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.…
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Down Below
You wake up one morning to find that a deep crevasse has opened up in front of your house. What do you find inside of it? Obviously this can go in almost any direction, from the completely mundane to…
Be Extreme
This morning I reviewed J.D. Robb/Nora Roberts’s mystery Memory in Death. One of the things that immediately struck me when I read the opening was how over-the-top it was: Death was not taking a holiday. New York may have been…
Immortality
I got the idea for today’s exercise when I was reading Bibliolatry’s review of Immortal. The character at the center of this novel is, as the title implies, immortal, but he doesn’t know why. The reviewer spends some entertaining moments…
Posted in Writing Tagged with: free-writing, immortality, Journaling, writers, writing, writing prompts
Thankfulness
I’ve read several self-help books by authors with psychology backgrounds that contend that people who focus daily on the things that make them thankful or grateful tend to be happier. (Authentic Happiness; The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You…
Posted in Writing Tagged with: free-writing, Journaling, thankfulness, writers, writing, writing prompts
Family Secrets
One great way to pull a reluctant character into all sorts of devious dealings is to spring a family secret on him. Today, choose a character you’ve been working with and brainstorm a secret his family has been keeping from…
One Single Emotion
Since I was recently reading (and just reviewed) Dara Girard’s The Writer Behind the Words, I have ‘the writer’s life’ on the brain. So today we have a meta-exercise. Free-write a list of emotions that get in the way of…
Posted in Writing Tagged with: free-writing, Journaling, the writer's life, writers, writing, writing prompts
The Perfect Holiday
Free-write about what you imagine a perfect holiday would be like. Cover the whole day, from morning to night, although you don’t have to write it chronologically. You don’t have to use Christmas or the equivalent as the holiday—pick any…
“Madame Nature”
Today, take a look at the following depiction of mother, or madame, nature. Write a brief scene with her as a character, preferably told from the first person (her point of view) or second (someone with her). Or, free-write or…
Posted in Writing Tagged with: art, free-writing, Journaling, mother nature, writers, writing, writing prompts
Quick! Choose!
Quick! Without thinking, pick one of the choices in each of the following sets (or some subset thereof), and then write a paragraph as to why you chose each one: Ninja, or pirate? Glass, or plastic? Hardwood, or carpet? Plastic,…