What Do A Lobster, A Waiting Room and the Fantasy Genre Have in Common? It turns out, not very much. Still that was the prompt my group was given in the second round of the NYC Midnight contest that ran from a minute until midnight on Friday until the same on Sunday night:

• Genre: Fantasy
• Location: A travel agency
• Object: A lobster

When I received the prompt, I deflated.

Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre I've read but not deeply and not recently. I suppose Gaiman is fantasy, but I think that's not the sort we're talking about here.

A Travel Agency
To be truthful, I've never spoken to a travel agent, nor have I used the services of a travel agency.

Lobster
I don't like the idea of lobster, the bottom feeders. I don't like their treatment, their pincers rubber banded together, the overcrowded retail tanks, their eventual live dive into boiling water.

I repeat: I deflated.

Not only was I not stoked about any of the three elements of the prompt, I found joining all three of them into a story particularly difficult. With some difficulty, I could marry Fantasy with Travel Agency. I could create a believable equivalent of a medieval or such travel agency. I could marry Fantasy with a Lobster. That was possibly the easiest combination of the three. And I could marry a lobster with a Travel Agency with a Lobster. Okay THAT would be the easiest of the three. But it was that third element that kept throwing a wrench into my thinking.

Scenario: A fellow goes into a travel agency, ends up on a vacation with a beach. Voila! Lobster. Do I introduce a fantasy creature? A secret door into a fantasy world? Introduce a quest?

The problem was not so much that I could think of a storyline; it was that I couldn't think of a storyline that fit into the 950-word flash fiction format. By the time I've done the travel agency thing, there's little more room for the introduction of the story itself.

Reading this, you might be thinking there are a hundred things coming to mind, but my thinking was this: everyone is going to go funny; everyone is go funny or cutsy. But this is a competition. I not only need to write a solid story, but the real marketing truth of the matter is that my story needs to stand out as well. I'm not talking about in a cliche' way though. I mean I couldn't simply go with my first idea. That's the one most folks run with due to the 48-hour time constraint. I needed to think a couple levels deeper and still have a good story.

I ran into dead end after dead end. Unable to sleep and finding no success dreaming on the prompt, I decided I had to walk. 

From a very early age, I would piss my mom off by skipping the school bus and walking home. On the walk home, I would sing, monologue, create poetry (that I never wrote down) or read. Even now, when faced with deadlines, I find that a long walk or a long bicycle ride is a perfect way to release the brain juices.

I headed out at 4am. In 2 miles, I had gotten a mild workout, seen hordes of bats gobble up less fortunate hordes of insects and had come up with the seed of the story line that could combine the disparate prompt elements. It was like magic. It never fails. I headed to the San Antonio Writers Guild Saturday write-in at 8am tired and not having written a word but armed with a short arc.

The next time you're faced with a difficult challenge, be it personal, professional or creative, I suggest finding some rhythmic activity to lull your mind into its deeper workings. There's a drumbeat to how we think and that sort of activity can bring it out when you need it.