Daily Cascade

Bad Luck to Good Story

Prompt:
"Your bad luck will make for a great story tomorrow.” Let this Friday the 13th quote inspire your entry.

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I guess this prompt is like the saying, "If life throws a lemon at you, make a lemonade." Well, okay. I hope you like lemonade. In my case, I even like the taste of lemons, which used to freak out my mother when I was a kid. I wonder if that was why I'm so drawn to written word.

Lemons aside, let's first look at the word bad luck. I have to say, all our feelings about bad luck may be true, and our confidence in our sense of stability and security may be false, in the first place. If only because our planet rushes through space at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, which it can be--and has been--struck by asteroids, and also, there's that serious possibility of our sun growing larger and swallowing all its planets. Now, did I scare you enough?

Still, this is all fodder for the sci-writers and similar people who are out to scare us, at the drop of a hat, from everything. And I haven't even touched the variety of viruses, bacteria, accidents, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and fires, yet. And I won't. Not that I think of such things day in and day out, either, but the prompt made me wonder about what may be possible on a scale so large that it may even pass by our so called everyday wit and wisdom.

Then, some authors do base their work on their life experiences, and if those experiences were to be all good, their stories would never be as attention-getting as the negativity that usually provides the turning point.

By the way, I'm still suspecting that our love of reading about the attacks of bad luck just might have something to do with this planet we are living on, and not only for being out there in the space, either. I would write more about it, but I don't want to freak out any of you, who may be reading this entry.

As for the authors who base their stories on shifts of bad luck and difficult situations, Herman Melville now came to my mind. Melville based his novels Moby Dick, Typee, and Omoo, on his experiences as a crewman on whaling ships. You and I may not be as efficient with our pens or keyboards, as Melville was with his steel point pen and an inkwell, but still we can weave a good story or two when we put our minds to it.

Yet, it isn't just the fiction writers who use their experiences of bad luck. Almost all poets, our WdC poets included, use what they consider their real life bad luck and complain, with pretty and/or shocking words, similes, metaphors, etc., in their poems. Yours truly is guilty of that, too.

Talking about yours truly, my writing about bad luck sometimes takes a funny turn. To adapt to a prompt or something, especially when I wrote for a contest, I used to make up a bad luck situation. Then, sometimes, I received reviews and comments from WdC friends who tried to console me and hold my hand through my fake bad time. And, mostly, I didn't have the heart to tell them the truth because I really appreciated their good hearts.

This alone goes to prove how, as readers, we all are aficionados of bad luck: however, we need to remember that it helps to end our words with something positive, in order not to get our readers so worked up, and better yet, to give our work an upward turn.

All this means that we can, in our writings, easily use everything and anything that is bad luck, real or imagined. Bad luck just gets better attention.