Writing Prompt Monday: Creative Excuses

Hello and welcome to another post where I apologize for being a failure.

I didn't even stick to my posting schedule for a week.

I'm not what you might call "reliable" about this.

Anyway, feeling horribly guilty about flaking out on not one but TWO posts last week, I started thinking about excuses.

"I had to go to this party and it took like three hours to drive there and then there was no internet and also, who sits at a party and surfs the internet looking for links to re-post for their Friday link-a-palooza post?"

No good. No one's going to feel sympathetic with me because I drove to a party.

"My parents are both dying of cancer and I had to go stand by their bedsides!"

Too sad. Also, my parents are like 30% of my audience, and they would know it was a lie.

"My internet connection was down all weekend! I spent all of Saturday arguing with AT&T's very passive-aggressive customer service department."

Perfect! Not only is it near-undetectable as a lie, it did actually happen! Not, you know, this weekend. But it could have!

Just don't check my Facebook activity.

Then this thought process also got me thinking. (Metacognition!) You know the saying "necessity is the mother of invention?" (Or, as Calvin would say:)

Which led me to a new theory: being bad at life nurtures creativity.

If you are one of those relentlessly competent people who is unfailingly responsible and always pays your electricity bill on time and never waits til the last minute to finish a project, then you never really learn how to get creative.

If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who throws a party and fails to do any kind of food-shopping the week before, then your creativity will be tested when you have an apartment full of hungry people and nothing but cheez-its and sorrow in your cupboards.

When you have a 20-page paper due at 8 AM and it's 3 AM and you suddenly realize you spent your entire quarter using the school's wifi to binge-watch "The Vampire Diaries," you have to get creative and apply literary criticism to the symbolism of blood and sex in a popular TV show, exemplifying Romantic and Gothic themes even in our modern world.

Hardship, whether it's the kind you're born into or the kind you create for yourself, is the soil in which creativity is grown. Have you ever read a really awesome, inventive, lyrical work of genius written by a trust-fund kid whose parents were nice to him and who always got a 4.0? I haven't. And I suspect I never will, because that kind of life doesn't lend itself to creativity. As Anne Shirley would say, there's no "scope for the imagination" in that kind of life. Whereas if you grew up between a meth lab and a pot farm, with your only running water being a hose coming through your kitchen window from your meth-lab neighbor's well, with sporadic electricity and occasionally nothing in the pantry but beans and stale crackers-- and then you go on to be the kind of adult who routinely forgets to do things like "attend class" or find a job or return phone calls-- well then, the soil of hardship is rich and dark and bursting with nutrients for your flights of fancy. You basically have to be creative, because imagining different worlds where you live a different life is the only way to survive.

So your prompt for today is to think about something you failed at recently. Maybe you missed a big meeting, or forgot a major assignment. Whatever it was, think about that feeling of failure and shame. Really snuggle down inside your regret, or your sorry-not-sorry, or however you feel about it. And then write the most creative, convincing, compelling excuse you are capable of, to get the blame shifted off of yourself. Share in the comments below or keep it to yourself, but just enjoy the feeling of victory that comes with knowing that you not only flaked out on something, you fertilized your creative field.