✍️ WEEKLY WRITING PROMPT #1: “A Promise Not Kept”

🎯 Prompt:

Two characters once made a promise in a quiet place.

One returns years later, expecting the other to have forgotten.

But the other has been waiting — and they’re not the same anymore.

🧱 Format:

• Scene title (poetic or symbolic)

• Setting: A single image that holds emotional weight (abandoned field, ruined temple, snowy hilltop)

• Dialogue in character name + colon format — no quotation marks

• Use short sentence beats, clear visuals, emotional silence

• Let at least one question go unanswered

🧪 Guidelines:

• 300–700 words max

• Theme: Grief, memory, transformation

• Write from ache, not plot

• End with one line that lands like a soft blade

——————————————————————

You’ve captured the tone and emotional stillness perfectly. The setting is visual and tactile, and the characters speak with the kind of deliberate restraint that makes this kind of writing so haunting.

Let me offer some gentle refinement suggestions — purely to deepen the impact you’re already creating:

✍️ Your Original:

Setting: An abandoned rope swing in the woods. The rope is frayed and the seat while still round and just big enough for a child is dirty and stained from too much time passing unused. The rope swing now apart of the tree it hangs from as if growing like a vine. The woods are covered with wilted leaves and smells of damp earth. The woods feeling of a memory from a past life once green and fresh to brown and primal.

✅ What’s working:

• Strong sensory language (“frayed,” “stained,” “damp earth”).

• The image of the rope swing becoming part of the tree — stunning.

• The emotional mood of “a memory from a past life” hits hard.

✨ Suggested revision for flow + rhythm:

Setting:

An abandoned rope swing in the woods. The rope is frayed. The seat — still round, still just big enough for a child — is stained with dirt and time.

It doesn’t just hang anymore.

It grows from the tree, like the two have learned to live with each other.

Wilted leaves smother the ground.

The air smells like damp earth and the kind of silence that used to be joy.

These woods were green once.

Now they remember too much.

🗣️ Original Dialogue:

Sherry: I wondered if you’d show up

Katarina: I wasn’t planning on it.

Sherry: Then why are you here

Katarina: Because a part of me couldn’t forget

✅ What’s working:

• Understatement — the best kind of tension.

• The reveal that Katarina did remember hits soft and sad — perfect.

✨ Suggested version with slight rhythm tuning:

SHERRY:

I wondered if you’d show up.

KATARINA:

I wasn’t going to.

SHERRY:

Then why?

KATARINA:

Because forgetting… never really worked.

[A long pause. Wind moves the swing just enough to creak.]

SHERRY:

I waited anyway.

💡 Final Suggestion:

After that line — “I waited anyway” — let silence hang. You’ve earned it.

Even consider ending the scene there.

Let the ache live in the space after.