[Write On Wednesday] Write A Secret Story

Inspiration for this prompt came from the very wonderful How To Be A Writer by Barbara Baig, which I’ve only just started reading, but which echoes what I’ve been saying here for years (so naturally, I think she’s a genius!)

Not everything you write should be written with a view to showing it to anyone else.

Just as you would practice the piano in private for months or years before hoping to be able to bring any pleasure to a listener, writers must practice their craft too…sometimes in private.

The Prompt

Write A Story That Is You Will Never Show To Anyone

Tips

  • Don’t cheat and tell yourself that something magical is bound to happen and that you’ll end up writing a story so good that you’ll feel compelled to show it to people. Promise you will not show it to anyone and stick to that.
  • If you’re having trouble coming up with something to write about, dive into your stash of Story Sparks (you have been collecting them, haven’t you?)
  • If you haven’t been collecting Story Sparks out in the real world, take ten minutes right now and look deep inside yourself. What news story annoyed you this week? Which political candidate do you despise the most? Why? What did you see that was beautiful, recently? What is your strongest memory of your mother? Why? What did summer smell like when you were growing up? Who do you miss? What’s your favorite swear word? What frightened you when you were a child? What frightens you now?
  • Make a quick list of 30 Story Sparks. (If you don’t know what I mean by story sparks read this article)

Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Write A Secret Story”

[Write on Wednesday] Regret

I’m not big on regrets. Everything experience contributes to the person we become, so there’s not much point in wishing to change the past.

But everyone has regrets.

And what good is a character in a story without a few regrets?
Regret - Contrast

The Prompt

Write A Story Centering On A Character Wrestling With A Big Regret

Tips

  • Think of a character (do this exercise: adjective noun; e.g. nervous housewife; tired teacher; suicidal businessman; carefree duke)
  • Give that character one thing in their past that they regret.
  • Think about how this thing has affected where they are today.
  • Ask yourself what would this character do if given a chance to act on the regret (to confront the person it concerned, to change the decision they made, to make amends, to take revenge).
  • Think about the different options open to your character. How does each of them work with the person the character has become in the intervening years? (A rich young man with no responsibilities might swear revenge on the woman who broke his heart. When he meets her again, as an older man who has inherited his wealth and title, does he still want revenge? What will it mean for him if he takes revenge? Is it worth it?)
  • Decide which course of action your character will take (or not take).
  • Set them on the road to taking that course of action.
  • Now start the story. Don’t start with the backstory. Start with them on the road, in the room, in the middle of the fight, in the midst of the heist. You can weave the backstory into the conversations they have during the story.
  • Make sure to let the reader know what’s at stake.

Go!

[Write on Wednesday] The Lie, Revisited

I’ve been browsing the archives here at StoryADay, unearthing some gems from the first year I ran the challenge.

I also decided to recycle a prompt or two. Here’s one from the middle of May 2010:

Ooo, the lie. We’ve all done it. We do it all the time, even though we know we shouldn’t. Sometimes we get away with them and other times they come back to bite us in the most spectacular fashion.

The Prompt

Write About A Lie

Is it a tiny one? A whopper? Does no-one find out about it? Does that mean your character really ‘gets away with it’? Does it spiral out of control and become a Fawlty Towers episode?

GO!

[Write On Wednesday]

In honor of Groundhog Day, today’s prompt encourages you to tell a story over and over and over again…

In honor of Groundhog Day, and one of the best films ever made about an obscure holiday, today’s prompt encourages you to milk one simple plot for all it’s worth.

The Prompt

Write A Very Short Story About An Incident In Your Character’s Day, Then Make Them Relive That Incident

Tips

Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday]”

[Write On Wednesday] Zeitgeist

Are you even moved by an injustice in the world? A news story? A historic event that you feel has stories in it that haven’t been told?
DSC_1639

It can be hard to figure out how to write a story that is of the moment, but doesn’t become irrelevant when the news cycle moves on.

Yesterday’s Reading Room post was all about a story just like that and it pointed one way forward: set your story in the moment (in that story’s case, it was during the Occupy Wall St movement), but make the story about more universal issues. The protagonist of “We Was Twins” was not part of the the Occupy movement, but got caught up in it anyway. He was struggling with issues of poverty, life after military service, grief, estrangement…issues that are universal and timeless.

This week I encourage you to try something similar.

The Prompt

Write a story set in a specific time/place in history, but tell the story of specific individuals dealing with issues that are both specific to them, and part of the human condition.

