Despite the lack of entertaining randomly-generated spam subject lines these days, I finally got another one that was worthy of inspiring a writers’ exercise: “The Narcissistic Dungeon.” Write this phrase at the top of a piece of paper (or document file), set a timer for 10-30 minutes, and start writing. I can imagine a wealth of literal, figurative, and partially figurative ways in which this might be taken, as inspiration for journaling, philosophical musing, or fiction.

As a side note, it can be a helpful exercise in its own right to look to something in your life that’s as annoying or inconvenient as spam emails and find a way to get something helpful, inspiring, and provocative out of it. If there’s a small thing like this that drives you nuts from day to day, try to find a way to derive something of benefit from it. Anything can act as inspiration, particularly if it irritates—just as a grain of sand provokes the formation of a pearl. Not all inspiration must come from something that is beautiful.

blank journals

Look around your house and pick up several small brightly-colored objects; place them together on a table in front of you. For example, you might pick up a hunter-green crayon, a red-backed playing card, and a yellow six-sided die. Imagine that you (or the fictional character of your choice) receive a package in the mail that contains these items; it might or might not contain a letter or other items as well. Who is the package from? What is its purpose? What happens next? Free-write or tell a story.

When creating and building a fictional world, two things you’ll need to think about are law enforcement and military. I bring these up together because in some forms of governance—military dictatorship, for example—these can amount to the same or related things. There are quite a few items you might consider when detailing the law enforcement and military on your world. For example:

What is the general public perception of these institutions? While there’ll be no one-size-fits-all attitude, there’s likely to be one or two prevailing sentiments among the populace. Are these people seen as honorable, honest, hard-working, respected? Are they seen as corrupt, dishonest, dangerous? Are they viewed with fear, indifference, or love?

What is the route to service in these institutions? Is there a period of compulsory military service for all able-bodied citizens? Do these organizations have difficulty recruiting enough people or do they get to pick the cream of the crop from an eager (or obligated) populace?

What is the general public perception toward service in these institutions? Is it seen as an honor? A route to greater things, such as political achievement? Or is it viewed with disdain, or simple expedience?

How much action do the members of these institutions see? Do members of law enforcement risk their lives every day, or do they have a relatively calm job? Does the military go to war often, or is it used largely for defense?

Come up with a tag-line, catchphrase, or slogan for your institutions.

The military and law enforcement of a society are integral to its structure, society, and operation. Whether they’re front-and-center or operating just beneath the surface, they impact everything. In order to truly explore your world you must explore its soldiers.

Normally when you’re asked to come up with a “creation myth” as a writer’s exercise, you’re being asked to delve into the mysterious, long-ago origins of a thing. Instead, today I want you to come up with an alternative explanation for the everyday origins of a thing. For a beautiful, creative, and highly unusual example, click through the thumbnail image below for a wonderful piece of art called “Goldfish Factory” by Susan McKivergan. Look closely at the drops of water falling from the spout in the enlarged version:

Write the worst plot you can possibly think of. Toss every trite turn into it. Use every cliche. Bald plot devices should be de rigeur. Pack it as full of dreck as you possibly can; brainstorm the most abundantly-used or annoying plot and dialogue tricks you can remember from every source. Joyously abuse language, metaphor and imagery.

Is there any point to this other than having a ton of fun? Well, sure, although I think the fun is reason enough to do it!

First, this can help to remind you that it’s a lot easier to find bad writing when you’re deliberately looking for examples of it. When you’re looking at your own writing and hoping to find it good, you’re less likely to ferret out these things. Instead, you could try turning it into an entertaining exercise in pointing out the flaws, as though you were snarkily pointing out the flaws in a late-night movie you stumbled across on TV.

Second, this can also remind you that many overused plots and plot devices became thus because they worked. We overuse the things that work. We take advantage of plot devices and shortcuts because they make things easier on us. Knowing this helps us to find alternatives that serve the same purpose yet seem more elegant, fresh and original.

Third, it can be frustrating at times to not be able to use some of these cultural shorthands. Sometimes it helps to get them out of your system all at once.

And finally, if you write all this stuff down in a hurry, free-writing it, you’ll find out which pieces of trite material are lurking most readily in your brain. This is probably a good indication of what you’ll need to watch for in your own writing. Make note of those types of mistake that show up most often, and turn them into a checklist for your own proofreading purposes.

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Today, write about a movie, television show, or book that served as a particularly formative experience when you were coming of age. It might have directly impacted you in a strong and obvious way, or it might just be one of those low-key experiences that you can never quite let go of and that ripples through your life in odd ways. The piece itself might be what impacted you, or the events surrounding it in your life at the time.

I think everyone at this point at least knows what Sun Tzu’s Art of War is, even if they haven’t read it. It elevates war to an art form and wisdom that can be applied to far more than the obvious battlefield. It lays out rules and guidelines that have been translated into the languages of business, creativity, and more.

Today, pick another field that interests you (and that you hopefully know something about—perhaps your own field of work); we’ll call it X for now. At the top of a sheet of paper, write “The Art of X.” Beneath that, use the rest of the sheet to brainstorm guidelines for this art form. Try to limit each one to a sentence or two, but don’t make an artificial attempt to be pithy or sound wise—keep it natural.

I admit it, the site design over at WritingFix makes me dizzy thanks to its overly-busy look and wild array of colors. However, it has a ton of prompt categories that you should take a look at:

Daily Writing Prompts provides a very nice random prompt generator that chooses one from over 500 possibilities, such as:

“What can we learn from contrast? Write a description of something very dark (like a crow) in a very light place (like a field of snow). Make the dark thing seem innocent and the light thing seem ominous.”

Right-brained prompts includes a wide variety of visual sparks, poetry prompts, sentence creators, alliterative sparks, story starters, and more. This example comes from one of the Serendipitous Word Games options:

• Setting: the top floor of a building
• Character: an artist
• Conflict: the ground is covered with something awful

Poetic prompts are prompts just for poets, such as the random poetic phrases generator.

Left-brained prompts make use of the logical side of the brain to get your fingers moving. For instance, you might try the Start and Stop Game, in which “your writing’s first and last sentence must contain the same word, phrase, or clause.” I love the first one I generated:

“if I knew any better”

If that isn’t enough, the site also contains:

• Picture book prompts
• Chapter book prompts
• Literature prompts

Use one of the above prompts or go to there and generate your own. Either way, make sure you visit their site. Hopefully someday they’ll pick some colors that are easier on the eyes.

It’s been a while since I posted any world-building questions, so it’s time for a handful. This time we’re going to look at your fictional world through the eyes of the animal kingdom.

What is the rarest animal of your world? Why is it so rare? Do people realize how rare it is? If so, do they try to preserve it, or hunt it for some purpose?

Which animal would you consider the “king” or “queen” of your world’s animal population, or of some particular subset of it? Why? How does it interact with the other animals around it?

Which animals in your world seem insignificant, yet have a disproportionate effect on the ecosystem, agriculture, the larger animal population, or other issue?

Which animals multiply in such abundance that they’re considered pests? How do people deal with them? What effects do they have on the environment, the ecosystem, agriculture, etc.?

What is the largest animal in your world? The smallest?

Which animal of your world lives in the most complex social structure? How do people perceive this social structure?

What is the most intelligent animal of your world? How does it compare to the main intelligent creature(s) of your world?

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