Writer In Motion | Week 0: This is Familiar

So when I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect to join a month+ long writing project, but here we are. I think I looked at the site for Writer In Motion for about 3 seconds before I decided, “yeah, this seems relatively manageable during these Stressful Trying Times; I’m in.” (Nyoom over there or to WIM’s Twitter to check out the details for the project.)

Please, @ the world, let this be the moment where I get out of the writer’s funk I’ve been in since May. (Note: not block. funk. i have story ideas. many daydreams’ and notebook app pages’ worth. actual writing tho? idk her.)

So anyway. The prompt dropped yesterday, August 1st, so I’m a day behind in terms of brainstorming for this lovely image:

Photo by Rahul Pandit on Unsplash.

And golly gee did I grin when I saw it.

Note: below is a lot of rambling about lighting and themes of isolation and visual/physical storytelling elements of video games. Feel free to skip down to the “tl;dr”–don’t worry I won’t be mad.

Maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve written via picture prompts in recent years and some of my favorite little original stories (1) (2) have come out of them that has me giddy.

Or it’s the vibe of the picture itself. That golden hour light and isolated feel (#mood).

Or it just reminds me of the recent vids of some YouTubers I watch: Julien Solomita and Unus Annus (if you’re reading this after 11/15/20 and the link is broken or leads to nowhere, oops you’re too late, sorry friend). In both of those vids, the YouTubers went out in the middle of the desert to film, but created their own little… “pockets” (that keeps coming to mind) of familiar and safe space to… do what they gotta do. Whether it’s looking at stars, extreme horseshoe, or cooking pad thai.

I mean, Julien’s AirBnB looks just like the one in the prompt pic above.

Kinda.

Idk they’re both boxes.

… I could probably elaborate on that as a theme. Were someone to be staying in that concrete box of a shack on the top of a hill/mountain in the forest… is it for deliberate isolation purposes, comfort, safety for that person, safety for others? How does that person feel about their predicament? Is it even a predicament? … Is there even a person there?

…

Nah, I’m making a person be there, probably. But I like the idea of someone being like… in hiding there. And the reader isn’t explicitly told why and just has to infer.

In that way, it feels like what’s playing out in this setting is the epilogue of something big that happened, and the reader has to piece it together from the lingering effects of that big thing.

That’s also a really cool vibe to portray. You kinda see it in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the sense that “a big thing happened 100 years ago and you’ve been asleep all that time so here, go forth in the aftermath of what happened. here’s what was left behind.”

Only the game tells you what the big thing was but there were sometimes random parts of the open-world map where there were just random ruins of a stable or village or fort and it just leaves you to wonder what happened exactly here even though you know about the Calamity but like what specifically here–

Am I rambling? I feel like I’m–

Oh my god wait it reminds me of Firewatch, too. I MEAN. LOOK AT THIS.

[9/6 edit: i bought the game, she was on sale for like $5 ayyyy]

THAT LIGHTING. THE ISOLATION. THE SINGLE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

The prompt pic could literally be a screencap from the game, wow.

Okay. I think that’s about enough for an initial post.

So tl;dr someone is living in that shack in isolation because of a Big Thing that happened in the past and this is the aftermath. And golden hour will probably be a pivotal time or element. Because I’m a sucker for good lighting and proceeding sunsets are pretty.

OKAY, NOW I’M DONE.

See y’all next week with a draft!

–CM