Tips

  • You might write a story about an idealistic twenty-something who goes to help at a refugee camp in Europe only to find that she still gets picked on by people because she can’t stand up for herself.
  • You might write about someone working on Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, but with an intriguing complications in their personal life.
  • What if your main character got caught in Winter Storm Jonas on their way to do something life-changing?
  • You could combine this idea with ‘evergreen’ occasions, like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, the first day of spring. Write a story like this and you can republish it every year, or sell it to a publication that’s looking for holiday stories. Make sure your protagonist has an interesting story to tell, that you can highlight/echo/make poignant with the holiday you choose.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Aphorisms Are Ace

Finding a topic for a story, then, needn’t be hard. Try your hand at this week’s prompt and remember to have fun (even if your story is dark and depressing): Use An Old Saying As A Title

Not every story has to be sparked by a deep desire you need to share with the world.

the first rays
Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining! Photo by: Richard West

Sometimes we write for fun. Most people read to be entertained.

Finding a topic for a story, then, needn’t be hard. Try your hand at this week’s prompt and remember to have fun (even if your story is dark and depressing).

The Prompt

Use An Aphorism As A Title

Tips

[Write On Wednesday] Myers-Briggs-plosion

Myers-Briggs

Today I’m encouraging you to put some personality conflict into your story.

The Prompt

Put a particular personality type into a situation they would never choose

Tips

Use the Myers-Briggs personality types (hover over the table at the bottom of this page, to get a list of characteristics for your main character).

Take some of the traits that define your character and put them in a situation completely unsuited to those traits. See what happens.

For example, Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Myers-Briggs-plosion”

[Write On Wednesday] Manipulation

Marionette

Today’s prompts is all about manipulation.

The Prompt

Write a story with two characters: one manipulative and one manipulated

Tips

Think about what characteristics you associate with a manipulative person. Are they bossy? Aggressive? Passive Aggressive?

Use the contrast between the two characters to highlight the ‘truth’ of the each character- in their own minds, in each others’ minds, in the reader’s mind.

Have some fun with reader expectations here: allow the reader to think that the brash, bossy character is the manipulator when really it turns out that the seemingly submissive character is the one who gets their own way. Or vice versa.

Consider using an unusual setting for a very domestic dispute (an argument about housework during a car chase) or a domestic setting for an unusual conversation (two people making the bed, discussing the evidence for the the theory of multiverses).

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] A Winter Tale

The Prompt

Write a short story with an atmospheric feel set in any of the wintery types of weather that present opportunities to give that additional ingredient of mystery and suspense.

Sat here on a dark, cold, wet morning I thought what a wonderful time of year for a story prompt! Winter offers so many more options to add tension and drama to a scene.

Tips

  • Think of Victorian London, thick, swirling sulphurous fog and the menace of Jack the Ripper.
  • A cold frosty morning, crunchy grass underfoot. The sound of someone following you, dare you look behind.
  • Where do the crazy footprints in the deep, crisp snow lead?
  • A howling gale, is that a ghost I can hear moaning behind the tombstones?
  • A misty morning on the heather clad moors, Cathy frantically searching for Heathcliffe.

Winter tales don’t have to focus on Christmas or New Year (or any other religious festival), there are so many varied forms of winter weather that you can use to give your story that extra buzz of originality and authenticity.

An atmospheric opening paragraph to a story can give a wonderful sense of foreboding. But don’t forget your character; he, she or it needs to be introduced early and be placed in the middle of the dramatic scene.

And don’t ignore your character’s motivation that is driving them to pursue their dream or chase that thief. Then the reader asks ‘why is he there in the middle of nowhere?’ or ‘what is she doing wearing only a bikini in the middle of a snowstorm?’

Go!

Malcolm Richardson has been writing creatively for the last ten years. After a slow start focussing on a novel, which is still only half completed he has concentrated on short stories over the last few years. His recent focus has been entering short stories in competitions. Freshly renewed over the last couple of months, he is now getting grips with his novel with the aim of completing a full first draft early next year. Malcolm is a latecomer to blogging, but his September Story a Day stories can be found here.

 

[Write On Wednesday] Holiday Story

Screen Shot 2015-11-10 at 5.12.57 PMIf you haven’t written a story for the the Nov/Dec holiday-of-your-choice, now’s the time.

The Prompt

Write a Christmas/Other Religiously-Affiliated Seasonal Story, a Thanksgiving Story, or a New Year Story To Include With Your Seasonal Greetings Cards.

Tips

  • Write a short piece that you could include with your holiday cards instead of the dreaded ‘family update’ letter.
  • Think about a few of your friends and what kind of story they’d appreciate (make it your most fun/twisted/dearest friends)
  • Keep the story to about 500 words, so it fits on one side of a printed page.
  • You don’t have to actually send the story, just imagine delighting these particular people, as you write.
  • Feel free to send it to them, with a note saying you were thinking of them.
  • You could do a parody of a traditional seasonal story, or a parody of the family update letter.
  • You could write a sweet, sentimental seasonal story, or a dark piece especially for the friend who you know hates the holidays (especially useful as cathartic therapy when you’ve been out trying to shop in the holiday crowds!)
  • You can post it as your holiday greeting on Facebook or your blog.
  • Get creative. Let loose.

