Here’s an exercise you can either apply to yourself (by journaling on it) or to a character as a way to explore your fictional characters. As quickly as you can (so as to limit careful conscious thought), list out five major ambitions you have. These can be personal, spiritual, material, interpersonal… anything. They can seem as large or as small as you like, as realistic or unrealistic, as long as they’re major to you.

Next, free-write about why these are so important to you.

If you’d like a continuation exercise for another day, pick one ambition you’d like to actually see come to fruition and brainstorm ways to make that happen. Free-write, thought-bubble… use any technique you can to get ideas out there on the page. Some odd and surprising things might result!

Occasionally I relay calls for submissions or contest announcements from folks who’d like to receive your entries. As always, I can’t guarantee the legitimacy of any requests for material appearing here, so do your research first. Today, your exercise is this: regardless of whether you plan to send in a submission, write a piece that would be appropriate to the call. Then, consider submitting it. If you do submit it, come back and let us know so we can cheer you on!

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Christmas Traditions: True Stories of Holiday Celebration

Send submissions to: Helen Kay Polaski (Szymanski) at hkpolaski [at] yahoo.com

Christmas Traditions: True Stories of Holiday Celebration will be filled with stories that touch the mind as well as the soul as they take the reader on a magical journey through Christmas—past and present—while giving the reader ideas for traditions they might be interested in adapting in the future. Each story will include a well-known holiday tradition or a unique tradition known only to a particular family or community, as well as a touching story that circulates around each individual tradition. (I love traditions and can’t wait to see how your family celebrates Christmas!)

Stories must be first person, true accountings of either shared or unique traditions celebrated by families, communities, and/or groups during the Christmas holiday season, and all must be based on strong individual family/community dynamics, specific geographical location, and/or different cultures and religion. Approximately 70-80 stories (700-1,200 words) will be gathered. (When writing your story please keep in mind that Christmas is the most magical time of the year. I want to see the magic unfolding on the page before me as I read, and so do my readers.)

Only stories that have a beginning, middle, and an end will be considered. I’m looking for great inspirational stories that “include” a holiday tradition. Please do not send an essay that lists all of the things your family enjoys during the holidays. Instead, choose one tradition your family follows and write a story about it that is as moving as it is real. Only true stories that have not been previously published will be accepted.

Payment: upon publication, $75 and a copy of the book (for each accepted story)
Deadline extended: December 20, 2007

Please include your full name, current address, email address, phone number, and a 50-word bio.

Editor – Helen Kay Polaski (Szymanski)

Helen Kay Polaski
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Christmas Traditions
Editor: A Cup of Comfort for Weddings, Rocking Chair Reader book series, Classic Christmas, Christmas Through a Child’s Eyes

Humour - like romance, like drama, like excitement - needs boundaries. It needs rules, lines, differences, be they social (as in Fawlty Towers), cultural (Borat), gender-based (Tootsie) or moral. As in sex.

This, arguably, is a primary purpose of organised religion. In giving us rules to break it lets us sustain into adulthood a child’s delight in naughtiness. Childish, sure, and deeply, almost definitively human, the urge to transgress is also a constant, renewable source of creative energy.

And the more forbidden the sex - the more illicit, immoral or commercial - the greater the potential excitement, creativity and fun.

The above entertaining quote comes from this opinion piece on legalization of the sex industry in The Sydney Morning Herald by Elizabeth Farrelly. In this case, however, I’m more interested in it for its statements regarding creativity, energy, and humor. Today, write about the subject of boundaries, mores, morals, and their relationship to creativity. How do you think a culture’s mores relate to the creative output of that culture’s people?

Earlier this morning, power went out all over the globe. Anything electronic? Dead in the water. No computers, no alarm clocks, no factory machines. No refrigerators or furnaces, air conditioning or security systems. Electronic door locks are dead. Electric fences lie quiescent. There’s no television or radio to tell you what’s wrong, and even if there was, no one knows enough to say.

What happens next? Where does society go from here? Were electronics knocked out a single time such that infrastructure might be rebuilt, or is something keeping them from working again? How do people cope? Where do you find food and clean water, heat or cooling as needed?

What alternative forms of power or manufacturing might people come up with? How far does civilization devolve, and what new forms spring up in place of the old?

This is a type of scenario that’s been explored in literature and movies before, but now it’s your turn to imagine how things might go.

Book Nerd

Today, write an over-the-top ad, article or essay enthusing about a new fad diet. Make up the diet to go with it, and it can be as strange or bizarre as you like. Try to sound as ‘real’ as possible while piling up stranger and stranger suggestions and/or claims. What unexpected conditions will this diet cure? What odious personal habits will disappear when you follow the diet’s dictates? What foods must you eat or avoid and why? How will this affect your body and mind? The exercise is to be as convincing as possible about as strange and unlikely a practice as possible. This will certainly exercise your ability to be believable on paper!

I felt it was time for another image prompt, so I went poking around deviantart and found the following. Today, pick one of these options and apply it to the image below:

• Write a poem inspired by it.
• Draw something inspired by it.
• Brainstorm based on it: write any words or phrases it makes you think of in empty spaces on a sheet of paper, then cluster more words and phrases around them, connecting ideas with lines where appropriate. See if this leads you to anything interesting.
• Write an essay on the silk moth.
• Write a scene of a story in which this moth is present.
• Other: anything else you happen to think of!

Goth Moth - revised by *Blepharopsis on deviantART

There are so many things we don’t understand or don’t know about the world, and we’re so accustomed to seeing them and not knowing them that we forget to question them. Children ask those questions—”Why is the sky blue, dad?”—but as they grow older they almost always stop. This morning I reviewed Why Moths Hate Thomas Edison. It’s a compilation of column entries from Outside Magazine, in which people write in with the silly, everyday, weird, ridiculous, stupid, or seemingly obvious questions we all forget to ask, and the magazines editors track down the experts who can answer them.

The ability to ask questions everyone else has forgotten is an extremely valuable trait for a writer. Take a look at the review linked to above and note the types of questions asked and answered in the book. Then take a walk around your house, your workplace, your neighborhood, the woods, a business, or any other place and make a list of basic questions you don’t know the answer to. Make it as long as possible; try to at least fill up a sheet of paper.

Being able to come up with questions is, if anything, more important than answering them when trying to train your mind and eyes. However, if you want to take this a step further, answer these questions. Come up with your own creative, fictional answers, research the real ones—whatever you’d like. The former is more useful as a world-building exercise for fiction writers, while the latter makes a great exercise for nonfiction freelancers looking for inspiration for articles.

One popular form of question you’ll find in memes, online quizzes, and some exercises is: “If you could be any [fill-in-the-blank], what would it be?” Possible types with which to fill in that blank range from serious to incredibly silly, and might include:

• color
• ice cream
• historical figure
• world leader
• cocktail
• flower
• movie

Today, turn this into a two-part exercise. Both ask and answer this question: fill in the bank with your own word or type that you think might lead to something interesting, and then answer it. You can use this as a journaling exercise or answer it on behalf of one or more of your fictional characters.

For all that this has become a quick question tossed out in memes and quizzes, the results can sometimes be interesting, particularly if you delve into “And why?” instead of answering with a phrase, name, or word.

Writers hang around shady characters