Writing prompt 34

On the last Wednesday of my 34th year, I'm posting the 34th writing prompt. Eerie! ;*)

Prompt
Listen.

No, that's not a mistake. "Listen." really is the entire prompt. With the period. It's its own sentence. Very important.

So you just write "Listen." at the top of a blank page (or in the middle or on a napkin or speak it into your voice recorder or whatever you want 'cause I'm not trying to micromanage you here) and you start writing. Let go of sense-making. Let go of your expectations. Let go of punctuation and grammar and good spelling and everything else you've been taught is necessary to "good writing," and just write words, one after the other, without stopping, for at least five minutes. Go. Now. Do it. Even before you read the next line. There's no time like the present.

Happy writing!

Excerpt from my freewrite

Listen. Maybe I don’t tell stories the way you know them and this is hard for you. For example if I tell you that Goldilocks’s hair was actually more of a strawberry blond. I know that’s not the way you heard it but that doesn’t make it any less true. Maybe when I saw her hair the sun shone on it in just the right way that it was tinted by the reddish bark of the cedar tree behind her. Or maybe she dyed it. She dyed it red that day and the original storyteller, who was a relative of hers, had always loved her hair like gold silk and couldn’t bear the thought of her being seen any other way so he changed the fact – or rather, he said what her hair had always been and neglected to mention the part where she’d dyed it red, neglected to mention that the whole reason Goldilocks went out into the woods that day was because she felt persecuted by her family and townsfolk. She stomped off into the forest, vowing never to come back; she’d only dyed her hair in the first place because she wanted to try it out, to see what it would be like to not be defined for once by the color of her hair. But the townsfolk and her kin had always loved her hair, they’d only ever seen her that way, so they had a hard time with it (“What are we supposed to call you now? Redilocks?”), just as you might have a hard time accepting that Goldilocks’s hair was strawberry blond, contrary to how you’ve heard it all these years. 

But I digress.