The Story Spark was ‘In the Sea’. I took the writing prompt – A bottle with a piece of paper in it.
The Note in the Bottle
It was a cold, misty morning. There I was just walking along the beach, trying to release all the tension in my body from a poor night’s sleep.
My mind, as usual, was wandering all over the place, thinking of all the writing on my desk that had not been accomplished yet. I wish there were something positive that could distract me. Something to get me to focus on myself, my well-being, and not on work to be done.
It was then that I saw the bottle. It was not unusual to see a bottle on the beach. Careless people were always leaving their garbage there, thinking that it was not their responsibility to keep the environment clean.
What attracted me to the bottle was a piece of paper lodged in it. I grew up with tales of pirates, castaways, and people in trouble who would write a message, place it in a bottle, and toss it into sea, hoping that someone would find it and rescue them. I decided to check out this bottle.
It took a while for me to get the paper out of the bottle, as it had a very narrow neck and the cap on the bottle was very tight, sealing off the water so the paper stayed intact. But eventually I got the paper out.
I unfurled it and was shocked at what I found. Instead of a plea for help, the message was a solution to what I was looking for.
The note read, “You know who you are. Your strength is the ability to adapt and invent. Create what you need from your imagination. It has yet to fail you. Have fun.”
What a brilliant thought. My writing groups have always fostered this. Yes, I have a lot of writing yet to do. But it was only work because I thought of it as work.
What if I looked at this as one of my writing groups would? What if I took each piece of unfinished writing as another prompt? The difference being that I don’t need to limit myself to 20 minutes to write it all. Let my muse and imagination guide me.
I took the paper and put it in my pocket and returned home to my writing desk. It looked a lot less formidable now.
As I sat down to write, I took the note from my pocket and pinned it on the bulletin board over my desk, next to some other notes I had written.
Why hadn’t I noticed this before? The note from the bottle was in my handwriting.
