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“Watch”: Inktober Day #8: Writer Edition
I’m using Inktober prompts to generate daily writing
I’m always jealous of my visual artist friends, especially my sister, when Inktober rolls around. Then this year I realized that even though I don’t draw, I do write, and it might be fun to take the same prompts and see what twenty minutes of writing on the given topic elicits. So I thought I’d just play and see where things take me (knowing that a lot of what I write will be dreck), and maybe you’d like to join too. Here are this year’s prompts.
We hear about the first watch. It’s there in books, the hero saying “I’ll keep the first watch,” as their exhausted partner collapses against a tree trunk, unable to go any further, feet bleeding, exhausted from terror. Where do they get the strength? How do they know it’s time to turn to sleep themselves, is it hard to rouse their travel companion, who has only gotten a few hours of sleep, at most, by then? How do they harness their fear, so that when it’s just them, alone, in the night, they are able to listen for footsteps, for intruders, for those who come up upon them?
And what about that second watch? What about the one who is awoken from their deep, entrenched sleep, muscles stiff from the ground, shaken awake by the leader, told to take their turn, now that the leader has revealed themselves to be human, too, to need to take their rest, at last? What of that loneliness? The loneliness of the bone-tired, of the weak, of the one who does not know the way? Do they simply sit up and look out into the darkness and resign themselves to death if their pursuers have somehow managed to reach them? Do their hands shake? Do they weep? Do they try to force their breath to calm, pretend at a bravado? Do they simply fall back asleep?
