From the Bookshelf

May 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the May installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald (New York: New Directions Press, 1995)

I opened The Rings of Saturn to this lovely setting captured in two sentences:

The rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I took my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town. Darkness was falling, and only the lighthouse with its shining glass cabin still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon.

In my copy, there is a black and white photograph of a lighthouse below this text, but the image is superfluous: this is painted so clearly. The first thing to notice is the scale: Where do the eyes go? From the rain clouds in the wide sky to the narrator’s body walking along streets and lanes, back to the sky for its near darkness (maybe we add a few leftover strands of clouds in there) to a tall lighthouse and then immediately to the fine point of the glass at the top of the lighthouse, which reflects the “last luminous rays” from the western horizon, which takes us from the glass back to the open sky.

Most readers won’t notice that their “eyes” are doing so much work, of course. But this variation in scale (near and far) is helping them stay engaged. Note, too, how the darkness is played against the light in the glass of the lighthouse. So there’s not only a variation in vision; there are contrasts, as well.

Now it’s your turn to paint a scene: Write a flash that begins with a person walking or waiting or doing anything boring; enliven it by moving the camera in their surroundings from large to small, near to far. Don’t worry about what the story is about yet. Just animate the scene with visuals while this person is doing something. Try to end by focusing on the same place you started (as Sebald does, with the sky).

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl