WordPress has a daily prompt of one word and it’s an opportunity to write a post outside of my comfort zone. Today’s word is Zoo and I thought I was just going to let it go like all the rest.

Then my brain started spinning threads of words and here I am typing a post.

The word zoo has created a fairly large stumbling block in my writing life. Several months ago I came up the bright idea to buy a book of story prompts to practice writing by direction rather than what’s comfortable.  With the plan in place, I opened the book somewhere in the middle and looked at the list of words.

The story went something like this:

Needed to be about a wild animal loose in the house.

Additional items to be included:

pregnant

community

logo

statistics

democracy

honesty

criminal

ankle

orange

comment

So of course my initial plan was a zoo keeper steals a tiger from the zoo, is seen and ends up taking a pregnant woman hostage.  Hey, it could work.

Except it doesn’t. Well, it works in a “this story will never be believable in any universe” way.  It will be a bad story, even if I can manage to tie all of those elements together. This is my struggle, I don’t want to write a bad story and I have never really just followed the rabbit hole with a story. The choice is made, I am going to write that unbelievable and bad story.  I am going to write it this weekend because enough is enough and it’s time to get that story completed. Who knows, with any luck I will learn something in the process.

Look for the post early next week.