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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Prompt: Pinterest Story

Wouldn't it be ironic if Pinterest got mad at me
for using a copyrighted image.
Pinterest sends me a notification e-mail me every time someone pins one of my pictures to one of their boards. At first I thought these were pretty annoying. (Jeffery has pinned one of your pins! That's great. Can you send me an e-mail if Jeffery has a successful bowel movement too?) Only sheer, unadulterated laziness prevented me from figuring out how to turn off the e-mail notifications.

After a while, something changed. I got to like these e-mails. Sometimes I follow them back and look through the board the person pinned my image to in order to find new writing memes for my Tumblr and FB page.

Usually they're writing boards because that's the kind of image I stockpile there. (My account is mostly images that have shown up somewhere here on the blog.) But every once in a while...

I find a board that tells a story.

The latest one was a deluge of slut shaming images telling women never to give it up to anyone who doesn't respect them and an almost equal number of "Men are weak" macros–especially focused on how men are pigs who only want women for sex. As I scrolled further down, the theme morphed to a series of images along the theme of, "True love means never leaving no matter how broken you are," "I am so beautifully damaged" and "I deserve better than anyone who would leave me" images. The last third began to change again, and there was one macro that I thought might be hopeful: "No reason to stay is a good reason to leave" but toward the end came a series of repudiations: "Don't leave something good to find something better because by the time you realize you had the best, the best will be with someone else."

The last row was a series of images about how the perfect love was your best friend and how sometimes you didn't notice something was there the whole time.

Pinterest, of course, pins your latest images at the top and your older ones further down. Based just on the pins, I began to construct a story...

In chronological order (bottom to top), I imagined a couple who were friends. Perhaps one of them (probably her) had wanted to be a couple for a long time during their friendship, but he kept it just friends. Until one day they got together and she thought they were perfect and destined to get married and have lots of babies. He was using her in a time of weakness (rebound from his own breakup?) and he ended up leaving her. She wanted him to him how much he was missing. Desperately so. But life didn't go the way she planned, and the relationship he ended up in lasted longer than theirs. She tried to find love, and only found casual sex within a series of relationships that left her increasingly more disillusioned with men and what they valued from her. Finally by the end, her faith in men had been altogether shattered. She may have even had self loathing about her string of relationships and how she had allowed herself to be used.

Of course I'm probably just doing that thing I do when I look at things and make up stories. It's equally possible that she was very religious and the guys all broke up with her when she told them no sex until marriage. Of course, I'll never really know. But if she's as hurt as her pins seem to indicate she is, I hope she finds what she's looking for.

And if my story is maybe closer to her truth, I hope she discovers that what she's looking for isn't ever going to come from someone else.


Prompt: Practice your skill at taking bits and pieces and forming a story out of them!  Find a person you don't know with a board on Pinterest that tells a story. Remember that the story goes from the bottom (the first pins) to the top (the last pins). Unless, of course, top to bottom is a more interesting story! Write a one page summary of the story. Develop it if it seems interesting enough. Don't forget to have fun!

For this prompt, it is also important to remember that you don't actually know this person!!! You have NO idea who they are or what they're going through. You're just taking a guess and practicing your storytelling skills. Please be rational, and don't presume you are correct.

2 comments:

  1. How did I not know you were on Pinterest?!? FOLLOW ALL THE MEDIAS!!! Love this writing prompt idea.

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    1. Ah yes. Feel free to follow it. I don't list it as a way to follow WAW because I'm not very great at updating it.

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