Pick an animal from the zoo. It could be your favorite animal, a random animal, or an animal you’re curious about. Do just a little research about the animal if you don’t know a lot about it–do a web search or look it up in a recent encyclopedia. You don’t need to go all-out here; just try to learn a little bit about it, maybe a few day-to-day details you didn’t know before.

If possible, find a photograph or artist’s rendering of the animal that you would choose to represent your particular animal. Go ahead and name it. Then write a journal entry or vignette from that animal’s point of view centering around a day or event at the zoo.

For inspiration, meet my favorite animal: the cheetah.

Cheetahs at Cafe Press

Technorati Tags: animals, journaling, prompts, cheetah, write, writers, writing

Today I thought I’d direct you to and they lived happily ever after, from Dragon Writing Prompts. I must also direct you to their quote from yesterday:

Writers are cannibals… It’s a terrible thing to be the friend, the acquaintance, (or) the relative of a writer.

–Cynthia Ozick

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In the World of Warcraft strategy manual it says that if you use the “/silly” and “/flirt” commands for a given race and gender of character a handful of times and listen to the jokes and entertaining flirts that result, you’ll get an idea of whether the race’s style would appeal to you. I only partially agree with that in practice simply because of some of the jokes and flirts they’ve programmed into the game.

However, this suggestion does show some surprising insight. You can learn a lot about someone by the jokes they tell and the ways in which they flirt. So, take a character from a fictional world (one of your own if you’re a fiction writer, or come up with one on the spot) and free-write about their style of joking and/or flirting. If you want, write up a scene or three that shows us how the character jokes or flirts. If you write non-fiction, then you might write about your own style of humor or manner of flirtation.

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You can do this writing exercise from your own point of view or the point of view of a fictional character, depending on your mood or what sort of writing you prefer to do.

Set a timer for 20 minutes. Set pen to paper and describe something you or your character was not meant to see or overhear–a private moment, a confession, a deep trauma, a raw emotion or exchange. Write from that raw place, that knowledge of possessing something you shouldn’t and being unable to take it back or change it. Don’t worry about punctuation, grammar, or the rules of writing. Just write feelings.

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It’s been a long day today (although at least I did have fun seeing a movie) so I’m late with today’s writing prompt. Thus, I’ll keep it simple. Today, start a piece of writing with the following phrase:

“It’s been a long day, Suzanne.”

Set a timer for ten minutes and just go. Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, punctuation, structure, anything. See what comes pouring out.

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I thought I’d start occasionally linking to other sites that provide prompts for your writing. Umm, as soon as I no longer have two cats trying to simultaneously occupy my lap. Hold on…

…Well, I think maybe I’ve made just enough room around them to continue. Anyway.

Today, I wanted to point you to Tearing Down the Walls, a journaling exercise about forgiveness from the author of “Journaling from the Heart”, Eldonna Edwards (someday I’ll have to pick that book up for review). It’s more for journaling than fiction-related work, but either way it works those writing muscles, and it’s good to work on a variety of things. The Journaling from the Heart blog offers a good handful of such journaling prompts.

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Imagine the worst possible day of your fictional character’s life. Start when he wakes up in the morning–what’s the worst possible circumstance he could find himself in the moment he opens his eyes? Go from there. If you ever stumble and aren’t sure what could happen next, just start listing possibilities. You can go back later and pick and choose the most effective.

Difficulty: restrict yourself to ordinary, everyday events. Sometimes writers think something extraordinary has to happen to their characters to push them over the edge, when often it’s the most mundane difficulties that add up: a sick spouse, a power outage at a critical juncture, a fridge full of spoiled food before a party, a patch of unnoticed poison ivy in the garden, etc.

Technorati Tags: prompts, write, writers, writing

Take any of the following sets of words (or a set you create yourself). Set a timer for 10 to 20 minutes and freewrite using those words as inspiration. Try to use them all in the piece of writing, or simply combine the concepts and free-associate off of that.

• Memory, death, renewal

• Memorial, platform, junk
• Retrospective, consume, day

You can either just start writing and see what emerges or use one of the following formats:

• A dialogue between three characters (try to use one of the words as a touchstone for each character’s part of the conversation)

• A short story
• A fictional character’s memoirs

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Take a conversation from a story you’re working on–preferably one with some tension to it. If you don’t have such a conversation to work with, write down as much as you can remember of an actual conversation you had recently; you don’t have to stick too closely to reality as long as you get the gist of it.

Make a list of all the ways in which this conversation could have gone (or could go) wrong. What misunderstandings could occur? What impasses could the characters reach? What could someone say differently that could change the entire meaning of a question or sentence? What past context could cause the conversation to take on new meaning?

Write a new version of the conversation in which things take a drastic turn for the worse.
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Make a list of some of your favorite food dishes, preferably about ten of them. Pick out the ones that have very ordinary names that purely describe the dish, like macaroni and cheese. Sit for a moment and imagine each one in turn, picking out significant details about how they look, taste, smell, feel on the tongue, make you feel, etc.; take notes. Now try to come up with at least one imaginative name for each recipe. Preferably brainstorm a handful and then pick your favorite.
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