’s Fiction Friday Writing Challenge was:
Write your challenge submission as a letter from your character to someone he or she hasn’t spoken to in more than ten years.
You can find this challenge along with others on the September 1st post listing the Fiction Friday Challenges for this month.
Here are the Fiction Friday Writing Challenge rules:
- Check for the weekly theme or Fiction Friday writing challenge. At the beginning of each month, a list of that month’s Fiction Friday challenges will be posted to give you plenty of notice as to what the theme for each week will be.
- Write using the prompt or theme for five minutes. You can go longer if you want, but remember the challenges are meant to get your juices going. If you don’t have a finished story, don’t worry! That’s kind of the point!
- No editing! Seriously. Don’t hit that backspace key, no matter how tempting it is. These are exercises. No one will be judging you on perfection.
- On Friday, post what you wrote to your blog.
- On social networks, use the hashtag #FictionFriday and share the link to your post.
- Come back to The Editorial Consultant Is In, and share your post in the Fiction Friday Challenge post’s comments section for that week.
- If you like, share others’ posts on social networks using the hashtag #FictionFriday as their work is posted.
- Feel free to comment on the posts of other participants, but remember to be constructive! We’re all working out our writing muscles, not trying to be the next Tom Wolfe, James Joyce, or Jane Austin!
I will participate with you in these challenges, so here’s my Fiction Friday Writing Challenge post for this week!
Letter to an Absent Friend
Dear Chris,
It has been ten years since you did it, and I’m still not really sure why. So much has come out about you since then. It’s strange, how no one cares until we’re dead, isn’t it? I can’t watch the news today, because it’s like a morbid celebration of your wrath. I knew you as my best friend, the person I turned to for wisdom. The world knows you as a killer. I wonder who has the more accurate picture.
It’s strange, but as the years go by I miss you more, not less. I wonder whether you and Mel would have had children by now – probably not, considering the news reported that she had been sleeping with the neighbor. I guess it would have been good to know that from you, and not Jenna Johnson, the nightly news anchor who smiles even when someone has been shot to death. I wonder whether they get a kick out of reporting that stuff or if their media employee handbooks just instruct them to smile. Either way, it’s creepy.
I suppose you felt you did what you had to do because…well because you’ve always been extremely passionate. I just never thought we’d be seeing CNN, Fox, and MSNBC broadcast about you 24 hours a day for a week after… you know.
I met you on the first day of classes. We sat together and joked about girls and how tough things can get sometimes when you feel completely alone.
TBC *Characters from my work-in-progress novel, Night Song*
