Five Minute Writing in May

By Carol Woolum Roberts

During the month of May, my online writing community Hope*Writers sent us 31 prompts to use to do a fun writing exercise for the month.  The challenge is to read the prompt each day, set your timer for five minutes, and write whatever comes to your mind about the topic.

If you would like to get a list of the topics, you can click here.

Paul and I have been posting our writings from the prompts on Instagram, and I have posted on Facebook as well.  We put #growmeastory to help people search on Instagram and Facebook.

We invite you to join us in this exercise.  If you want, post your writings to your social media accounts with #growmeastory.

Here are the writings I have done for the first four prompts:

May 1--Bloom 

When I see my flowers start to bloom in the spring, it gives me hope.

Especially those first hearty crocuses that bloom despite the cold and snow. Their yellow and white and purple blooms always let me know that spring is on the way.

Next I love to see the daffodils bloom. Yellow flowers are my favorite and daffodils are so cheery.  They really make me happy.  Soon the lovely blue-colored grape hyacinths bloom to give a lovely contrast to the cheery, yellow blooms.

My favorite blooming bush is the forsythia.  Again, those yellow flowers make for such a cheery looking display.  I have a small bush full of blossoms in the backyard.  My neighbor has a forsythia bush about four times as big as mine that bursts forth each spring with the cheery, yellow blooms.

The other yellow flower is the first tulip that bloomed.  The rest are ready to burst forth any day, but the yellow tulip won the race this year and opened first.

May 2--Picnic

I feel like it has been a long time since I have been on a picnic.  By picnic, I mean packing a lunch in some kind of  basket, along with some cold drinks and grabbing a blanket and going to some grassy area to sit and have a meal.

 As I am ending the decade of my fifties over the next year, my body is no longer equipped with the ability to “picnic” as I illustrated above.

1. Sitting down on the ground would be okay.  Getting back up would involve a process of rolling over, kneeling on my bad knees, then needing some support to get me back on my feet–an image that to me does not look pretty.
2. If I decide to sit on the ground, where is my back support?  Sitting on the ground without anything to lean against doesn’t bode well if I am to picnic, either.

 If I am going on a picnic, I need a picnic table that I can sit on.  None of the blankets on the ground picnic for me.  I’ll leave that to the kids!

May 3–A Perfect Summer Day

My perfect summer day would be spent in my backyard.

I see the beautiful flowers blooming and I see the vegetables growing.

I hear the birds singing in the trees and the neighbor’s children playing in their backyard.

I taste the fresh lettuce I just picked from the vegetable bed when I make a salad.

I touch the soil as I weed and fertilize the soil in the ground and in the pots and beds around the garden.

I also feel the sun shining on my body, not too hot, not too cold.  The temperature is right around 80 degrees—just right.

I smell the flowers that are blooming on the Linden tree.  I smell the roses in bloom.  The smell of freshly mowed grass wafts through the air.

I see a peaceful haven that I can retreat to all throughout the summer, where I can find a place of peace and rest.

My perfect summer takes place at home.

May 4–Summer Writing

This summer I will continue to do my weekly blog posts.

I may try some different kind of writing for our weekly newsletter because I don’t think what we are doing is getting people to open up and read our Monday’s Mulch newsletter.  And that is kind of the point…for people to read it each week.

I want to set some specific times and days to work on my historical fiction novel I am writing about the Silver Valley.  It begins when Father DeSmet meets the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribal members and goes up to about 1888.  This is a prequel to a trilogy to follow.  But I realized I needed a “warm up” book to set the stage for the remaining three books I plan to write.

I like summer writing because I can go outside on my patio and enjoy writing on those wonderful spring and summer mornings. 

And who knows what kind of writing may come out of times of writing in the garden.

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Comment below if you posted any of your writing online so we can search for it and read it.

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