Create a Story - The Experiment Begins

As promised, I'm starting my story prompt experiment using Create a Story, a prompt book I got in the discount section of Barnes & Noble. This is just an exercise to get me writing regularly again, but maybe it will be interesting for folks. In any event, it's got to be more joyful than any of the terror that is passing for news these days.

For the first prompt, I selected a page from the romance section (pg 59). The prompts are very brief, and for an additional challenge you can include a handful of specified words. I will be trying to include all the words recommended for each prompt, since it's meant as an exercise. 

The prompts are the whole content of the book, so it's not really fair to print the prompt itself... but I encourage people to guess in the comments. 

Missing the North Star

Julian leaned against the counter. The bright light of a beautiful day from the kitchen window did nothing to clear his mind. Even the air inside the house felt heavy, clouded, like a pea soup fueled by thought. Just moving through the tiny distances from kitchen to office to bedroom in the tiny cabin he’d meant to have rented for a week and had been in since fall sapped his drive. He’d spent the winter here.

It’d been a thought. To wander the woods. Searching the beauty of the wilds. To seek direction in nature, where the heart of wonder grew. Every day was vibrant—the cascading color of the leaves edging to the frozen cold landscapes of snow and the hooting of the owls in the night.

Julian felt only betrayal.

On this day, like so many others, he tore himself from the tiny cabin and drove the long twisting route into the nothing of a town that was the closest hint of civilization.

Here in the middle of nowhere, the town was nothing. Not even a stop light. There was a general store, a gas station, a small diner—and a bar that was busier than any of them, at least after work hours.

Once the drive out might have brought Julian some satisfaction. Instead, he wondered about his feeble path in life. The store keeper greeted him warmly. His supply needs were known and gathered—the bags waiting. He paid the man and started packing the bags into his truck. 

This place had been his everything. Like a dream. He’d drawn it that way, painted magnificent landscapes. It was like the beauty around him stirred his soul, painting wild, like a dervish, with the brushes making strokes more eloquent than a poet stirring the soul with verses. Those paintings meant he could afford to wallow for six months or more. But it grated. He’d been young and filled with inspiration.

Where had it gone?

Julian gripped the edge of the truck. He could feel the energy sapping away. He knew where the inspiration had gone. He might have translated it through this place, but the real heart of his artistry had been a person, not a place. A person he’d neglected. A person he’d taken for granted and left alone until they felt unwanted. A person who left him for someone else. It was his fault.

“Hey mister.” A firm hand gripped Julian by the arm. “You okay?”

Julian spun, pulling his arm from the grip, and his breath caught in his throat.

Stunning. It was a young man, perhaps twenty three. His bare chest was smooth, in the fashion of the day, and marked, over the heart and toward the shoulder with an elaborate tattoo of a compass rose. Julian looked up from the tattoo into sinking depths of sparkling blue. He could feel the weightlessness of drowning as he grew ever more lost. 

Was it a sign? How did one find their way?

“Hi.”

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500 words with the title. Not so bad. I hope people enjoy it. Did anyone suss out the prompt? What do you think? Let me know and I'll post a new one next week.