You’ve made it! Congratulations to anyone who wrote at all this month and I’m prostrating myself on the floor before any of you who are sitting down to write your 30th story. Really. I bet you’ve learned a ton this month, right?

The Prompt

Take the story you wrote yesterday (or any day) and rewrite it from the perspective of another character in the story.

Tips

• Remember that the only ‘truth’ in a story is the truth as your protagonist sees it — preferably an emotional truth.
• Remember that your former protagonist is now only a supporting character. Everything you show about that character should only serve your new protagonist’s point of view (even if you KNOW why the former-protagonist really slapped the old lady, in this version you should probably only show the new protagonist’s perception of that act).

And now:

Thank you so much for coming along on this journey this month.

I’d LOVE to hear about what you’ve learned. If you can take a moment, please send me an email (julie at storyaday dot org) and tell me one thing you discovered on your journey this month. (Perhaps it’s about how or when you work best, perhaps it was about the ideas that came to you, perhaps it was about how to carry on after a bad day…)

If you’re subscribed to the Daily Prompt email, don’t think I’m going to leave you stranded. You should still receive one email a week (on Wednesdays), to keep you writing throughout the rest of the year.

If you want to keep up with the news about the next StoryADay challenge (May 2013) make sure you’re on the Advance Notice List. I send occasional emails to this list, mostly with news about the upcoming challenge.

If you’d like to hear from me occasionally about writing courses, ebooks and other creativity-enhancing goodies, make sure you’re on my Creativity Lab list. It’s an even more infrequent mailing which goes out only when I find a great tool I want to share with you (hint: there’s a big thing coming in October, which will help you keep writing and polishing stories throughout the year). Join the Creativity Lab List here.

And lastly, thanks again for joining in. It give me so much pleasure to see people writing and getting joy from putting in the work!

Keep in touch and keep writing,
Julie

We’re almost at the end of the month! Congrats to anyone who has written at ALL this month and HUGE, HUGE congrats to those of you who have 28 stories already. Two more and you achieve SuperHero status!

The Prompt

Write a story with more than one character today, so that tomorrow you can rewrite the story from the other character’s point of view.

Tips

Remember that the ‘truth’ of the story is not so much in the details of the events as the details of how the protagonist tells/sees the story.

Today you’re going to do a little more burglary. Yesterday I encouraged you to steal from an actor, today I’m encouraging you to steal from a songwriter [1. Note that if you do this, it’s technically a derivative work and you can get into trouble if you decide to publish. If you want to avoid that, change the names and only ever acknowledge being ‘inspired’ by the song. If the song is an old folk song, and in the public domain, however, you’re in the clear. Publish away!].

The Prompt

Write The Story Of A Song

Tips

• There are plenty of ballads out there that tell a story from the Me & Bobby McGhee to Copacabana. Tell the story of the main characters or something that goes on in the periphery.
• Other songs conjour a mood but don’t tell you the specifics (“Whiter Shade of Pale” springs to my mind)
• Some songs have a strong central character that we might like to follow through another day (Maybe “Born This Way” or “Somebody That I Used To Know”)
• Put the song on repeat and try to capture the mood of the song as you write.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

These prompts are designed to help you go further with your daily story than a simple ‘idea’ might. If you’re having trouble coming up with that idea, check out the Story Sparks post.

Today we’re going to focus on your descriptive writing. Every story has some sort of description in it[1. Unless you’re writing some kind of post-modern experimental work that isn’t designed to please an audience in which case you’re excused.].

The Prompt

Write A Story in Which Every Piece Of Description Is Designed To Elicit An Emotion In The Reader

Ideally, the emotions that you are forcing the reader to feel are the ones the protagonist is experiencing.

 

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

Sometimes it can be inappropriate (or boring) to write realistic dialogue. If you are Aaron Sorkin or Shakespeare or R.A. Salvatore you probably don’t want your characters having humdrum conversations littered with everyday grammar. You’re creating a world, a fantasy kingdom, an idealized version of reality. Your characters’ speech, word choice, syntax and rhythms should reflect that.

The Prompt

Write A Story Containing Stylized Dialogue

The key to making this work is that you must remain consistent in tone through out the piece. If your main character sounds Shakespearean at the beginning, make sure he sounds that way in all his big set pieces.

Of course, you can puncture the style for comic effect but this works best if you break out of the style sparingly.

And just because everyone speaks in a formal or jargon-laden, or poetic manner, doesn’t mean that all your characters should sound the same: far from it. Even in Shakespeare, you still have people who are florid and poetic, and people who are earthy, coarse and abrupt.

Give it a try, have some fun. You may find you’re adding a style of dialogue to your repertoire that you can pull out in moments of high drama in your future writing. If it goes badly, at least you’ll have discovered some of the pitfalls of writing this way and can avoid them in future.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

Another one-word prompt for the weekend as we head into the second half of the month.

The Prompt

All

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

We’re half way there! Enough with the writing class style prompts. Today I’m throwing you a simple word prompt. Do what you like with it:

The Prompt

Half

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

Continuing this week’s theme of POV prompts, here is today’s prompt:

Write a Story In Second Person

This is probably the least-used of all the points of view and with good reason. It’s not one we’re used to reading because it’s tricky and informal and potentially distracting.

So what is ‘second person’? It’s when the story is told with “you”, where the narrator puts you in the position of the main character.

