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.

Story starters are simple lines or paragraphs that you can use to start off a writing exercise. Just put it at the top of a piece of paper or file and go. You can use it directly as the first line of a piece, or use it as inspiration. Of course you could also get a bit more creative and use it as the last line, or incorporate it into the middle somewhere. You could re-phrase or re-write the starter if it better suits your story. But for the purposes of a quick exercise, it’s usually easiest to just use it as the first line of your writing. Today’s story starter is:

“The smell is coming from that ambulance.”

This morning I came across 50 Writing Ideas I Couldn’t Find on Another List. There are definitely some unusual suggestions there! Today, pick one at random, pick one that inspires you, or, if you need help choosing, try the following, which is one of my favorites from the list:

11. Write a review of a book that hasn’t been written.

Another article from that same blog that you could use is 5 simple ways to get out of a blog writing pickle. Coming up with ideas for writing in your blog can be very similar to looking for ideas for writers’ exercises.