Writing Prompt – You Never Noticed

Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone wants to be noticed by someone. In this prompt from Shauna Philp, the point of view character is reflecting on someone whom they wished would see them, someone they knew for a long time whom ultimately didn’t see them, perhaps until this point, perhaps at all.

It’s a little hard to imagine growing up with someone for so long and them never noticing your existence at all. It makes me wonder just how close their situation was growing up.

It says in the prompt that they grew up together, but that could mean a lot of things. Perhaps they grew up in the same neighborhood, but didn’t actually interact much. Or maybe they went to school together in the same class and yet didn’t interact much.

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Writing Prompt
#173
We grew up together. You just never noticed I existed.

What, I think, would be worse is if they actually interacted a lot, being in the same clubs, teams, committees, and stuff like that and yet the other person still didn’t notice their existence. It seems clear that being noticed by this other person is important to the point of view character. The question becomes, how important. Is it an obsession with them to find a way for the other person to notice them or is it just something that they’d like and are sad at how little they have been noticed.

A third option is that something is actively preventing the other person from noticing them, such as a spell or a curse making this a fantasy type story instead of something else. How would you handle this? Do you think that the point of view character is obsessed, sad, or cursed? What story would you tell with this prompt?

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