Writing prompts and exercises #1

Dawn
by daronlarson at YouTube



This is nothing more than an image and sound effects. The creativity is up to you.

If you are a mystery writer, what crime occurred here (or is getting ready to occur)?

If you are a romance writer, focus on the man (in your imagination). Why is there silence between the man and the woman? (You do see them on the bank don't you? Or are you on the dock? In your mind, of course.) Are they angry? Are relaxed and listening to the sounds of nature? Are they afraid? Are they waiting?


One Word 
Here are the directions at the site (written in very pale type):

simple. you’ll see one word at the top of the following screen.
you have sixty seconds to write about it.
click ‘go’ and the page will load with the cursor in place.
don’t think. just write.

There's very little else on the site. You are shown a word. You write about it for sixty seconds and then save it. The fun part is you get to see what other people. For a 60 second prompt, I have found it useful.

Suddenly Jamie got my attention

I am very excited about a blog I have discovered: Live to Write – Write to Live (http://nhwn.wordpress.com). The articles are are beautifully written – both in terms of content and style. Here are a few samples on writing habits and the writer's life.  I will cover articles on plot, characterization, and so on in a separate post.

10 Ways Journaling Makes You a Better Writer
by Suddenly Jamie (@suddenlyjamie) at Live to Write – Write to Live blog

[Keeping a journal]  brings you closer to perfect. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that to be an expert at something, you must invest at least 10,000 hours in practice.  The hours you spend journaling count. Start logging pen time today.

Will anyone notice?

Grammar Goof of the Week: Apostrophe catastrophe: Old Navy botches a big batch of T-shirts

by Eileen Burmeister at Ragan.com

How to show that you attend a first rate school...

Truckloads of erroneously punctuated garments are destined for colleges and universities.

The big question: Will anyone on campus notice the error?

Am I over-reacting?

I am always looking for writing prompts.  I'd like to have a large collection that I could refer to when the muse is silent.

During my search, I found this site: Writing Prompts.  The author, who is never identified, indicates the pictures are used as writing prompts for students.

Let's hope these students are college students.  Otherwise, I found it appalling that a teacher would give children a picture like prompt #241. It's of a human being wrapped up like meat you would buy at the supermarket. The label is "whole human."  The label gives the weight and a bar code. The writing prompt reads:

The door bell rings. You answer the door and find this on the front stop.  You yell inside the house. "We got another one." Tell the rest of the story.

Vegetable beings?

I curate several Scoop-its.  One is Home and Garden.  While checking the recommendations for garden sites, I saw this post.  The flowers were pretty, but the content - well, you read it and see what you think.   On a scale of bad to the worst, how would you rate this? (The change of color in the text is my doing.)

The flowers and their characteristics What's the most beautiful and significant than a flower? Through these wonderful vegetable beings we can communicate or manifest many moods, we can thank, love, hate, be happy, or to express a certain kind of sadness. Through the articles that make up this section, we will try to explain more specifically the composition of the flowers... We will explain the flowers par excellence like those of orchids, brightly colored and full of elegance and charm, the flowers of the mimosa, very near and dear to women, the flowers of the rose, perhaps the most loved and appreciated...as the daisy, a symbol of love and lots of other uncertainties....In addition to telling you and inform you of these wonderful flowers, we will happy to publish your eyes with beautiful and colorful pictures make it the idea of ​​this wonderful world.

What is your favorite grammar site?

If I didn't really like the contents, I would not recommend this site because the ads drive me crazy. But I am recommending it, so that means it is worth putting up with the ads (multiple versions of the same ad, in fact).

The site: Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips
by Mignon Fogarty

There are podcasts, a free newsletter, posts, and videos. Here are a few examples:


Grammar Girl's Top 10 Language Myths
by Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl) at Grammar: Quick and Dirty Tips.
Grammar is often a dry subject, but Grammar Girl makes it interesting. Here's one of the myths she debunks:

When I retire, I am going to be brain surgeon, Part 2

 Please read Part 1 first.

Writing isn't brain surgery, but it's hard work
By Elizabeth Floyd Mair | Albany Times Union
published at the Montreal Gazette

I found this comment in the "Brain Surgeon" article described in Part 1:

[Author Marion Roach Smith] ....recommends ... seeing what happens if you write about big events obliquely, looking at them sidelong rather than straight on. She writes that, in most cases, she'd rather read an essay about dressing for a funeral than about sitting there listening to the eulogy.

I could write a full blog post on this comment (and I probably will some day very soon.) For that reason I started to omit it here, but it gives an interesting perspective for that brain surgeon or anyone that thinks that there is nothing much involved in writing.

Is good writing more than vivid pictures and a good writing style? 

Bear with me a minute.  I remember long ago someone read a scene I had written. She commented that she could have written a better description - which was true. My style is boring. I trip over my words. (Not good for a writer.) She could write very effective descriptions that made a scene come alive.  These were necessarily  flowery, detailed descriptions that people usually skip over. Her descriptions were clear and vivid. She was very good at it.  But that was all she could do. She created photographs.

When I retire, I'm going to become a brain surgeon

Part 1
Writing isn't brain surgery, but it's hard work
By Elizabeth Floyd Mair | Albany Times Union
published at the Montreal Gazette

Author Marion Roach Smith gets ticked off at dinner parties when brain surgeons ask what she does for a living and then say, "A writer! Wonderful! I'm going to write a book someday myself."

Recently, she says, she has taken to replying, "When I retire, I'm going to become a brain surgeon."

If you are a writer, what kind of reaction do you get from people?  Or what do you sense that people are thinking?  Please share your thoughts using the poll in the right column. You can check as many items as you like.  Even if you don't make your living by your writing (yet), answer the poll if you get reactions when you talk about your writing.

Further in the "brain surgery" article, I found this comment that stuck me as useful. It's a little off the subject and led to me a long post, so I decided to break the post into two separate post.

see Part 2.

Click here to read more of the Montreal Gazette story.

Oops, I'm Stuck

A Simple Trick to Boost Your Creativity

by Art Markman, Ph.D. at the Hoffington Post

I found this article from another post,Dumb Little Writing Tricks That Work: Adopt a different writing persona by Scott Myers at his Go Into The Story blog. I wanted to mention both posts to ensure that both authors get proper credit.

In the original post, Markman reviews research illustrating the construal level theory; this theory states "we think about things that are near to us in space or time in specific terms, but we think about things that are far from us in space or time in more abstract terms." When we are thinking abstractly, we are more free to let our imagination soar.

For example, when thinking about a trip you might take to Paris next summer, you might focus on how much fun it would be or how great it would be to sit in a café and watch the world go by. When thinking about a trip to Paris you are going to take next week, though, you focus on what you are going to wear, how you are going to exchange money and what you will do when you encounter Parisians who speak no English.

....[Researchers] Polman and Emich reason that if you are trying to think creatively, then generating some distance between you and the problem you are solving might enhance your creativity.

Creating distance is not just about time.

...pretend that you are being creative on behalf of someone else. That will help you think about the problem more abstractly and avoid simply repeating the solutions you already know about.

Jot it down

AdviceToWriters: Always Carry A Notebook

from WRITERLY WISDOM OF THE AGES/Collected by Jon Winokur

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.

WILL SELF

One bright commenter, Common Superman, added this bit of wisdom to carry a notebook: "and a pen." More likely these days, you can use your smart phone or similar device, but the intent is the same.

Keeping the memory is not the only value. Even if you don't look at the notebook again, you will be developing a habit of paying attention to:

• what is around you.
• what creative ideas might be floating through your head.