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.

Today’s prompt is called ‘childhood memories’ and it’s from another Heather over at A Creative Journal:

[S]pend some time writing about a safe place you remember from your childhood. This could be someone’s house or at the top of a tree in your backyard. Once you’ve written that one up, also spend time writing about a scary place you recall from your childhood. This could be a particular house you didn’t like to pass on your way to school or a room in your own house.

I particularly appreciate Other Heather’s reminder to only tackle the scary place if you’re ready for it—smart words! You’ll find quite a few interesting prompts and links at her place, so go visit while you’re at it.

Just a quick thank-you to Meghna for posting a list of great writing prompt sites. I’m adding most of them to the blogroll:

• prompts by number (link fixed now)
• Pumping your muse prompts
• Random logline generator
• Story Spinner Online

Today, go find a prompt from one of these wonderful sites and enjoy! I particularly like the wackiness of the logline generator for silly fun, and the pym prompts for neat photos.

Today, from Freelance Folder’s 7 can’t-miss ways to kick-start the writing habit:

Write nothing but headlines. Sometimes the thought of writing an in-depth article is too much for your brain to deal with after a long day (or at the start of one). Spend 15 or 30 minutes just churning out headlines without worrying about how catchy they sound.

So today, write headlines. You might choose an area to write headlines in beforehand (sports, local news, fashion, parenting, pets, farming, health, science) or just go crazy. Check out the above link for more ideas! Or go on and read more of Freelance Folder for plenty of ideas that span the wider world of freelancing.

Still looking for my muse

I recently stumbled across 50 timeless blogging tips. One of my favorites was:

You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Albert Einstein

Today, pick something you consider yourself an expert at and choose one small sub-topic or item that you want to explain (make sure it’s something your grandmother isn’t already familiar with, or you’ll defeat the purpose!). Using no more than one side of a sheet of paper, write an explanation you think your grandmother would understand. If you really want to test yourself, show it to her afterward!

I was over at Two-Fisted Freelancing Tales and stumbled across an awesome discussion of the Coen brothers’ movies. I got distracted, however, by the following:

[T]he scene starts in a suburban living room containing a man in an iron lung and ends with Walter destroying a sports car with a golf club while screaming, “This is what happens when you f* a stranger in the a*!!!!” (Or as the censored version on Comedy Central would have it, “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!!!”)

Normally the nonsequitors used in place of profanities when the censors get hold of a movie just make me roll my eyes, but this one is hilarious in its own right, just because it’s so silly. So today, pick a book or movie that has some profanities in it (if you try to avoid particularly profane reading material, you can always pick one whose profanities are very mild) and find creative and entertaining ways to ‘censor’ them. Do this to at least three separate profanities (if you can’t find a page with multiple profanities on it, pick non-contiguous paragraphs). Try to free-write possible replacements in list form, then go back afterward and pick the most interesting or entertaining results.

Next time you find yourself having trouble solving a literary problem in your writing, use colors to help you brainstorm an answer.

Say you find yourself uncertain how your main character will get out of a seemingly hopeless situation. What would a purple solution to the problem be? Purple might lead you to think of royalty, twilight, grandmothers, or magic, any of which could suggest a solution. If that color doesn’t work, move on to the next. You can go through the colors in order, or pick one at random.

• Red
• Orange
• Yellow
• Green
• Blue
• Purple

Rainbow Cling by *Sphinx47 on deviantART

Imagine that you wanted to write more than one book on the same topic, and had to figure out a way to legitimately stretch the topic out over multiple volumes while making sure readers feel they’re getting their money’s worth. First, pick a topic that you know something about. You don’t have to be an expert, but you should at least be moderately well-versed in it, and capable of researching what you don’t know. Brainstorm the various sub-topics you might tackle, the kind of mileage you could get from them, and how many books you might be able to stretch them out across.

Today’s Booking through Thursday meme encourages book bloggers to think about what book(s) they would want to change and how if they wielded the editor’s pen. I can certainly understand the various people who felt that they couldn’t answer that, that by suggesting changes to a book they’d be turning it into a different book. However, I have a different take on that.

First, a good editor knows how to suggest changes that work with the author’s style and voice. Even the best writer needs a good editor, because a writer is generally too close to his or her work to see the holes and problems. Having someone make suggestions for changes doesn’t somehow rip it out of the author’s control; a good author will weigh others’ suggestions and opinions and decide what will work best for his project.

Second, the kind of strong imagination it takes to come up with alternate versions of an existing story is the same kind of strong imagination it takes to create your own stories. If you’re too busy telling yourself that your opinion of what could be changed in a piece of writing isn’t worth anything, then you’ll never learn how to write good material of your own.

So today, do the BTT meme. Pick a book in your chosen field of writing that you weren’t entirely happy with, and detail as precisely as possible how you would change it. Try to make those ideas suit the style, voice, and structure of the existing piece of writing as much as possible.

A well-loved practice technique of writers everywhere is to imagine identities and histories for the people they see day to day. What does that girl on the subway with the shiny purple pants do for a living? What kind of a family raised the huge man in the ill-fitting business suit, and why does he never wear the same tie twice? What secret life does the woman with her sad eyes and her chai lattes lead? What does the young man with the haunted eyes conceal in his tightly-clutched backpack?

Today, go somewhere public and make up histories for the people you see. But first, read this wonderful example of someone else’s tendency to invent stories for the people he meets.