Blog

[Writing Prompt] It Feels Like Somebody’s Watching You

iGalaxyS4 funny
Wow, it didn’t take long for Apple to respond to Samsung’s latest innovation…

With today’s announcement about the Galaxy 5 phone, I couldn’t resist posting a bonus writing prompt.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Douglas Adams’ writing. I remember laughing along when Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was plunged deeper into despair by a ‘door with personality’, which stopped to tell him how happy it was to open for him. In the early 1980s this seemed like the height of farce. Who would ever come up with something like that?!

Twenty years later I put some trash in a mall food court and the trashcan said, “Thank you”!!

Seventeen years ago I wrote a story in which something very much like Google Glass was the going out of fashion in favor of similarly equipped contact lenses or, better yet, retinal implants. Last year we started to move into the futuristic era I’d written about.

Yesterday, the latest Samsung phone was released and is equipped with technology that can tell when you take your eyes off the screen (apparently it’ll pause your video for you, and I’m sure someone will come up with an even more awesome application for that in due course).

The Prompt

Write A Good Old Fashioned Paranoid 1950s Futuristic Story About The Rise of Technology/Surveillance/Man vs. Machine

Tips

  • You don’t have to actually be paranoid. You are free to point out the positives.
  • Take one technology, extrapolate it and think about the implications for daily life (e.g. if we really all did have flying cars by now what would our physical world look like? Not like it does now, with as many roads as we have. See The Boston Big Dig for inspiration as to how a city could look without roads. This was an elevated highway when I lived there in the mid 90s)
  • Show the small, everyday ways technology affects one character, one family, one event.

Share

If you like this prompt, would you do me a favor and  share it? (by email, Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest!)

[Writing Prompt] Story For Stealing

This post is the first of two. Come back next week to steal a story from someone else!

This prompt is part of a two-part prompt. This week we’re writing a story that we won’t mind someone stealing. Next week we’re going to look at someone else’s story and steal their character, setting, premise or twist, and write our own story (a kind of derivative work).

The Prompt

Write a quick story with one strong feature: an appealing (or loathsome character), a great setting, a fabulous twist, an intriguing ‘what if’. Plan to allow someone else to steal from/be inspired by this story

Tips

Don’t worry if the story is less than perfect. As long as it has one appealing feature (character, setting or premise), let the rest go. Just finish it and post it.
Don’t try to write something you’re so proud of that you’ll be loathe to let it go.
Think of this like the kernel of a piece of open source software (like WordPress, on which this site is built). Someone came up with the original nugget, then let everyone else into the sandbox to play with it. Are you more mature than a four year old or will you get annoyed if someone else builds on top of your sandcastle?
Post the story somewhere and provide a link to it. Post it in the comments here if you don’t have a blog of your own.
Come back next week, read the links/stories and create a story based on someone else’s.

 

The Rules:

  • You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  • Post the story (or a link) in the comments.
  • Leave a link to your story and say which story it’s based on
  • Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Open Source Story #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/open-1

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is an Open Source Story! #storyaday https://storyaday.org/open-1

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/open-1

See my story – and write your own, today: Open Source Story at #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/open-1

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

The Write On Wednesday story prompts are designed to prompt quickly-written stories that you can share in the comments. It’s a warm-up exercise, to loosen up your creativity muscles. Come back every Wednesday to see a new prompt or subscribe.

What Doesn’t Kill You…

Duck Yoga

I would not use the word ‘enjoy’ to describe what I did at yoga class this morning.

I didn’t even manage to love the relaxation part at the end this week (the promise of which is what keeps me coming back).

I wobbled my way down the stairs (really, who puts an exercise class up a flight and a half of stairs?!) and started to wonder if my three month fling with exercise had maybe run its course (ha!). I wondered if it had been worth dragging myself out of bed instead of rolling over, as I had so dearly wanted to.

And then, as I splashed through the puddles towards my car, turning my collar up against the driving rain, I started to notice something. My body felt good. It felt strong. The endorphins were doing their thing. The class had been a slog, but the rest of my day felt suddenly manageable. Shoulders back, head up, I grinned into the cloudy sky and jingled my keys in my pocket.

