Sunrise: A Short Story
I sometimes attend a free-writing Meetup in my city. The organizer gives a single word, and then the goal is to free-write for 30 minutes without self-editing. I like to use it as a writing challenge, to write a short story in half an hour. I haven't done things like that in almost a decade, not since grade school. In grade school, I was part of a writing group called Power of the Pen. It was a chapter of a state-wide writing competition with the same name. For the first meeting, we'd be given a sealed one-sentence prompt (also known as a strip of paper stapled in half), and then we'd be responsible for writing on that prompt for 40 minutes, timed. We'd then share our writings at the following meeting, critique one another, and be given another prompt. All of this was in preparation for the competitions, where there would be three timed rounds of 40 minutes, each with their own prompt. At the district competition, the top 50% would go...