If you’re a non-fiction writer: What’s the biggest disappointment you’ve ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes.

If you’re a fiction writer, pick a character and: What’s the biggest disappointment he or she has ever faced? Free-write for 10 minutes, or write the scene itself.

Today, spend 10 minutes free-writing every stereotypically bad line of dialogue you can think of. These could be genre-inspired (think of the worst examples of the romance, horror, fantasy, or adventure genres, for example), from TV, from novels, from movies… Use anything you’d like. Then spend a few minutes thinking about why you consider these to be ‘bad dialogue’ and how you’d go about fixing them up, replacing them, or changing the scene to make it better.

If you can’t think of specific lines, try to remember a scene from a book or movie and read or watch that scene before doing the latter half of this exercise.

This exercise inspired by The Secret Scroll.

This morning I got to thinking about gender roles in some books. So today, I’m going to suggest that you grab a sheet of paper and a pen, set a timer for 10-20 minutes, and write about gender roles in your own writing.

Let this take you wherever it happens to go. You might start out writing about a recent story you penned, and end up describing an unusual character you want to create for your next book. You might start out describing a character you aren’t sure how to write, and end up ranting about someone else’s depiction of gender roles. Go wherever it leads.

got loot?

Writers of all people tend to be familiar with the power of ritual in one’s life. After all—that’s one of the reasons behind engaging in writer’s prompts. The familiarity of ritual can help to put one in a particular mindset, go after a certain goal, work on a difficult project or personality trait, etc.

Today, write about a lifelong (or career-long, or the equivalent) ritual that a person uses and how that affects his or her life. If you prefer to write non-fiction, journal about the place of a ritual in your own or a relative or friend’s life. If you prefer to write fiction, create, examine, or explore the place of a ritual in the life of one of your characters.

For a beautiful example, read Jervis’s blog entry The Next Rank, about a ritual that saw him through his years in the military.

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.

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.

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.