Go!

P.S. I collected a few of my holiday stories into a little ebook collection. You could try this too!

[Write On Wednesday] Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Detours Sometimes Lead to Conflict

How often do our travels – or our lives, for that matter –  go exactly as planned? The detours often lead to conflict, and conflict drives drama. Conflict provides the impetus for action and the catalyst for your characters to change. Conflict keeps things interesting – if it doesn’t get everyone killed! Don’t leave your reader wondering, “Are we there, yet? When are we gonna get there?” Road trips are meant to be fun, interesting, enlightening experiences for the whole family. All too often, we get lulled into complacency, boredom, and “white line fever.” Roadside attractions provide opportunities to stray from the planned path – and opportunities for it all to go terribly, shockingly, or hilariously wrong.

Today’s Prompt

Your character is taking a road trip cross country with two people who are not family or close friends. Something goes horribly wrong at the World’s Largest Cockroach and Frozen Custard Stand (or other odd or humorously cheesy roadside attraction) located in the middle of nowhere.

Ideas to Explore:

  • Who are these characters and why are they traveling across the country together? Was it by choice? Will they be closer by the end of the trip – friends for life, perhaps – or will one or more of them (barely) live to regret it?
  • Now’s your chance to camp it up – you can use an actual roadside attraction (the more ridiculous, the better!) or invent one. Don’t just describe it, though – make us feel like we’re there.
  • What could possibly go wrong? Here’s your opportunity to add over-the-top drama, nail-biting action, or hilarious comic relief. Can you work in all three?

Tips:

  • Create 5-10 brief character sketches on scraps of paper. Fold them up, drop them into a Mason jar, and pull out three of them. Throw them into the car together and see where it leads.
  • Build your own roadside attraction. Make us feel like we’re there. If it really existed, would we want to visit it – or would we pray we didn’t have a flat tire within 30 miles of it?
  • Use descriptive language that appeals to all five of the reader’s senses.
  • Add additional characters who are not in the car with your main characters. Throw in an animal, maybe a pet. Maybe it’s part of the attraction.
  • How do your characters solve their problems? What does that reveal about them that we didn’t know before?

Have fun! Be sure to come back and share your story links in the comments.

 

Holly Jahangiri is the author of Trockle; A Puppy, Not a Guppy; Innocents & Demons; and A New Leaf for Lyle. She blogs at It’s All a Matter of Perspective. You can find her books on Amazon at http://amazon.com/author/hollyjahangiri. For more information on her children’s books, please visit http://jahangiri.us/books.

[Write On Wednesday] – Cargo Cult

Such Bounty from Above!

Today’s prompt, should you choose to use it, involves the creation of an imaginary cargo cult.

A cargo cult is a religious movement usually emerging in tribal or isolated societies after they have had an encounter with an external and technologically advanced society. Usually cargo cults focus on magical thinking and a variety of intricate rituals designed to obtain the material wealth of the advanced culture they encountered.

The term “cargo cult” has caught the imagination of the public and is now used to describe a wide variety of phenomena that involve imitating external properties without the substance. In commerce, for example, successful products often result in “copycat” products that imitate the form but are usually of inferior quality.

Cargo cults exemplify the third law of Arthur C. Clarke: that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

See http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cargo_cult for more info. Your cargo cult can be set anywhere you like – how did it first come into being? Who are its adherents? How has it affected their lifestyles?

Ideas to Explore:

  • World building – while cargo cults are typically associated with the South Pacific, you can set yours anywhere. It doesn’t even have to be on this planet.
  • What might the central cargo or technology be? How does it shape the cult’s thinking and behavior? What myths spring up surrounding it? Is it useful, harmful, or merely…decorative?
  • What sort of conflicts might arise in such a society – between its members or between its members and the outside world?

Tips:

  • Think about setting, character motivation, props, and conflict.

Have fun! Be sure to come back and share your story links in the comments.

Holly Jahangiri is the author of Trockle; A Puppy, Not a Guppy; Innocents & Demons; and A New Leaf for Lyle. She blogs at It’s All a Matter of Perspective. You can find her books on Amazon at http://amazon.com/author/hollyjahangiri. For more information on her children’s books, please visit http://jahangiri.us/books.

[Write On Wednesday] Invented Languages

This week’s prompt is inspired by this article on lost American slang. There is such richness and yet a foreign feel to the language in the quotes, that I couldn’t stop thinking about using this as a way to spice up my own writing.

