Robots: Menace or Pathos?
Weekend Writing Prompt
Welcome to the first weekend writing prompt of 2019. Before I set you on your imaginative writing adventures, let me talk a little more about why these are weekend prompts and not just prompts, sprints, exercises, etc.
Writing prompts are designed to stretch your thinking, to make you write around certain roadblocks by providing arbitrary restrictions you would not otherwise put on your own writing. But prompts are often also short, designed to be temporary challenges like doing a crossword. After you’ve managed to find your way around the restriction of the prompt you get to pat yourself on the back and consider that prompt completed, that challenge met and overcome. When writing prompts take only a few hours or even less time, it’s easy to walk away from them and forget all about the lesson you learned form the exercise. It means nothing to have strong muscles if you never do any heavy lifting.
A writing prompt ought to be revisited more than once if you want the lesson to stick. So this weekend, read the prompt and try your hand at it. Then again tomorrow and again the next day. Have the prompt on your mind all weekend so you can either really polish the piece or, and in my opinion even more beneficial, you can have a few different versions, multiple ways of completing and satisfying the prompt. That way anything you’ve learned will be remembered and more likely to resonate in your other writing.
Now for the writing prompt!
I’ve been reading a lot of robot stories lately. Asimov’s The Complete Robot is a weird and wonderful collection of some older stories as well as Roger Zelazny’s The Last Defenders of Camelot. Clarkesworld Magazine has a story in this months issue titled Fire in the Bone by Ray Nayler that has a particularly unique take on robots.
Robot stories aren’t all created equal. Asimov separated them into two categories: Robots as menace (basically robot as zombie), and Robot as pathos (the lovable, man’s best friend kind of robot). But is their an alternative? Does there exist somewhere a third kind of robot story?
Hopefully after this weekend there will.
PROMPT: write a new robot story.
No evil robots come to conquer man. No savior robots come to save man.
Good luck!
Remember, you can always submit your stories to Capital Letters. I’d love to read your stories!
