Prompt #39 — Write Like Christopher Higgs

Higgs crafts a speaker (view here) whose confession is both chilling and engaging, largely due to the fact that he never overtly states the motivation for his crime. This piece offers fragments—the action and the starting point of its cause—but it never quite connects the dots, explaining what happened between the speaker and the woman Pilby introduces to him. The readers are left, like the speaker on the doorstep, wondering what will transpire inside the trailer, and how it led to attempted murder.

PROMPT

It can be challenging to write fragmented narratives; you never want to trick your reader or leave them so far outside a story that it fails to cohere. Higgs succeeds at this by building narrative tension and offering enough details for readers to draw some of their own conclusions. Create a character who confesses to something without actually naming his or her crime. Develop the narrative enough that readers may reasonably hypothesize one or two possible crimes that have been committed, but do not make the piece completely transparent.