(The examples in the piece remind me of both Harold Hill  — The Music Man’s pop-culture references were meticulously researched — and Mr Burns from The Simpsons! It also made me wonder if Disney intended Bambi’s “Thumper” to have a double-meaning for older viewers.)
Slang/Chat/Zyte/Moon/Dase

The Prompt

Write a story in which your characters have their own slang, dialect, similes and metaphors tied in to their time/place/culture.

Tips

  • Feel free to make up the slang. No need for historical accuracy here. Just be consistent within your world.
  • Think about how your characters see life. Are they agricultural? Sports-obsessed? (When I moved to the US I was bamboozled by political articles in newspapers that relied heavily on sports analogies that meant absolutely nothing to me). Are they engineers? Are they space-based?
  • Play with current expressions and change them to fit your characters. In a space opera “How on earth?” becomes “How in the twelve orbiting satellites of Juno?”; the fable of the grasshopper and the ant is transformed into a fable about worker droids and love-bots; etc. In my speculative-fiction novel-in-progress, my atheist-mechanics use expletives like “Great Gears!” where we might use profanity.
  • You can use slang to distance one generation from another (my husband and I are constantly having to explain our bon mots to our children, who are growing up on a different continent as well as a different millennium!)
  • Have fun with this.

Go!

 

Write on Wednesday – And Get Published

…well, maybe.

This week’s Write On Wednesday post is a reminder about this prompt I posted during the 2015 May’s Challenge.

The DIYMFA Anthology/Writer-Igniter deadline is fast approaching. Polish up your earlier story now, or write a new one today.

The Prompt

  1. Use the Writer Igniter tool at DIYMFA to spark a story (grab a screenshot of your result)
  2. Write a story of up to 2,000 words on the theme ORIGINS
  3. Submit to DIYMFA by August 31, 2015 (more details here).

 

Go!

(And good luck!)

[Write On Wednesday] Expect The Unexpected

Sir RaleighThis morning my sister (visiting me in the US from Scotland) took my son out in the pouring rain to continue their ‘learn to ride your bike’ sessions. She’s leaving today, so it was their last chance. They weren’t going to let a little warm rain stop them. I do wonder, however, what the neighbors thought.

Which leads me to today’s prompt.

The Prompt

Think of a character who needs to do a task. Put that task in an unusual location/setting/timing/condition.

Tips

  • If your character needs to bake a cake because her mother is coming over (and your character, of course, has long-standing, complicated issues with her mother), that’s a story. If she’s trying to bake the cake on a spaceship and it has to be ready before her mother spacewalks over from her passing spaceship, that adds a layer of interesting complexity to the story!
  • Perhaps your story opens with two characters, like my sister and son, cycling in the driving rain. What could induce them to cycle in these conditions? Where are they going? What is driving them to do this? How do they feel about the journey? Each other? What is the journey a metaphor for? (Grammatically incorrect, but fun to say out loud. Try it!)
  • What other mundane tasks can you think of? Taking a test. Cleaning a bathroom. Meeting a friend. Now, where can you set these to make them intriguing? Taking a test on the side of a mountain. Cleaning a bathroom in a World War I trench. Meeting a friend in Death Valley.
  • Dig deeply into the circumstances. Ask why these things are happening where/when they are happening. Why would your character be there, trying to do this thing? Will they persevere? Will they give up? Will they whine? Will they fail? What has driven them to this point? Where would they rather be? Why is this interesting to a reader?

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Snowpocalypse

This week, like last week, my prompt is inspired by a submission-call from an anthology.
As a dyed-in-the-wool fan of disaster movies, I couldn’t resist this one.

The Prompt

Snowpocalypse

Tips

  • Cast your mind back a few short months (if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere, especially if you’re someone that gets hard winters) to the unrelenting, bitter winter. Think about those last few weeks of winter when you can barely remember what the world looks like in anything but monochrome. Remember how it made you feel. Think about how long it took to simply get out the front door when you can’t go out without fourteen layers of clothing.
  • Put a character into this setting. Are they happy? Are they longing for spring?
  • Come up with a reason why spring isn’t coming. Maybe it’s something like Narnia’s White Witch. Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe your character is on a planet where perms-winter is normal.
  • Make something change. It can be the character’s desires, the weather patterns or the environment they’re in (if the dome cracks and the air outside is 40-below, that’s a crisis your character’s going to have to deal with)
  • When something has changed, put your characters to work (together is good. Even more fun if they have conflicting personalities) to solve the problem or face their doom
  • One of the best ways to launch yourself into ‘show not tell’ is to put characters together and let them talk about what they see, what they want, what they fear. Put two or more characters into your setting and get them talking as soon as possible.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] About Time

Today’s prompt was inspired by a call for submissions from Main Street Rag Anthologies. They are currently reading submissions (until July 31) for an anthology called “It’s About Time”.

