Today, I’m going to share with you a prompt from the wonderful weekly site Booking Through Thursday, which they call simply ‘writing challenge’ and I’ll call connecting the dots. Here’s what they have to say:

• Pick up the nearest book. (I’m sure you must have one nearby.)
• Turn to page 123.
• What is the first sentence on the page?
• The last sentence on the page?
• Now . . . connect them together….

(And no, you may not transcribe the entire page of the book–that’s cheating!)

Since there seems to be some confusion among participants, here’s a little clarification for my version of this. You can connect the two sentences directly if they seem to go together, or you can invent something to go between them as a connector. If you connect them directly, free-write for a little while speculating as to what tale they might be part of or hint at, or turn them into part of a larger tale. If you invent a connector, try to end up with a full page of writing by the time you’re done (the phrases you borrowed can fall anywhere within that page).

Write a brief scene in which both snow and sand make an appearance.

Yes, this prompt really is just that simple. There are dozens of ways to spice it up or restrict it further, however, if that isn’t enough for you. Place limits based on writing time or space. Specify a genre. Specify that both the snow and the sand have to be real parts of an outdoor scene, actual conditions, not represented in some other way. Do whatever you want with it!

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

There’s a meme going around the book blogging community that goes roughly like this: you open a book to a certain page, find a line a certain number of sentences into that page, and then quote the next several sentences. At face value this sounds kind of uninteresting, but in practice it results in some absolutely fascinating out of context quotes. When you reach deep into a story and take several lines on their own like that, they can often spur the imagination in interesting ways.

Today, pick up a book and open to a random page, preferably one at least a little ways in and preferably among pages you haven’t read yet (even better, from a book you haven’t read yet). Locate the third sentence on the page, and then copy down the following three lines.

Using these three lines as the beginning or end of your piece (or inserting them somewhere in the middle), free-write for five to fifteen minutes.

Mystery Addict
Where’s the body?

This morning I couldn’t resist sharing a few thoughts about certain aspects of the Cassie Edwards plagiarism scandal over at my personal blog. Apparently she took dry lines from textbook research on ferrets and copy-pasted them wholesale as pillow-talk dialogue between two lovers. Take a look at this small example quoted from this article by Paul Tolme, the original author of the ferret material:

“I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight.” Shiona shivers, upset by the thought of the cute animals locked in mortal combat.

Sensing her vulnerability, Shadow Bear knows just what to say: “In turn, coyotes, badgers, and owls prey on ferrets, whose life span in the wild is often less than two winters … They have a short, quick life.”

This clearly illustrates several things. One, even if plagiarism seems easy, boy can it make you look dumb. As pillow talk goes, that’s about as non-sexy as it gets. And two, if you take one type of writing and insert it into a totally different type of writing, you get something utterly wacky and often hysterical.

Today, take two totally different pieces of writing. Preferably your own, but since these are meant to be private warm-up exercises and not pieces of writing that you’ll publish, you can actually get away with using other authors’ material. (Just make sure you note that this is what you’ve done, so ten years from now you don’t uncover your little exercise and inadvertently use that material as your own.) You might choose a cookbook and a short fantasy story; a memoir and a how-to home-improvement book; or a young adult novel and a science textbook. Take material from one and substitute it into portions of the other. Substituting for dialogue in the manner of the above example is a great way to go, but see if you can’t find other possibilities as well. Get strange, get wacky, and get wild!

Besides the traditional creativity burn that mixing and matching unlikely materials often causes, this exercise can teach you a lot about style, voice, tone, and consistency.

Book Lover

One of my favorite little ten-minute writers’ creativity exercises is to take a random set of words and free-write something from them. Try to include them all in a short or short-short story, essay, etc., or just free-associate off of the combination. The challenge of incorporating wildly differing items, concepts, etc. into one short piece over a brief amount of time can definitely teach you how to access your creativity! Today, here are your words to work with:

• Onion
• Fork
• Floodlight
• Pocketwatch

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?

Here’s a truly nifty prompt generator for you: the Special Projects Generator. You can press the shuffle button, or you can use the arrow keys to go up or down in a given category. This yields a three-word phrase describing a unique ‘project,’ such as:

• changeable rubber garden
• do-it-yourself glitter furniture
• ingenious collapsible magazine
• dramatic morphing orchestra

Use one of the above or go to the site and generate your own favorite. Then do one of the following with it:

• Write up a proposal (deadpan or over-the-top silly) for this project.
• Write a story in which this object, device, or whatever appears or has a role.
• Imagine the kind of world in which such a device would be commonplace, and explore it.
• Imagine that you’re a venture capitalist and someone has just given you a presentation on this project. Justify why you would or wouldn’t fund it, either seriously or or not.
• Explain what the project is and how we absolutely, positively need it in our world. Make as compelling an argument for it as you possibly can, no matter how silly the item is (in fact, the sillier the better).

I found this link at the PHS Computer Project Lab’s Monday Links for Educators.

We is smarter
We has the internets

One of our T-shirts that’s been picking up in popularity of late bears the slogan, I’d love to help you, but I’m dead. We had a particular context in mind for this when we created it, but of course that context isn’t necessarily obvious at first glance. We knew this and deliberately left it this way, because we thought it was one of those sayings which could be interpreted in a number of ways and which might, therefore, be more enjoyable to people without the context, allowing them to create their own.

Today, write something that creates your own context for this saying. You could use it as the first line of a story or as the inspiration for a piece of writing, or you could brainstorm a list of possible contexts to see how many you can come up with.

Here I am, back yet again with another “spam game,” in which I present you with an intriguing randomly-generated spam subject line and turn it into a writers’ exercise. This time the subject line in question was “incinerated labyrinth.” Write that phrase at the top of a piece of paper and free-associate/free-write beneath it, letting your imagination take you anywhere at all from that starting place. You could diverge outward, generalizing to terms like “fire” and “maze” or “flames” and “lost” and seeing where that takes you. Or you could literally start with the concept of an incinerated labyrinth and try to figure out what on earth you could do with that!

I love odd word-jumbles like this because they could lead anywhere, from a poignant story about firefighter’s last fire to an epic fantasy involving a great and fiery labyrinthine realm.