Tag: writing exercises

Shelter and Write Prompt 5: Taking Comfort

Jaclyn2 Comments

What is one small thing you are taking comfort in right now? Maybe it is a song, a person, seedlings, or the days getting longer. What is it that is bringing you a little bit of solace?

Describe this thing bringing you comfort in great detail. What does it look like, feel like? What does it remind you of? Why is it bringing you comfort?

Then draw connections between this thing and the current situation. In what ways are they similar? How could the thing that is bringing you comfort signify your current state? Can you turn the thing that is bringing you solace into an extended metaphor for your experience, or create a story centered around this comforting thing?

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Shelter and Write Prompt 4: Start with an Interview

Jaclyn4 Comments

Find someone who is affected by COVID-19 in a different way than you are. It might be someone who is taking a different approach to protecting themselves, someone who is quarantined, a local teacher, someone who had plans that have now changed. 

Get their story. What is interesting or notable about the way they are handling the situation?

Use this interview as the inspiration for today’s writing. Perhaps you want to juxtapose your own experience with the interviewee’s experience. Maybe you want to take key words and phrases from the interview and use them in a poem. You could use one detail from the interview to base a story around, or something that was said as your first line.

This post is part of a series I am doing that includes 30 prompts for 30 days of sheltering at home. You can read more about my reasoning and also find other prompts here. I would love to see what you come up with. Feel free to share here or to tag your work #shelterandwrite.

Prompt: Writing Roulette: Plot Generators to Spice up Your Literary Life

Jaclyn17 Comments

 

 

 

Need a little spice and adventure in your writing life?  Did you make a New Year’s Resolution to write more and now your motivation is waning?  Did you join the My 500 Words Challenge, but can’t figure out what to write about?  Maybe you and the muse have just gotten into a rut and need a little more passion in your relationship.

Perhaps it’s time to leave things up to chance, play a little writing roulette and see where it takes you.  There is a huge array of plot generators out there, which will give you anything from a random sentence to hypothetical scenarios, to symbolism, to stories complete with weather and villains.  Here are some fun tools that might help get you through a little bit of writer’s block:

The Big Huge Thesaurus Story Plot Generator: 5.1 million possible story plots.  Just click the link for six possibilities.  Not inspired by those?  Just hit refresh until you find one that gets your fire going.  This one actually started me on a novel.

Plot Generator UK: This one takes a little bit more of your own input into consideration.  Choose a genre.  The options are Romance, Crime, Teen Vampire, Mystery, and Song Lyrics.  Or (my personal favorite) you can recreate a lost Bronte Sisters novel, complete with a well-to-do hero and a poor, lower class hero and a weather description. For this one, you can choose the names, jobs, descriptions, weapons, and hometowns of your characters, or the generator will suggest them for you.

Writing Exercises UK: This generator gives you characters, a setting, a situation, and a theme and you can put them together to create your plot.  If you don’t like one of the elements you’ve been given, just hit the button again to get a new one.  One of the exciting things about this site is that it also has other writing exercises, like a random first line, random title, subject or random words to use.  Very, very useful if you just need a little kickstart.

Seventh Sanctum Story Generator:  Another one where you can choose the genre, this generator gives more in-depth scenarios in Fantasy, Science Fiction, Modern, or Free-for-All categories.  These plots are interesting because of the details that they contain.  This website also has a What-If-inator and a Symbolitron, which might be my favorite find in all of the plot creators!

Hopefully this will be enough to get your writing juices flowing.  If any of these work out for you, please share the results with us!

 

Creative Commons love to Adam Lerner for the awesome photo!

Prompt: Write Fast

Jaclyn19 Comments

I’ve been told recently that I write too slowly.  I will admit, my process is meticulous.  I follow in the footsteps of Tom Robbins (swoon)* in which I try to make the most perfect sentence possible before moving on to the next one.  There’s all kinds of research that happens and word-associations and trials and retrials.  I realize that this flies in the face of most writing process advice, which is to just get as much down on paper and then edit afterwards, but I have to admit, that’s just not the way it comes out for me.

Lately, I’ve been trying to exercise my “sprinting” muscles a little bit more and one way of doing this is with oneword.  It’s lovely for speed-thinking and writing and a nice little way to start a story.

So, here’s my challenge.  Go on oneword, write for the sixty seconds that they give you and use something you write in those sixty seconds as the start or end of a story.

Ready?  Go!

*It has recently come to my attention that for years I’ve been fostering a schoolgirl crush on a 77-year-old man.  I am not sure how I feel about it, but Switters would be proud.