I don’t normally encourage you to put the cart before the horse (and think about publishing before you’ve got through the creative process) because it can be stifling. However, there’s nothing wrong with writing with a particular market in mind, as long as you don’t let it cripple your creative side. So forget about the anthology for the next hour or two, and just think about the prompt.

The Prompt

It’s About Time

Tips

  • This could be a phrase someone in the story says. They can be annoyed or they can be jubilant.
  • This could inspire a twisty, time-travel story.
  • Perhaps you will write a thoughtful story about aging or the passage of time, or historical processes.
  • If your short story starts to get away from you, challenge yourself to turn it into a Flash Fiction piece. Trimming a story to meet a 1,000 word limit really helps you see the essentials. (I did this recently. I ended up expanding the story again, after I’d created the Flash version, but it was much easier to keep the story on track, after I had forced myself to strip out all the tangential rambling!)

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Two Different Timelines

Today’s prompt is inspired by a great book I’m reading on story structure. It’s called Book Architecture: How To Outline Without Using A Formula by Stuart Horwitz (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference recently. If you get a chance to see him speak, I’d highly recommend it. Very engaging and he takes a VERY different approach to the idea of outlining a story from most pro-outline people.)

The Prompt

Write A Story That Contains More Than One Timeline

Tips

  • Here’s a Flash Fiction example of the kind of thing I’m talking about: Comatose by Megan Manzano
  • In Book Architecture, Horwitz offers a couple of great tips for keeping multiple timelines from becoming confusing: 1, anchor your reader in the ‘present’ timeline before jumping back to a flashback and b, keep your flashbacks moving in the same chronological order (i.e. start at one point in the character’s experiences and move in one direction from there. He uses the movie Slumdog Millionaire as an example of this structure).
  • Here’s a longer, and more complex story that has multiple timelines: The Weight Of A Blessing by Aliette de Bodard (the timelines here are The Present, After The Last Visit With Her Daughter; The Recent Past, During And In-Between Her Three Visits With Her Daughter; and The Far Past, During The War. All of them combine to illustrate the theme of the story while unpacking the details of what the heck’s going on (kind of).
  • For today’s exercise, try doing the minimum: weave two timelines together, and keep each one moving in a particular chronological direction.
  • This might take more time than the usual Write On Wednesday “write it fast and loose” kind of exercise. What the heck, take the whole week.
  • Try taking a story you’ve written before and reworking it this way. Choose one you’re not happy with, or that you never finished Good candidates are stories that sank under the weight of their own backstory. Split out the backstory and tell it in flashback.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Going On A Journey

This week’s writing prompt: Take Your Character(s) On A Literal & Figurative Journey

Enjoy the journey, not the destination.
Yesterday, I wrote about Richard Matheson’s classic short story Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

It got me thinking about journeys as a vehicle (sorry!) for a story. In his story, Matheson included tons of detail about the plane travel in the early ’60s. The claustrophobic feeling of the setting wasn’t accidental: it mirrored the character’s internal issues beautifully.

Today I’m inviting you to do something similar.

The Prompt

Take Your Character(s) On A Literal Journey

Tips

  • Choose a mode of transportation that you can write about in detail. (Have a lot of time for research? Sure, write about Mary and Joseph on a donkey in Roman-occupied Palestine. Short on research time? Use the last trip you took as source material).
  • Think about the mode of transportation you have chosen. Does it represent freedom or escape? Is it comfortable or torturous? Is it difficult or easy? (Horse back riding sounds like fun, but if your character is facing his third day on a horse in freezing drizzle and you have a different story!). Is your character driving or at the mercy of others (literally and figuratively?)
  • What does your character want/need? How can you use a literal journey to pad out the significance of that?
  • What changes in the middle of the story? Can you use the vehicle/travel to raise the stakes? If the bus breaks down or the horse bolts, or the passenger tempts the driver to break the speed limit what are the implications for the character? How can you make it worse? Don’t be afraid to go deeper/further/more whacky (you can always scale back in the revisions if it seems too crazy).
  • In the end, does your character end up where he wanted to go? Literally? Figuratively? Did your character end up where they needed to be? Are those the same things?
  • Think about the imagery and language you use (see yesterday’s Reading Room post, about how Richard Matheson chose his words to enhance the tone of the coming story).
  • Write a quick first draft.
  • Go back through the story and see if you can heighten the sense of place with different senses, different word choice. See if you can make things worse (or better) for your character.
  • If you’re brave enough, post your story in the comments (but not if you’re planning on submitting it anywhere else).

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Occasional Places

I just read this charming blog post from an online friend (and fellow knitter & writer). She talks about her recent trip to France and shares some of her husband’s fabulous photos.

Celtic Memory Yarns Blogspot

It got me thinking….

