If you don’t know what to write about, here’s a story idea:
A young woman/man stumbles across a dead body in the woods. What does she/he do?
I was walking home through Benson Wood. It was 5:30 pm after work, and still sunny as it was early in July. I decided to cut a corner and walk through the grass as it was a short-cut home. I’d been walking for nearly five minutes when I noticed a bare foot resting on a tree root. I thought, “Oh, someone needs shoes and socks.” I got closer, and the exposed foot still hadn’t moved in the thirty or so seconds I’d been walking closer. I rounded the tree and saw it was attached to a man; a naked man sat with his back to the tree. I stopped—Wait a minute; he doesn’t seem embarrassed. I said hello, and he didn’t respond. I closed in on him, and his eyes were open, but they looked dry with no sparkle as normal. His nakedness apparently showed he was having great fun with a full erection. I touched his neck feeling for a pulse. He wasn’t cold, but there was no traces of a pulse. I reached for my mobile phone and dialled 999.
“Hello, what service do you require?”
“The Police please, as an ambulance is too late.”
“Reading Police Department, how can I help?”
“I’m walking through Benson Wood, to get home and I’ve come across a dead body. It’s a man; it’s a naked man propped up against a tree.”
After giving the police my details and location, they asked me to remain until they had arrived.
Ok, This guy was obviously having sex when his heart stopped, and he died. The blood in his body stopped moving and remained in its location. There was no condom, clothes or bags either. Was it a wife or lover with whom he was having sex in a public wood? Why they take his clothes? All his possessions have gone and determining an identity would be difficult.
—-
That was a fifteen-minute exercise of writing for fifteen-minutes. I have edited it cleaning up the comma splices and little spelling mistakes. It seems I can write about 1200 words an hour by pantsing it. In NaNoWriMo, I was online in chat rooms, and a lot of people love pantsing. They said 2700 words a day was no problem. I have to admit that this fifteen-minute exercise of pantsing was fun, but I couldn’t write fast enough as ideas were arriving and changing continuously. Fifteen-minutes were all right, but two and a quarter hours like that every day for 31 days? That was not in my capabilities and I stopped NaNoWriMo. Maybe you noticed the fact that I’m currently doing a course on Forensic Science and Profiling. I didn’t pay that much as I got it through Groupon.
I also filled in a questionnaire about which classic novelist I was like. The answer I received was: Mary Shelley. I answered one of the questions that I liked writing on a Mac computer. Interesting that Mary Shelley had a Mac computer in the 1810s to 1840s. Didn’t know they were that old.
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