Freewriting is one of my favorite things to do. I make my mind a blank, and let a story tell itself. It truly helps to set a timer, at least for me it does. Otherwise I think too much, and write stories that take a week to gussy up. But, if I can take the plunge and let the story write itself, as I did for the story below, I find out that I know much more than I ever learned. We all do.
This story is a three part freewrite. Writers are given three prompts in succession, no peaking ahead. I've set the prompts off as quotes in bold italics. Each section took me about five minutes from start to finish, with a bit more time to to proofread without changing the original content in any way. Here is the original hive post.
I hope you enjoy my flight of imagination. The image is mine.
I have been crying lately thinking about the world as it is.
The talk show host was doing his regular schtick, drumming up doom and gloom. I'd had enough.
I shut off the dang device that was bringing this tripe to me via a whole string of technological marvels that were costing me a pretty penny. Every. Single. Month.
I started disconnecting all my devices. I pulled out the battery cords to the batteries that had stopped working years ago. I pulled out the coax cables to my cable modems and receivers, ethernet cables from modems to routers, phone cords from cable modems to phones, HDMI cables from modems to TVs. Each of these devices was also plugged into surge protectors, so I yanked those out too. Once the main house was done, I hit the basement, shutting off electricity to the house, and yanking out all cables. Then I went outside and pulled down all cable company equipment at the entry points to my house. I left those dangling from the nearest pole.
The boy continues to grin
I hadn’t even seen him standing there, but somehow I knew he’d been grinning all along.
He said “My mother is doing the exact same thing right now.”
I snapped out of it. I had unhooked myself from the matrix. I looked around for Shelley, the boy’s mother. She was standing at the corner of her house, and had just emerged from the matrix too. I looked around the street and saw women outside each home, yanking out their cable company equipment.
When we were all done, we stood in the streets, wordlessly connecting with each other instead of with devices that previously had tethered our very selves to nodes hundreds or thousands of miles away.
A powerful quiet enveloped us. No devices, no cars, no lawnmowers leaf blowers weed whackers chainsaws lights. No nothing. I didn’t even hear the usual hum in my head, the hum doctors had long been telling me was tinnitus, that the problem lay with me.
We’d been unplugged. There was no stopping us now.
the dog barked at the fence
He wanted to get out. So we women gathered at that fence, and pulled it right down. We pulled down all of our fences, then began swarming in and out of each others homes. Shelley had a big bag of sugar, so I took some for the batch of vinegar I wanted to make that day, while she was at my house grabbing what she needed of my canned tomatoes for her dinner. Gloria headed over to Nancy’s to get herself some of the bumper crop of pears still impossibly hanging from the branches in late October. She went home and baked an enormous tray of pear cobbler. Lucy provided the whipped cream from this morning’s milk. There was more than enough cobbler for each and every one of the residents on the street: man, woman, child, cat, and dog. Even the birds had come to celebrate with us, gracing our street with nature's song.
We started partying. The whole town came to our street to see what was going on. What they saw was wild abandon, abundance, safety and infinite love and joy.
This moment went down in history as the day the revolution started.
Unplug your devices, if only for twenty minutes a day. If you don’t have twenty minutes, unplug for an hour.
You’ll see.