The Prompt

Write a story set in a place you have visited

Tips

  • Ideally this should be a place you have vivid memories of, so you can use little details to color the story — for example, in Jo’s post (above) there are all kinds of details that a French person make take for granted (the sweet peas growing wild in the verge; the red dust in Camargue), but that bring the setting alive for readers.
  • It doesn’t have to be anywhere exotic or ‘foreign’. It can be your favorite corner of your local park, as long as you remember to give us the local flavor: what is the light like? What can your character smell? What color/material are the nearby buildings?
  • Do remember to tell a story. Don’t just write a description of the place. What kind of person might be there and why? Do they want to be there? Why? What would you expect to be happening in this place/at this time? What if something completely different happened? Why? With what result?

Go!

Guest Writing Prompt from Joe R Lansdale

Today’s guest writing prompt comes from master storyteller Joe R. Lansdale, who has won the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker awards and The Horror Writer Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award among others!

Our thanks to Mr Lansdale for taking the time to provide this provocative prompt for us.

The Prompt

On the day they saw the blue star swell to gigantic proportions, everyone went blind but Hardy. He was already blind, had been from birth,but he had lifted his head to the heavens because he felt a peculiar warmth.

Moments later the others were still blind, but he could see. All the colors of the spectrum. Even viewed by moonlight, the brightness of it all frightened and puzzled him.

joerlansdaleAbout Joe R. Lansdale

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. 

[Write on Wednesday] Fear Itself

A Month Of Writing Prompts 2015First: The ebook is here! The ebook is here! Get all yer writing prompts ahead of time and start planning your month, today! Only $2.99. Don’t wait, the price goes up to $6.99 on May 1!

Now, on to the last Write On Wednesday prompt before StoryADay May 2015!

They say you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
What they don’t mention is that fear itself is pretty darned terrifying!

The Prompt

Your character is on the precipice: about to do something that terrifies them.

Tips

  • Think about who your character is and what would frighten them the most (maybe your character is committing to an extreme writing challenge in a few days’ time…)
  • Can you make it even more frightening? (If your character doesn’t post in the Victory Dance group, there are sharks. Sharks delivered by tornado…)
  • You can start the story with the decision—they do it or they run away—and then the rest of the story becomes the unraveling of why they made the decision and what the consequences were.
  • You can start the story slowly and allow the character to fill us in on all the details. In this case let the reader in on what the stakes are, and then, at the end when the character make her decision we understand the ramifications already.
  • You can decide to do a hybrid of the two and allow the character to make the big decision in the middle of the story. Set up some stakes at the beginning, show us the decision, then take us through some of the consequences (internal or external).
  • Give us lots of details about the thing that’s frightening them as they decide to do it, or run away from it. More detail slows things down (like during a car crash).
  • Try to hold in your head a sense of the shape of the story, while you write. Remember that you’re aiming for an emotional connection with the reader.

Go!

Just for practice, if you finish this story today, either post in the comments below or in The Victory Dance group. And if you haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet, leave a comment and I’ll give you the super-secret entry code to get in to the community.

[WriteOnWednesday] The Day My (Blank) Quit

Today I want you to think of a character and a relationship that should never be broken. Then break it.

The Prompt

The Day My _______ Quit

Tips

  • You might think of a professional relationship. We don’t normally think of dentists or therapists or trainers or doctors or laywers firing their clients. But it happens. It happens for innocuous reason (they’re moving away) and for hostile reasons (they think you’re a jerk).
  • You might think of a family relationship. Parents shouldn’t give up on their kid. What if they did?
  • You could go surreal or fantastic: the day my pet rock quit. The day the aliens stopped calling…
  • Thnk about what could cause such a rift. Is anyone at fault? Who?
  • Is it a good thing or a bad thing for the protagonist? Does it feel that way?
  • You can show us the break up or the aftermath (or even the events leading up to it). But you probably shouldn’t show all three in a short story.
  • Make sure you show us why the break up matters to at least one character.

Go!

 

 

 

[Write On Wednesday] Insults

I read this delightful essay on the literary insults writers hurl at each other, and it inspired a writing prompt!

The Prompt

Write a letter or review full of insults

Tips

  • Imagine a correspondence between two writers, one whose writing you admire, one whose writing you loathe. What would your favorite writer pick up on, in the writing or reputation of the other, to criticize. What style would he/she use?
  • Write an insulting letter to someone who regularly annoys you or someone who picked on you at school. Banish compassion. Write it with style, wit and ruthlessness. Be clever, artistic, snide. Have (guilty) fun.
  • Write a rebuttal of an imagined unfavorable review of your work. Be sure to point out the critic’s shortcomings in the most colorful, inventive language you can, but challenge yourself to keep it fit for print (no profanity).
  • Damn someone with faint praise.
  • Create a rich picture in your head of each of the characters in your story (insulter and insultee). Allow their personalities to shine through you words.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Metaphor To Reality

Yesterday’s Reading Room story started out with magnificent metaphors and then flipped to a story about a suburban guy. It brought back the metaphor at the end.

