Grab the book, magazine, or newspaper nearest you and open up to a random page. Start your story with the first line at the top of the page and end your story with the last line at the bottom of the page.
I absolutely love this prompt idea! I'm taking my lines from the book Love Me Anyway by Tiffany Hawk, page 148. It's an excellent novel!
She feels his lips brush against her ear. "Morning, babe," he mumbles.
"I am not your babe." Without saying another word, Carletta slips out of bed and gets dressed.
"Come on, don't be like that," he moans. So much for taking a day off to find myself, Carletta thinks to herself. She was supposed to visit all the places she's never seen in the city she's lived in her entire life. Instead, however, she ended up going to a bar and waking up in bed with a man whose name she doesn't know. Funny how often this seems to happen.
Sitting on the edge of a stranger's bed, Carletta contemplates her life as a retail store manager. She dropped out of college because she just wanted to be a writer. But then, she kept getting rejected from publishing companies and gave up. It had been almost two years since she gave writing another shot, and she missed it.
Maybe yesterday wasn't what she needed to find herself. But today she knew what she needed to do. Carletta leaves without saying goodbye (the man has fallen back asleep anyway) and takes a cab to the opposite side of town to her one bedroom apartment. It's all that she can afford. She sits down to her laptop to write for the first time in ages. She isn't even sure where to start but she knows she needs to if she wants to turn her life around.
It takes her quite some time to come up with a unique idea for a story, but once she gets going it's like she never stopped writing. Her delicate fingers fly gracefully and aimlessly over each key for hours at a time until a few days later, she has a few chapters to take to publishing companies.
Carletta is a nervous wreck as she walks into a few different businesses and drops off her manuscript. She's scared to face rejection again, but she's even more scared that she'll fall into a pit of self loathing and alcoholism if she gets rejected too many times again. Carletta isn't used to rejection from men--in fact, she gets asked out a few times every day at her day job--so when Carletta got rejected from the first company she submitted her work to, she was devastated. It was difficult to realize that her dreams would be harder to achieve than she had initially thought. So like she had with everything else in her life, she gave up and settled for something she hated.
But this time is different; she can feel it. This time there will be no stopping her. She will take her work to every publisher in the country if she has to and if no one takes it, she'll self-publish. Nothing will bring her down.
A month passes and she hasn't heard back from a published yet. She's continued doing her day job but now, instead of going out and drinking, she gets out her laptop and writes. Writing helps her vent; she hasn't had the urge to drink or smoke since she started going home right after work. She keeps telling herself that it doesn't matter if she never gets published; she's doing this for herself.
Slowly but surely, Carletta retreats back to her old ways. Not one company has called her back after four months. At least when they called to tell her they hated it, she knew it was over.
If she were on Days Of Our Lives, it would be time for the camera to move in for her close-up where she would say, "I've arrived."
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