Writing Prompt – Late

This next prompt comes from New York Times bestselling author, Tomi Adeyemi. I don’t know much about her, but I definitely think that she makes some thought provoking writing prompts. If you want to check out her whole arsenal of writing prompts, she’s posted them on Pinterest. There aren’t as many as some of the other prompt writers I’ve found, but she does have about 40 of them there. They seem to lean more on the horror, gore, and intrigue end of the spectrum, so if that’s something that interests you, check them out.

In this particular one, you have a male character of unknown age coming upon a female character implied to be a child or possibly a teen. You know right away that something is not normal about this girl, seeing as she’s surrounded by bodies.

It is unclear if they know each other, though it seems to imply he doesn’t know her and she does know at least who he is. And it is also unclear if she is responsible for the bodies on the ground or if someone else was and she was left behind to wait for him to appear. The blood covering her seems to indicate she at least had some part in the situation.

Clearly she was expecting him, but why? Did she expect him to deal with the situation he finds her in or did she plan on leaving before this happened and is not happy that she had to deal with it, or help someone deal with it, before he arrived? Who are the dead? After all nothing says that she is a good character or even that he is. Perhaps the characters on the ground are people that would have aided one or both of them had they lived.

There is a lot more than the obvious that you can do with this prompt, so it becomes a matter of what do you think it going on here. What would you do with this setup?

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