Fury, Impact, Strike
Today’s post is based on a writing prompt I shared in a previous Daily Drafts & Dialogues post. Keep reading to see what I wrote, and to access more writing prompts. [From the Archive.]
What I wrote below is based on the following writing prompt: Write a scene from the perspective of someone who works inside a tech startup.
Fury, Impact, Strike
Kenny, my ex, also new head of product at ZeroScape Games, is making my pulse race. Not in an exciting or fun sort of way, but in a suffocating, dangerous sort of way. His temper is one of the many reasons I broke up with him a few weeks ago, though I told him it was because he was becoming my new boss. He said he understood and that I was right to break things off, yet he’s been giving me the silent treatment ever since.
My palms are sweaty, so I wipe them on the front of my chinos underneath the conference table, hoping no one else will see me squirm, though I doubt it would matter. Everyone else’s anxiety in the room is skyrocketing in tandem with mine. I can feel it. A communal pulse that’s throbbing, at the brink of exploding.
Marcel is frozen in place, eyes glued to the glass wall in front of him, determined not to look at anything or anyone. Landon is scraping off the skin next to his thumbnail with his index fingernail and will probably start bleeding soon. And Tom keeps swiveling from side to side in his desk chair, unable to sit still. Meanwhile, the others just stare at Kenny, utterly mute, and clearly afraid.
Kenny won’t stop pacing in front of the blank projector at the front of the room as he rambles on and on about first quarter quotas, how pitiful they are, and how we’re all to blame. He’s also lamenting how we’ll never pull in the annual revenue we need at this rate.
“You call this moving fast and breaking things?!” he shouts, more than once, along with, “You call this innovation?!” over and over again. And he keeps slamming his hands on the desk with unnecessary emphasis.
Kenny, however, doesn’t share any numbers or data or viable information with us so we don’t know what he’s talking about. He just keeps yelling out industry slogans and jargon and clichés, waiting for their impact to strike. What or whom? That’s anybody’s guess.
We all thought the product we delivered before Kenny stepped into his new role at the company was remarkable and so did all the kids who were already addicted to it. They kept asking for new levels, more rewards, more visual effects, more everything. Hence why everyone sitting in this room was perplexed and surprised by Kenny’s intense fury. Seriously, what is he talking about?
Warranted fury is easily tolerated around here, expected even. But unwarranted fury is just confusing and unproductive (pun intended). Looking around the room, I could tell that no one here could fathom how Kenny could be so irate and dissatisfied. It didn’t make any sense. Someone needed to put a stop to this, and fast, before any damage to team morale set in for good.
I guess it will have to be me, the only female on this team.
I raise my hand to speak, to tell Kenny that we have been getting stellar feedback from our users and that our user numbers are growing as we keep adding more features they want. I want to ask him if he can provide us with any numbers or data or information we can learn from, to improve the product and our revenue numbers. But he ignores me and my raised hand.
For a full ten additional minutes, Kenny continues to pace and yell as the rest of the team members in the room remain silent, and I keep my hand in the air.
Finally, when he excuses everyone, he walks up to me and whispers hotly in my ear, “Don’t ever disrespect me in front of the team like that again, or you’ll be sorry.”
Then, before I know what’s happening …
[Write what comes next in this scene and share what you come up with in a comment or chat thread below.]
I might revise, edit, or add to this draft in the future. Stay tuned.
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© All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC. The above work is a piece of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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Today’s Writing Prompt
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Write a scene in which a character says 'in a jam.'
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