If you’ve ever played a role-playing game (or a first-person video game) this perspective is going to come a lot easier to you than if you have never read it before. In role-playing games, the games master reads a scenario to the other players, putting them in the scene:

“You walk into the room and know, immediately that something is wrong. There’s a huddled shape in the shadows at the far side of the dim, low-ceilinged space and strange markings on the floor. You turn to leave but the door has slammed shut behind you. There is no handle.”

That’s all very well, but how do you stop a story from reading like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book: a series of descriptions? Well, here’s a passage from Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights, Big City” that shows you how you can incorporate action, reflection and dialogue into a second person story. In this scene, the main character is in a nightclub.

In the bathroom there are no doors on the stalls, which makes it tough to be discreet. But clearly you are not the only person in here to take on fuel. Lots of sniffling going on in the stalls. the windows are blacked over, and for this you are profoundly grateful.

Hup, two, three, four. The soldiers are back on their feet. They are off and running in formation. Some of them are dancing and you must follow their example.

Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hidden behind a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a Bad Spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhythm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder.

“Dance?”

So yes, it is an unusual written form. It is, however, the way we often talk (“So, say your mother-in-law was coming over and she’s always having a go at you about the state of your bathroom, but her baby boy has never been seen to life a Clorox wipe in his life…”)

No need to be intimidated. Try out the second person and see what it does for your writing, your tone, the storytelling possibilities. Pay attention to how much description and dialogue you use in this form and how much of it seems interior. Is it significantly different from how you usually write?

Have fun with this and…

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

This week’s prompts are all about point of view and narrative voice.

The Prompt

Write a story from the third person limited POV.

Tips

“Third Person, Limited” means that, unlike yesterday, your narrator never says “I did this”, rather you talk about “he went to the door”, “He opened it.”

The ‘Limited” part means that all the judgements and assumptions, all internal thoughts are limited to those of the character through whom you are telling the story. No popping out of Dave’s head to jump across the room and tell us what Mandy is thinking as she looks at him. The only thing we’re privy to is what Dave thinks Mandy might be thinking about him.

Within this framework you can still play with the form: your limited persona can be like Nick Carraway, reporting on Jay Gatsby’s life, rather than telling us about his own adventures. You can give your limited persona the ride of her life through a whitewater canyon and let us see it all from her perspective.

Third person limited is great for short stories, because it lets us – the readers – identify with one character, and ground the story somewhere. You don’t have much space in a short story and the last thing you want is to confuse your readers (unless, of course, the whole point of your story is to confuse your readers!). Letting them get to know a character by showing their reactions to events, puts you half way to rooting for (or against) the protagonist.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

Continuing this week’s theme of POV prompts, here is today’s prompt:

Write a story from the Third Person, Omniscient perspective

This is the perspective you know from all the classics (Dickens springs to mind): the author can say anything, pop inside any (or all) character’s heads, travel backwards and forwards in time, insert herself and her own commentary onto the page…

Have some fun with this. Take an episode and tell it from one character’s perspective, then leap into another character’s head and give their read on the situation. Try out your authorial prerogatives and make a comment about what’s going on (think of that moment when a TV character turns to the camera and talks directly to us, the audience).

This can get quite complicated (which is why it works so well for novels) but give it a bash and see what you come up with.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

The Prompt

Pick a spectacular or vivid interior space. Set your story in it, paying attention to the space and how it might shape your narrative.

Tips:

• Perhaps your space is large and cavernous and something whispered at one end can be easily overheard at the other.
• Perhaps your hero is visiting his grandmother who has a lifetime of tchotchkes cluttering every surface. How does that affect him and can he say what he came here to say?
• Does your heroine need comfort, but find herself in a sterile home decorated by her acclaimed but distant architect husband?

Use a few details of an interior setting in your story today to suggest what’s going on with your characters.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.

Stories have settings, characters and action. Great! Easy. Let’s get writing!

A-hem. One of the hard parts of writing is getting the pacing of a story correct. You need to slow things down and speed things up in the right places. It may seem counterintuitive but the place to speed up is often in the set up. Readers don’t need a lot of set up. You (and they) can fill in the details as you go along. Again, oddly enough, the place to slow down can be the moment when you reach the action.

Trained by Hollywood as we are, we tend to think of ‘action’ as fast-paced, the bit where the cars come screeching down the hill, the rocket blasts off, the volcano erupts. But in a story, the ‘action’ is simply ‘the stuff the characters do in an effort to get what they want’.  When your characters start taking action, that might be a flag for you to slow the reader down, tease the moment, with some details, thoughts, frame-by-frame storyboarding of the scene.

The Prompt

Take a moment, right in the heart of the action of your story, and increase the tension by slowing it  wa-a-ay down with granular details.

Tips

Some examples:

Take us through every muscle that tenses as the hero prepares to run;

Take us inside a woman’s head for every random thought that flits through it between the words “will you marry me?” and her answer (“Did I leave the iron on? Oh gawd, I cannot believe I thought about that right now. Look, he’s on his knees. He’ll ruin his trousers. Focus, woman! Look at his face. That mole really needs checked out and oh no, this moment has gone on too long. Must answer. Must answer. Should I cry? I don’t think I want to cry, but it seems like the kind of thing I should do. I wish he’d stop staring at me like that…”)

Detail the painstaking preparations the surgical team makes, in silence, before the lifesaving operation.

 

This might not be the most successful story you ever write, but it’s a worthwhile technique to practice. You might just find a brand new tool to put in your writers’ toolkit.

Go!

And when you have written your story, log in and post your success in The Victory Dance group or simply comment on this post and let the congrats come flying in.