My teacher, Penny Shreve, recently asked me to use the writing prompt "It was a dark and stormy Night" this is what I did with it. "can you say hack? I knew that you could."


"it was a dark and stormy night," she scrawled upon the chalk board. The words hemorrhaged on to each of our papers from the dust ridden green abyss.
how can she ask us to use this?" I muttered to my self while thoughts of "Throw Momma From the Train" fluttered about in my mind.
I began to wonder what would motivate a writer to write about a dark and stormy night. Wouldn't "The inky void above wept icy needles upon the earth" spark the imagination further? I leaned back in by chair, twirling my pen and thinking back to my past writing.
the humor involved in the use of the cliche "it was a dark and stormy night" was not lost on me, but never once had I used it. Through out the years and through the countless papers I've written I've never been an option. I've written from many angles with many perspectives, once I even wrote from the pov of a block of cheese. I've expanded upon the mind and regaled the futility of the body.
all this while I've dragged this wasted blue ink across this tainted paper. And now I am consumed with dark and stormy nights. How dark is dark? And dark to who? And just what is stormy? Raining? Going to rain?


needless to say I fear the day when my story is set on a dark and stormy night.


Exile

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