She looked at the assignment paper and mused over how she could complete the paper before it was due. Mrs. O's class was difficult to succeed in at the best of times, and today was not one of those times. For this assignment she was supposed to use a fragment which Mrs. O. had assigned to them in order to write her story. The fragment talked about a man walking in the sand, about two tracks left behind him that had turned into a single pair of tracks the further he went. It described the man's thirst in the desert, and yet his stubbornness to continue walking. As she thought about the prompt, she decided to use it in the middle of her story. The man would be a disadvantaged kid who had grown up in Phoenix, abused by his father, who had run away from his home situation and become a street kid fighting off the city gangs. Ooh! This prompt would be a great lead-in to a romance! Hmmm....maybe a sweet girl who also happened to be wealthy could be in danger and her main character could rescue the girl? Then they could fall in love. But of course, the girl's father would have to be against it. What rich father ever wants to see his daughter married off to a poor street kid? So maybe the father would pretend to be helping the protagonist, sending him off to the desert to learn about archeology. Then the father could send assassins after the protagonist to kill him off. But the protagonist would win because of his street fighting experiences, and although he was pursued, would be the only man left standing, left wandering wearily in the desert, struggling to survive. Yes, this would be a great story...but only 10 pages? As she finished writing, having crammed as much information as possible into the 10 pages, she realized that she actually had written 13. Uh oh. Well, hopefully her teacher wouldn't mind. It had been fun to write the short story, even if it could have used more pages to go into the detail that the characters deserved. Maybe she'd expand on it later.
As I talked about in my above narrative, one of my favorite assignments for my 9th grade English class was writing a short story based off of a prompt which our teacher gave us. I was having so much fun with it that I went a little crazy with writing and stayed up late into the night writing a 13 page paper which was way longer than the paper my teacher was expecting to receive. In a later English class in college, I wrote another paper like this. I didn't realized that this was not the teacher's intent for the assignment, but when she read what I had done with it, she told me that she actually liked my interpretation of her assignment as well, and gave me a good grade. I think that using a prompt to write a story, or finishing an uncompleted narrative is a great creative writing assignment for students. It allows them to use their imaginations, and gives them a flexible base to work with. The assignment which I completed in my college class was in response to a short story in the book The World to Come by Dara Horn and the short story originally told by Der Nister, "The All-Bridge".