I’ve been struck lately by how many events have had to be cancelled due to lockdown. We humans LOVE to plan for things. The anticipation is often just as fun as the event itself. At any rate, the old saying, that God laughs at your plans, seems particularly apt these days.
For Day 26, your prompt is to write a flash about plans gone horribly awry. There’s a lot of tension and conflict to exploit in that idea alone. Examples:
- A botched caper.
- A trip delayed or cancelled or upended by something unexpected (A Good Man is Hard to Find)
- Mercury in Retrograde times 1000.
- Perhaps the PLAN is very detailed and specific, somebody has gone to a lot of trouble to make it.
To heighten things even further, let’s say one character is extremely STUBBORN and INFLEXIBLE and the other is low-key and happy to go with the flow. I’m thinking of Neil Simon’s The Out-of-Towners. Write into the humor and tension that occurs when two such characters must face a carefully planned itinerary that’s botched by a series of accidents, mishaps, and misfortunes. How your characters deal with adversity says a lot about them. Do they prevail in the end? Remember that “trouble” is inherently interesting to your readers.
Open Your Art Flash Fiction Retreats 