If you’re a non-fiction writer: What’s the biggest disappointment you’ve ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes.

If you’re a fiction writer, pick a character and: What’s the biggest disappointment he or she has ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes, or write the scene itself.

Today, spend 10 minutes free-writing every stereotypically bad line of dialogue you can think of. These could be genre-inspired (think of the worst examples of the romance, horror, fantasy, or adventure genres, for example), from TV, from novels, from movies… Use anything you’d like. Then spend a few minutes thinking about why you consider these to be ‘bad dialogue’ and how you’d go about fixing them up, replacing them, or changing the scene to make it better.

If you can’t think of specific lines, try to remember a scene from a book or movie and read or watch that scene before doing the latter half of this exercise.

This exercise inspired by The Secret Scroll.

I apologize for the length of time between posts; it’s been a crazy month! Anniversaries; endoscopies; cooking and planting; furniture shopping; reading like crazy; T-shirt redesigning like crazy… time flies! So today, let’s play with the concept of absence. Imagine that you (or one of your fictional characters) has been absent from home, friends, and family for some time with no word. As far as those people are concerned, the absence has been unexplained. They might have at least known that you planned to go away for a while, or they might have reported you missing.

Write the scene in which you or your character returns home.

This morning I got to thinking about gender roles in some books. So today, I’m going to suggest that you grab a sheet of paper and a pen, set a timer for 10-20 minutes, and write about gender roles in your own writing.

Let this take you wherever it happens to go. You might start out writing about a recent story you penned, and end up describing an unusual character you want to create for your next book. You might start out describing a character you aren’t sure how to write, and end up ranting about someone else’s depiction of gender roles. Go wherever it leads.

got loot?

Today, I’m going to share with you a prompt from the wonderful weekly site Booking Through Thursday, which they call simply ‘writing challenge’ and I’ll call connecting the dots. Here’s what they have to say:

• Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
• Turn to page 123.
• What is the first sentence on the page?
• The last sentence on the page?
• Now . . . connect them together….

(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

Since there seems to be some confusion among participants, here’s a little clarification for my version of this. You can connect the two sentences directly if they seem to go together, or you can invent something to go between them as a connector. If you connect them directly, free-write for a little while speculating as to what tale they might be part of or hint at, or turn them into part of a larger tale. If you invent a connector, try to end up with a full page of writing by the time you’re done (the phrases you borrowed can fall anywhere within that page).

Writers of all people tend to be familiar with the power of ritual in one’s life. After all—that’s one of the reasons behind engaging in writer’s prompts. The familiarity of ritual can help to put one in a particular mindset, go after a certain goal, work on a difficult project or personality trait, etc.

Today, write about a lifelong (or career-long, or the equivalent) ritual that a person uses and how that affects his or her life. If you prefer to write non-fiction, journal about the place of a ritual in your own or a relative or friend’s life. If you prefer to write fiction, create, examine, or explore the place of a ritual in the life of one of your characters.

For a beautiful example, read Jervis’s blog entry The Next Rank, about a ritual that saw him through his years in the military.

Write a brief scene in which both snow and sand make an appearance.

Yes, this prompt really is just that simple. There are dozens of ways to spice it up or restrict it further, however, if that isn’t enough for you. Place limits based on writing time or space. Specify a genre. Specify that both the snow and the sand have to be real parts of an outdoor scene, actual conditions, not represented in some other way. Do whatever you want with it!

Since I’m about to head off to the dentist’s in an hour or so (for my first filling in 20 or so years), I have dentistry on the brain. What’s the state of dentistry and other medicine in your fictional world? Does magic substitute? Do you use hand-wavy herbalism excuses to allow your low-tech society to appear clean and attractive in the hygiene department? Do you prefer the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach, where folks have decent teeth and you never think to explain it? Or do you like to indulge the gritty aspects of your world, where people can have rotted teeth or a terrible disease?

Any of these are perfectly legitimate ways to approach your world’s ills, but you should know which you’re using and be consistent about it. Today, free-write for a page about the state of your world’s medical system, and the impact of this on your visible characters.

Imagine that one of your fictional characters has pulled an old family photo album from a shelf. He retires to a couch to look through it. What does he find? Describe at least one of the photographs—something that surprises him or catches his attention—in detail.

This could be a photo album that belonged to a previous generation, or one from his own childhood. If you don’t tend to write about modern or futuristic worlds, you can substitute some sort of sketch book for a photo album (perhaps a family member possessed some artistic talent and liked to draw other family members or unusual occasions).

As an alternative exercise, look through photo sites on the internet and pick a photograph to represent the one he finds; write about it and how it fits into his life and family.

wanna be my muse?

Here are more questions you can ask of a fictional character to help you flesh him or her out a bit more. The number you decide to answer will probably depend on how much detail you go into—the more inspiration you find in a single question, the fewer you need to explore on the whole. If you want a ton of questions to choose from you can visit our page of writers’ resources, which has a link to our pdf of 365 character questions, but I recommend only answering a few questions per character so as not to burn out on an individual character.

• Debonair: Where does your character fit on the suave-to-bumbling scale?
• Deadly: How deadly is your character? What could make her kill someone, and how would it happen?
• Daffodil: What does your character think of bright, sunny, happy flowers?
• Drawing: Does your character have any artistic skills to speak of? If so, what are they and how good is he at them?

Sometimes the most unlikely or seemingly meaningless question can yield unexpectedly interesting results. You never know which characters are hiding odd habits, abilities, or events from you. Any strong word—particularly a verb or noun—can be used as the basis for a question, so if these options don’t do it for you, look for more options elsewhere.

If you prefer to write non-fiction rather than fiction, ask character-building questions of yourself and journal about the answers.