Writing Prompt #14: It’s Giving Main Character Energy

This year I have a personal goal to do more writing “play,” so I’m creating weekly prompts for myself and sharing online, in case you’d like to join me too. I hope you will! Teachers, you’re welcome to use these with your students. I’ll be posting these every week on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.

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I loved this essay from Ali Edwards, about the big brown couch that has been with her through multiple stages of life.

“The BBC [big brown couch] has seen Star Wars at least twenty times (probably even more). So many movies and shows. I wonder if it has a favorite.”

I was delighted by the thought of imagining an object with main character energy, and so that’s the inspiration for this week’s prompt.

Thinking about an object as the main character of a story brings to mind two picture books: A Couch For Llama, written and illustrated by Leah Gilbert, and Rick the Rock of Room 214, written by Julie Falatko and illustrated by Ruth Chan.

In Rick the Rock, Rick and the other objects who live with him on the Nature Finds shelf in Room 214 are personified. They have dialogue with each other and Rick yearns for adventure. But he is also still very much a rock. He can’t really move himself around, and while he interacts with the humans in the story, it’s in a rock-like way. He’s not having conversations and sharing his thoughts with the humans.

In A Couch For Llama, there are actually two couches in the story and neither one is personified. But the story gives a sense of life experienced by each object. One couch is very well-loved by its family. So well-loved, in fact, the family decides to get a new couch. The new couch falls off the roof of their car as they bring it home, unbeknownst to the family, and it lands in a field where Llama lives. Llama befriends this couch (in one of my all-time favorite sequences of illustrations), but of course the family soon realizes their new couch is missing and has to go back and retrieve it from Llama, who does not want to part from their new best friend.

Both stories are super adorable and so well done. Highly recommend checking them out!

 

You can find previous prompts and my responses here.

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