Warrior Pose

Why does it always take us so long to learn (and re-learn, and re-re-learn) that the things that are hard, the things that are scary, the things that we just-don’t-wanna-do-waaaaah turn out to be the things that make us stronger, braver and more able to live life with our heads held high and our shoulders back?

Sitting down to write can be scary. Pushing through the soggy middle of a story can be hard. It can hurt. It can bore us. We can want to do anything else in the world other than the hard thing.

And then we get to the end of a writing session, or the end of a story, and we can’t imagine anything (ANYTHING) that we would rather have been doing than writing.

So, as you sit down to write today, channel my yoga teacher who reminds us every week,

“This is your time.”

This is your time. Shoulders down, head up, keep breathing, and write.

What about you? Are you writing regularly? Do you find it easy to reach that point where your writing endorphins starts to flow? Or are you still struggling to get out of bed? What do you think would make the difference to you?

The Art of Asking

If you’re worried about the business side of writing — about the point of doing this thing in an uncertain publishing future — I recommend this TED talk by Amanda Palmer. She’s talking about the music industry, but mostly she’s talking about art and connection, and it applies to writers as much as it applies to musicians. And it’s inspiring.

[Writing Prompt] A Way Into Second Person

It’s easy to raise objections to writing fiction in the second person point of view (“You do this, you do that and then you feel …”). The most obvious objection is that it reads like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel. It’s hard to pull off.


But this morning I was listening to an interview with a writer who found a fascinating way into the POV: his novel, “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”, is written as a self-help book. (It’s a great interview, full of all kinds of good stuff. Have a listen.)

The writer, Mohsin Hamid, sounds like such a nice guy that I hope he won’t mind us stealing his idea for this weeks’ writing exercise:

The Prompt

Write a second-person fiction tale as if it was a self-help book/article.

Tips

Think of all the ‘How To Write” articles you’ve read over the years. Have some fun with them

It doesn’t have to be ‘self help’, it can be aping any type of non-fiction that lends itself to second person.

You can often find this kind of writing at McSweeney’s. It isn’t always obvious that you might apply the label ‘fiction’, but it certainly is.

Read a sample of “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia”

 

The Rules:

  • You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  • You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  • Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  • Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Self Help Story #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-second

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is Self Help Story! #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-second

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-second

See my story – and write your own, today: Self Help Story at #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-second

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

 

 

[Writing Prompt] My Robot Nurse

People have been writing about robots for a long time and fans of Science Fiction will instantly know what I’m talking about if I mention Isaac Asimov and his three laws of Robotics.

Robot on the Taff

Twenty years ago I couldn’t have asked those of you who are not fans of Science Fiction to write a robot story unless you were writing about heavy industry.

Ten years ago, you could have written about the Mars rover or those funnily little circular robots that were starting to sweep our floors (and sweep for mines in the military).

Today you could write a story about your grandmother, being brought her medicine and being entertained by her own robot butler and only be on the edges of speculative fiction, according to this report from the BBC: Robot Designed To Care For The Elderly.

Reading this article gave me the strongest sense that I was living in an Asimov story (or very shortly might be)

The Prompt

Write a story featuring one of the everyday robotic technologies available to us today

Tips

You can make it, like early sci-fi, an exploration of humanity’s relationship with machines and what that means. Or you can simply use the robot as a primary or secondary character.

Perhaps your robots are sentient but it would be also interesting to see how living with highly-efficient, highly-programmed machines that are NOT sentient affects your characters’ actions.

Some of the robots available in day to day life today (or soon) include the Roomba(af), Lawnbot(af), Lego Mindstorms(af), robots for cleaning your pool(af), welding robots (my grandfather used to do this job!), Automated Guided Vehicles that carry goods around warehouses and hospitals[1. “(af)” denotes an affiliate link.].

The Rules:

  • You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  • You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  • Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  • Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Everyday Robots #WriteOnWed #storyaday  https://storyaday.org/wow-robot

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is Everyday Robot! #storyaday  https://storyaday.org/wow-robot

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday  https://storyaday.org/wow-robot

See my story – and write your own, today: Everyday Robots at #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-robot

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.