Magnolia (writing prompts!)

And some inspiration from novelist Charles Baxter.

Let's start with an excerpt from an interview with novelist Charles Baxter:

ST: At Sarah Lawrence, you urged us to linger in the emotional heart of a scene. What is gained in a writer’s deliberately slowing down at certain moments?

CB: It’s a thumb in the eye of the zeitgeist. Everything now is supposed to go fast; everything is supposed to be so efficient. Since when was fiction supposed to submit to time-and-motion studies? Impatience and distraction are our great enemies and must be conquered somehow. We all know that some of our most profound moments happen with a kind of languor: pleasure and love and sorrow and prayer take their own sweet time. When the pace slows down, we are allowed to explore a feeling and to understand it inwardly. Here’s the Sistine Chapel: you have thirty seconds to look at the ceiling! Hurry up! No. A thousand times no. A sign of the times: at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, I remember going into the Vatican Pavilion (yes, there was one), that had a moving floor that took you past Michelangelo’s Pietà so fast that you only had about thirty seconds to look at it. I’m not kidding. It was the wave of the future. Art should be an antidote to Speed Culture.

LET'S ALL REMEMBER TO SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

Today’s prompts were inspired by the movie Magnolia.