It was an extreme example and tough to pull off (I’m still not sure it entirely worked), but today we’re going to try something similar.

The Prompt

Start a story with a vivid image and weave the metaphor throughout the story

Tips

  • You still have to make this story about a character. Think of something that matters to your character and create the metaphor/story imagery from that. (e.g. if your character gardens, all the metaphors could be horticultural)
  • You can weave the tie-in metaphors throughout the story or, like the Reading Room story, start with a vivid image and come back to it only at the end.
  • Try to dig deeply, and go beyond the obvious, clichéd metaphors. I worked with a reporter on a weekly newspaper who would open a file and think of all the puns and metaphors he could, on a particular topic, before he started writing an article. The top of every file he wrote was a groan-fest! Try creating your own list of imagery before you start to write, to help yourself push past the cliché.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Can’t And Won’t

Does a story have to have conflict? Does it have to have a beginning and a middle and an end? Perhaps not.

Lydia Davis’ story “Can’t And Won’t” is pages of complaints about life:

My sheets get all twisted in the dryer.

The carrot cake was a little stale.

When I toast the raisin bread, the raisins get very hot.

The bridge of my nose is a little dry.

I’m sleepy, but I can’t lie down.

The sound system in the examining room playing folk music.

I don’t look forward very much to that sandwich.

There is a new weatherman on the radio.

Now that the leaves are off the trees we can see the neighbors’ new deck…

There is no ‘happening’, no crisis, no rising action, but do you get a sense of character? I do.

What is a story if not a portrait of a character or characters?

The Prompt

Write A Non-Narrative Short Story That Allows The Reader To Experience Another Character’s Life

Tips

  • You can copy Lydia Davies’s idea and write a story of complaints. Make sure all the complaints belong to one, very specific character. (They can be like you, or unlike you. It can be a secret portrait of your annoying coworker, your ex-mother-in-law, your little brother…) [remember, this is an exercise. If you decide to publish this, you might want to credit Davis as the inspiration!]
  • Write a List (like they do in McSweeneys)
  • The “character” doesn’t have to be one person. It could be an institution: write the Standard Operating Procedures of a big firm.
  • Write about a collection of objects (e.g. The Things They Carried) and allow the reader to infer what they will about the owners.
  • Come up with your own way of writing a non-narrative short story.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Objects In Space

When I was ten or eleven years old, our teacher marched us over to the cafa-gym-itorium (didn’t your school have one of those?) and sat us down in front of the rolling cart that held (hooray!) the TV set.

The film they showed us featured a tumble weed. There was no dialogue, just a stirring score that swooped and whispered as the tumbleweed rolled through its day. First it rolled down a deserted street and across an open plain. Then it started to have adventures. It was nibbled by animals, it got stuck on a fence and, in a climax that had the whole class gasping and biting our nails, it had a run-in with an 18 wheeler. We were sure it had been destroyed. Silence fell in the huge room as 26 preteens stopped fidgeting and tried to make sense of our feelings of loss. Then, oh joy, the tumbleweed rolled across the now-empty road and we all cheered.

Why did we care, asked our teacher. We all shrugged, a little embarrassed, as the spell broke and we realized we had been rooting for a bundle of twigs.

“That,” pointed out our smug teacher, “Is called ‘personification’.”

More than 30 years later, I still remember the experience and the discovery.

 

The Prompt

Write the story of normally-non-sentient object

"Dawn Flight Configuration 2". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dawn_Flight_Configuration_2.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Dawn_Flight_Configuration_2.jpg
“Dawn Flight Configuration 2“. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons –

Tips

  • This week, the NASA Dawn Spacecraft settled into orbit around Ceres, a dwarf planet in our solar system’s asteroid belt. Imagine what it’s like. Could you imbue Dawn with a personality and report back for us?
  • What other object catches your interest?
  • Decide whether or not you will tell the story in the third person (as in my tumbleweed story) or the first person.
  • If you work in the third person you can decide to have your object pass through the hands of several people or you can observe the object and anthropomorphism your narration, to give it life.
  • If you work in first person, you can have a lot of fun figuring out what characteristics such a thing could possess. (Think of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: Cogsworth, the butler-turned-clock is, in his own words, a bit ‘wound up’)

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Time Yourself

Today’s exercise is designed to help you see that you CAN write, even when you think you don’t have time. Take 30 minutes today to write a complete story. Here’s how…

Sometimes life gets in the way of writing. We must find ways to work in a time-crunch.

