This week, we’ll look at a few entries from Alchera Project #39.

Writing prompts, if you’re a writer you probably think you should do more of them, but you never seem to have the time. Those who are not writers may have only a vague idea what a writing prompt is. The prompt is a starting point for a writing project, an idea, a structure, and a set of requirements, and you as a writer have to flesh it out into a complete work. As writers, we know these are great practice and great opportunities to expand ourselves. But we never seem to have the time to do them. Besides which, they’re a lot more fun to read than to write.

The Alchera Project is a monthly writing group run by Laurie Murray. Each month, she posts six writing prompts. There’s a “prose” option, a “poetry” option, a “free-write” option, a “list” option. Option Five is called “A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words”; it includes a photo, and you have to write something inspired by the photo. Option Six is the “grab bag” option; six words are listed, and you have to use at least 3 of them. Each month, Alchera members choose one or more of these prompts to write to.

Alchera began in November 2001 as a monthly collaboration project offering one writing prompt. Shortly after that Laurie became bored with just one option and decided to create “the buzz,” which included one or two writing options each week. But not many members had time to do a writing prompt every week. So, Laurie changed the format to five project options per month. The number of options has grown and shrunk over the years, but that’s basically still what we have today. This format makes the Alchera Project different from (and in my opinion, better than) other writing prompts on the Internet.

One of the things that intrigues me most about writing prompts is that each writer has a different interpretation of the prompt. Take Alchera Prompt #5, “A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words.” In project #39, for November 2005, we saw a black-and-white photo of a rocky beach at dusk. Cloud-filtered sun illuminates tiny ripples infesting the infinite sea. And silhouetted against this backdrop, almost out of the frame, is a person, someone, we don’t know who.

There were 16 entries for this option last month, and all are worth reading, Some were poetry. Some were stories. Some were creative essay. Some were about the sand inbetween your toes. Some were about memories. Some were allegorical or metaphorical. One, inspired by the black-and-white photo, had the world losing all its colors. I myself wrote a 130-word flash fiction about a woman meeting her loved one on the beach under strange circumstances. I won’t say any more about that. Instead, there are two other submissions I’d like to talk about.

The first is a creative essay, called “Sea Change,” by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld. It begins with the line, “Water was a central part of my earliest nightmares.” This is what writers call a “compelling lead.” It causes you to ask questions and keeps you reading to find out the answers. Even though this is a non-fiction essay, the effect really isn’t so different from the tension a good story arc invokes. A good essay will produce the same arc as a good story. In fact, some use an actual story as the basis of the essay.

I assume the events portrayed actually happened, because it’s written in the form of an essay. But for all I know, it could be a work of fiction. If it’s fictional, we call it a story. If it’s nonfiction, we call it an essay and put it in a totally different category. But the line between these two is thinner than we’d like to admit.

In fact, the events in “Sea Change” actually did happen. The author herself told me that.

Elizabeth Bennefeld is a freelance writer and editor from Fargo, North Dakota, with a website thewrittenword.net. She specializes in academic editing but has also edited novels, nonfiction, and professional articles. In college, she started by studying math and science. But in her junior year, she switched to the humanities, earning a BA in English and Philosophy. Then she spent over fifteen years in bank computer operations and a bit less than a year as a computer programmer before striking out as an editor and writer. Some of her favorite authors are William Sanders, Candace Robb, Julie Czerneda, Mindy Klasky, Wen Spencer, and Louise Marley.

In “Sea Change,” we feel the author’s horror of water, but also her romantic attachment to it, after she came to terms with the sea. It’s a short piece, moving and romantic.

By far the longest, most involved submission to last month’s Alchera Project was Nathan Nelson’s story “Midnight Mass.” Inspired by the same photo, it’s a story of a young man seduced by a gay vampire. This is not a story for kids, or even for the weak of heart. In the story preface, Nate writes, “One man’s smut is, I hope, another man’s allegory.”

I knew, however, that the symbolic meaning I saw in the story could not possibly be what he intended. But when I asked him what he intended the allegory to mean, he said:

I rarely intend anything when I write a story, or if I did intend something at the beginning, it didn’t turn out that way. This was a rare exception. I went into the story intending allegory, but I did not go into the story intending for the allegory to mean the same thing to everyone. I think the best allegory is the kind that can mean many things to many different people, and I think your understanding of what you read is likely more valid than any kind of preconceived intention I could tell you about. Allegory is more about the reader than the author, in my opinion.

Nate Nelson is a 21-year-old writer from Bridgeport, Ohio. Involved deeply in both faith and politics, he is also a contributing editor for the Catholic social justice blog Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and he maintains a faith-based blog called Sacramentum Minimum.

In “Midnight Mass,” a vampire in Key West seduces a young man named Daniel, who is visiting over the Christmas holidays. He draws him in, into a hidden place where no one can get to save him. Daniel speaks as though he no longer has control over his own thoughts. As I read the story, I found myself horrified for this character, under the spell of the undead. I wanted one of his friends somehow to save him, but I knew that was not going to happen. This is a perfect picture, I thought, of the horror of being subjugated by one’s passions. The story is, after all, an allegory. We can’t control our feelings, true, but we can direct them toward the productive, rather than being dominated by them. However, once one allows himself to be caught in their grip, he might as well have lost his mind, as it’s not working anymore anyhow.

I am sure this is not what Nate had in mind. If you read certain pieces I’ve written in my LiveJournal, you may understand why I’d see the story from that perspective. If you read what he’s written, you’ll understand why his perspective is different.

Maybe he meant that being seduced by a vampire, becoming one of the undead– Maybe that’s sometimes a good thing, sometimes beautiful. “And they lived happily ever after,” and all that. In this case, the story would be a symbol of how sometimes what scares us is exactly what we need, and we need to surrender ourselves to it in order to be happy.

If that’s what was thinking, he needed to build much more sympathy for the vampire. The vampire is naturally inhuman; we need to see it as human. We need to identify with the character. Pat Murphy does this very well. In her novel, Nadia: The Wolf Chronicles, for example, she establishes sympathy for a werewolf. She achieves this within the first few chapters and never stops. She also does this in (at least some of) her short stories.

But in “Midnight Mass,” the vampire horrified me. As beautiful as Daniel said he was, I could only see Nosferatu. I could only imagine that Daniel was bewitched, not seeing what was really there, which only added to the terror I felt.