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Archive for July, 2006

Photo albums

Monday, July 17th, 2006

Pick one of your fictional characters and imagine she keeps a photo album. If she’s from a genre or time period without photos, figure out what her equivalent is (a journal? Scrapbook? Memory shelf of mementos? Private store of memorized moments that she occasionally mulls over?) or what her photo album would be like if she could have one. Write about this album, either following the wisdom of your own pen or answering one or more of the following questions:

How selective is she about what she chooses to memorialize? The most important moments? Everything she can? Something in-between?
How detailed or simple are the moments she captures, how complex or straightforward?
How artistic and well-rendered are those moments?
How accurate are those moments? If they’re colored by experience and emotion (as they undoubtedly are), in what way are they altered, and by how much?
Are there many images of your character in these images and memories, or does she prefer to focus on others? Why?

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Can you spare a dime? Shirking Workers

Sunday, July 16th, 2006

Engineering Ardor: Skating at Work

Above is a link to a semi-humorous, semi-serious look at some of the personality types of workers who don’t want to work and the schemes they employ to avoid being productive.

Make a list of the characters from one of your pieces of fiction. Next to each, write a brief phrase (like the headings on the entries in that blog post) summing up their attitude toward getting work done or their method for approaching their work.
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Velvet Chocolate

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

This evening I was playing around a bit with a description of hot chocolate. So for today’s exercise, I want you to choose a food you have a particularly strong reaction to, positive or negative. Have some if you can, eating slowly and concentrating on every nuance of flavor, texture, and your reaction to it. If you can’t have some then do this in your memory and imagination.

Describe this food in terms of something that isn’t food, trying to convey what causes this food to provoke such a strong reaction in you.
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A Typical Day

Friday, July 14th, 2006

Pick a character from your fiction that you want to know more about. If you write non-fiction, then use yourself or a character from some piece of fiction by another author that you enjoy and want to explore more thoroughly.

Today is a typical day for this character. In brief detail, sketch out her activities from waking up to bedtime.

Explore her feelings throughout the day as she moves through these tasks. You don’t have to go into great detail; again, just sketch things out briefly.

Circle three small events or tasks at random from your write-up. What would happen if these were interrupted in some way and your character was prevented from having her normal day? How would that change the chain of events and emotions?
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Lightning Dances with a Rainbow

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Incredible pictures: the moment lightning shared the sky with a rainbow | the Daily Mail

Imagine, if you will, a moment in one of your characters’ lives. He comes to a crisis point, a decision point. He’s in the middle of something terribly important to him. Spend a few moments imagining (or writing) this character into the middle of this situation.

Then, he looks up into the sky and sees the most awesome display–forks of lightning playing around a rainbow against a yellow-pink sky.

How does this affect his transformative experience?
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Frame It Like A Photo

Thursday, July 13th, 2006

Think of a scene from a piece of writing you’re working on or want to work on. If you don’t have such a piece then daydream an interesting dramatic scene, or pick one from a TV show or movie you watched very recently or a book you’re reading. Now pick a “still frame” from that scene–imagine that you’ve taken a photograph of one single moment in it. Write up that image in a way that conveys as much as possible about the scene–through description, not telling.
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Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Contest

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

WD Popular Fiction Awards

The deadline of the Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards Competition is Wednesday November 1, 2006. Please note that there is an entry fee for this contest. Click on the above link to read the entry guidelines, submit manuscripts online, and so on. The grand prize winner will apparently recieve cash, books, a manuscript critique, and marketing advice, while the first place winner in each genre category will receive the same, but the cash prize will be smaller.
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Genre Jumble

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

First, list out every genre you can think of (mystery, science fiction, romance, etc.). Next list out every sub-genre you can think of; visit an online book seller if you’re having difficulty with this part.

Pick out two sub-genres of different genres; try to pick ones that are very specific and very disparate. Spend five minutes brainstorming new and interesting sub-genres that would combine these two sub-genres in some fashion.
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The Spam Game, Part II

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

I can’t help it; I just keep getting these awesome spam email subject lines that make me want to write whole stories, and then I have to share them with you. It’s probably the only good thing to come out of the phenomenon of spam in the entire history of the internet. So even though I’ve already posted an exercise today, here’s another one for you. Pick one of the following two phrases (or do this exercise twice, once for each one):

chromium quip
infusion suicide

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Posted in Word Association Games | Permalink | No Comments »

Authority

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

There are many positions of authority in this world, from the small (supervisor at a tiny two-person company) to the huge (president, prime minister, or king of a large country), the personal (parenting) to the impersonal (CFO at a huge corporation), the petty to the influential, the abusive to the noble.

Part One: Take a sheet of paper and fill it with every position of authority you can think of. The more specific you can get the better (CFO of a particular company rather than ‘CFO of a company’), but try not to get stuck on variations of the same few types of position.
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