[Writing Prompt] Character Counts

Woo-hoo! One week into the StoryADay May challenge and you are still turning up. Good for you!

(Seriously. More than talent, persistence is the thing that is going to make writing a fulfilling, successful and worthwhile pursuit for you.)

Take a moment to reflect on everything you learned about your writing last week. Try to keep the things that worked, but stay flexible and open to more experimentation in the weeks ahead.

This week we’re going to focus on different elements of the story, starting today with Character.

The Prompt

Write A Story Where Everything Hinges on Your Character’s Most Desperate Desires

Tips

  • If you need some help coming up with things your character might desire, here’s a series of writing prompts based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
  • Spend some time with a blank sheet of paper, before you write. After you decide on your character and their need, jot down 15 scenarios that could grow from that desire. (Writing 15 different scenarios means that you’ll blast through the obvious storylines straight away, then you’ll get to the weird and interesting ones that will make your story sing. Keep going until you have 15 even though the last three will probably be truly terrible.) Pick the one that interests you most, then start writing.
  • Make the desire all-consuming (for this instance, the duration of this story). Focus on this moment in the character’s life. Mine it for details, humor, horror, whatever you can get out of it.

Go!

Don’t forget to comment below to tell us how your writing went (or share an excerpt, or link to your story on another blog) or join us in the community and do your Victory Dance.

[Writing Prompt] Becca Puglisi – Ending Line

The Prompt

Write the story that accompanies this ending line:

I clicked off the safety, swearing that if she showed her face here today, my room would be the last one she ever entered.


Becca Puglisi is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others. This is one of her reasons for writing The Emotion Thesaurus, The Positive Trait Thesaurus, and The Negative Trait Thesaurus. A member of SCBWI, she leads workshops at regional conferences, teaches webinars through WANA International, and can be found online at Writers Helping Writers (formerly known as The Bookshelf Muse).

[Writing Prompt] Writing In Bits And Pieces

The last of the content-less prompts today!

Today I’m sticking with the theme of timed-writing but trying something a little different.

The Prompt

Pick Three Times Today When You Will Write Parts Of A Complete Story

Tips

  • Try to start earlyish in the day and write the opening of your story.
  • Pick a time a few hours later to write some more, and then again, later in the day to finish up.
  • Notice how easy or hard it was for you to get into the writing at different times of the day.
  • Think about professional writers on deadline, on book tours, who teach, who have ‘real jobs’. They have to find a way to write whether or not life is getting out of their way. Practicing squeezing a story into different parts of your day can be a useful skill.
  • Pay attention to whether or not one of the times of day worked best for you (tip: it might not. You might simply find you need to get the flow going, or that you’re ace at writing in fragments any time of the day. Be open to experimentation here).
  • Finish the story!

Go!

Don’t forget to comment here about your writing day or join The Victory Dance Group and let us know how you got on today.

[Writing Prompt] Elizabeth Spann Craig – The Unexpected Guest

[Here’s another scenario ripe with opportunities for character development, comedy, tragedy…in other words emotion — that thing that all readers are looking for! – JD]

The Prompt

Your protagonist opens the door and finds an unexpected guest–a friend from high school who hasn’t been heard from in many years.

This friend has fallen on hard times and wants to stay with your protagonist a few days. As your protagonist and friend sit in the kitchen, the friend reminisces about the old days…and stirs up trouble by recalling some unhappy teen moments, too.

How does your protagonist react and what are those good and bad times in the past? 


Elizabeth writes the Southern Quilting mysteries for Penguin/NAL, the Memphis Barbeque mysteries for Penguin/Berkley, and the Myrtle Clover series for Midnight Ink and independently. She blogs at ElizabethSpannCraig.com/blog, which was named by Writer’s Digest as one of the 101 Best Websites for Writers for 2010-2013.

[Writing Prompt] Set Aside An Hour

Today we’re going to try something new. I’m not assigning a word count, but rather a time limit.

The Prompt

Set aside a full hour to write a short story. Start and finish the story during that time.

Tips

  • Some people work really well with deadlines. Maybe this is yours.
  • Don’t panic if you can’t start writing at 00:01. Sketch out some ideas, try on a few characters. An hour is quite a long time if you focus on one moment, one instant (the perfect milieu for a short story). As long as you’re writing by 00:30, you’ll probably get a decent draft out of this exercise.
  • Pay attention to how you deal with the pressure of the hour finishing up. Is your story’s pacing clearly influenced by the deadline? (If it is, don’t worry, you can always clean things up in the rewrites).
  • Assess this exercise. Did you finish? Did you have to ‘cheat’ (i.e. write stuff like [put details in here], [move characters across town] etc.)?
  • Did the time limit work for you better than the word count as an exercise? Could this be something you use every day?

Go!

Don’t forget to comment about your writing day below or in The Victory Dance group.

[Guest Prompt] Angela Ackerman – Shame

The Prompt

Shame is a powerful emotion, and one of the most wounding experiences a character can face.

Write a story where your character does something that they feel shame for (maybe a failure, making a mistake [through one’s own carelessness or by accident] that hurts someone else, or letting someone down, poor treatment of someone, refusing to help, etc.) and how they redeem themselves in the aftermath.

Angela Ackerman is a writing coach and co-author of the #1 bestselling resource, The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression as well as the bestselling pair, The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Attributes and The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Flaws. When she isn’t teaching or building innovate tools for writers, she writes Middle Grade and Young Adult mysteries represented by the Jill Corcoran Literary Agency. You can find her at Writers Helping Writers, a hub for all things description.