Today’s exercise is designed to help you see that you CAN write, even when you think you don’t have time.
time flies
The Prompt

Write A Story In 30 Minutes

Tips

  • Turn your phone off, mute your email, hang a sign on the door, put on huge silly headphones. Do whatever you need to do, carve out 30 minutes today to Just Write.
  • Use only 30 minutes, start to finish, brainstorming to ‘the end’.
  • Set a stopwatch. Take seven minutes to brainstorm. Think of a character. Give him/her a problem/desire. Pick a reason why solving this problem/achieving this desire causes them extreme heartache/peril (examples: Wesley loves Buttercup but is too poor to woo her. Becoming good for her means risking being murdered by pirates, a prince and a rodent of unusual size. A bookworm’s heart’s desire is simply to read, but his wife thinks its a waste of time so he can’t read at home; and his boss threatens to fire him if he catches him reading at work.)
  • Pick a good opening line that sums up the character and the problem. (“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” – J.D Salinger: The Catcher In The Rye)
  • You should be at about 10 minutes into your time now. Spend the next 15 minutes getting to the meat of the problem, throwing complications at your character, and having him start to try to resolve them. Fail at least once. (If it’s an interior kind of story, you can let that failure be ‘temptation to give up’)
  • Five minutes to go! At some point in the past 15 minutes your character should have started to tell you how the story should end. Tie up the last challenge you gave them and move immediately to the ending. Two sentences. Don’t worry about connecting the middle to the ending just yet. That’s what rewrites are for. Just write “[connecting stuff]” and move on to the end.
  • There. Didn’t that feel good?

What you have in front of you is likely not a complete short story. It’s a sketchy first draft. But it’s a sketchy first draft that moves. It has an interesting character. It has action. It has a sense that it’s going somewhere, and it has and ending.

Now you have a draft you can rework. Add a few lines to help clarify setting and description for the reader, if it’s that kind of story. Change some of your ‘info dump’ paragraphs to dialogue and move them to earlier/later in the story. Expand or delete details. Figure out your theme and how you can (subtly) strengthen it.

Do this, and I think you’ll have a pretty good story. All from taking 30 minutes to squeeze a little short story writing into your day.

[Write on Wednesday] Inventor’s Day

Did you know Feb 11 is Inventor’s Day in the USA?

Oxford Words Blog Screenshot

Well, it is. The terrific OxfordWords blog has an entry about 10 products that were named after people (did you know them all? I knew some, but others were a surprise!).

The Prompt

Write about an inventor or his/her invention

Tips

  • You can use a real invention or make one up.
  • You could write a faux scholarly article/history of the person/invention.
  • Your story could be set at a middle school inventors’ faire, where kids have to dress up as famous inventors.
  • Perhaps your story follows an incident in the life of your inventor years before, during or years after the work on the invention. What brought them here? Where did their life go after the invention? What’s it like to invent something that took on your name? (If you want a tragic example, look at Richard Jordan Gatling, who was convinced he was inventing a weapon that would lead to smaller armies and less suffering).
  • You could go whimsical, with an invention of the type that ends up in an As Seen on TV box.
  • You could throw a little magical realism into this story as the invention produces unexpected results.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] (re)Committed

After scaring you all with my writing prompt headline last week, I’m going much more positive this week.

The Prompt

(Re)Committed

Write a story about a character who is determined to achieve something difficult.

Tips

  • Tell us why that something matters to your character
  • Think about what obstacles you can put in her way. Go beyond the obvious.
  • Show us one way in which she is better, more determined, more heroic than we ourselves would be.
  • Let her triumph — or flop gloriously.

Go!

[Write On Wednesday] Giving Up

No! I don’t mean you! And I don’t mean me.

But there comes a point in any venture when a person thinks of giving up.

I recently wrote about how glad I was for the tenacity and commitment of the star of a show I went to see. And it got me thinking about all the other stories that could have resulted from each decision he had made during his life. And that I have made. And that you have made. And that our characters make…

The Prompt

Giving Up

Write a story in which your character is tempted to give up on something that matters to them. Or maybe they already have.

Tips

  • Think about the emotional ramifications of making that decision. Is it something they have wanted for a long time, or just a whim? Your answer dictates how big a deal the decision is.
  • Think about the fall out from the decision. Who does it affect the most? Do the consequences match the expectations of your character? Is it easier than they thought it would be? Harder?
  • Think about how you can convey these things without directly telling the reader “She was finding it harder than she had expected”. What does it do to a person’s energy level, gait, relationships, ability to focus, when things are tough? What does it do to all these things if the character is surprised by how happy they are, after giving up?
  • You can write about the process of coming to the decision, or about the consequences, but remember to include some immediacy, some sense of movement in the events of the story. Don’t just tell it as if everything was resolved before you put pen to paper.

Go!

Post your story in the comments, or tell us how it went.