WordPress, the content management system for my blog, regularly offers prompts to writers. A way to get the creative juices flowing, you know… and to connect people through sharing their stories.

For, as my fellow Slicers of Life can tell you, stories knit our hearts together like nothing else. Stories are the fabric of our lives, the storehouse of our memories, and one of our most creative endeavors. They are the way we see and shape our world. They shape us. Stories are among humankind’s greatest tools and gifts.

To that end: It occurs to me that a little inspiration might be needed for the Slice of Life Story Challenge. After ten days of writing, some of us may be running low on fuel. Here are a few WordPress prompts, just in case anyone out there can can use them…

1. How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success?
2. You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?
3. What’s one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
4. Do you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?
5. What big events have taken place in your life over the last year?

Confession: It would be soooo convenient to end this post here and make another to answer my favorite of these questions (i..e, stretching this post into two; one DOES have to be strategic during a challenge), but the teacher-writer in me says You know you have to show, not just tell.

All right, all right.

My favorite from this list is #2: You’re writing your autobiography. What’s your opening sentence?

A: I have no idea.

First of all, not sure writing my autobiography is a venture I desire to undertake. A memoir, perhaps…a memoir in verse, even more appealing, but…hmmm. You writers know what our greatest fear is, don’t you: Will anyone really read it? Or care?

Which brings me to the point that this is a secondary concern.

Because…write for you first. Capture the words emerging in your brain like new and fragile butterflies. Jot the images before the rains of time wash them away like chalk from a driveway. Relive your memories; spend time with the people you have loved and lost and will miss all your days…along with the lessons you picked up along the way. Answer the Muse who stands so patiently (exasperatedly?) over you, tugging at your creative human soul where beats your struggling writer-heart. Just because you don’t feel the tug doesn’t mean she’s gone. Oh, she’s there, all right, standing with her arms crossed, tapping her foot.

Enough avoiding the task at hand…how would I start my autobiography?? (I do wish the question was for “memoir,” alas…I’d find it more compelling, even if the world at a large uses the terms interchangeably).

Here I am, stalling, tempted to say Check back tomorrow for the reveal! Truth is, I need to think awhile…

ALL. RIGHT. Here goes…

—Can I please switch questions? Can I answer #3 instead? What’s one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

A: Right now I hate to be asked what the first sentence of my autobiography would be, because I. HAVE. NO. IDEA. Furthermore, I am now asking myself WHY I ever picked it (I suddenly feel like a student trying to write a short essay on an exam after having selected my topic most unwisely).

Sigh.

I set my own foot on this path… so, let me see where it leads (do you hear me, Muse? You gotta take it from here. Please…).

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Well… it’s a start.

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Composed for Day 10 of the Slice of Life Story Writing Challenge with Two Writing Teachers
(keep going, y’all!)