Big Pink Book Stars and Rainbows! (Prompt 9)
On Monday, I posted the blank version of this page, and today, I’m back to show you how I used it.
The first thing I did was to mark the text, “When it rains, look for rainbows. When it’s dark, look for stars,” to flip the elements, making it “When it rains, look for stars. When it’s dark, look for rainbows.”
For the first part of the revised text, I made some notes about an elf woman crying golden tears, which was absolutely borrowed from something a friend of mine described in a game we played not long before I worked through this prompt. For the second part of the revised text, my thoughts went to “Rainbow in the Dark” by Dio, and I looked up that song’s lyrics and jotted down some pieces that jumped out at me about magic and the portion of the refrain that changes at the end of the song to “You’re a rainbow in the dark.” I also noted “isolation and invisibility,” which is what the song is about.
While looking at the other search results that came up when I looked up the song lyrics, I stumbled on the Wikipedia article about moonbows (rainbows at night) and noted a few details about them. This sent my brain to a K-pop song, “Rainbow Halo” by Red Velvet,” so I looked up the translation of those lyrics. It’s ultimately a sappy song about love, and none of the lyrics really worked for what I had so far. But I then took the several elements that I had from the various pieces, noting “magic, confusion, isolation, sadness, but hope even in darkness.”
Then I went a little further, thinking about the idea of using the “moonbow” as a literal bow, pulled from the sky for an archer to use, which then brought to mind Cupid, and whether or not an archer with Cupid’s bow might shoot themself with that bow (“self-inflicted arrow shot?”). Finally, I noted “colors for each stanza?,” thinking of progressing backward through the rainbow, beginning with purple (for darkness to brightness), and then possibly starting with black (the absence of color) and ending with white (all colors).
My notes are, as always, a bit of a mess, but this is very much how my thought process tends to work when the prompts don’t set me immediately on a story or poem. I didn’t really use the timer part of this page, but I did pull this all together in 15-20 minutes, which seems like a pretty good amount of time for brainstorming. And I didn’t fall too far down any rabbit holes, though I did poke at the Korean lyrics for “Rainbow Halo” because I had a memory of a part of the song that I couldn’t find. I did manage to stop myself from trying to pursue what song I might have actually been thinking of, so that’s a win!
So this will probably turn into a poem (that I haven’t started yet), with seven or nine stanzas, that progresses through some of the imagery that I’ve pulled together here. I’d love to hear what you do with this page, if you’re playing along at home!
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