Friday, November 22nd, 2013  I’m sitting in the doctor’s office as I type this.
When I walked in, there were only there were only three people in the office. And now, forty minutes later…I’m still sitting in the waiting room, and there’s not a seat to be had.
Seriously. Standing room only.
The funny part: the expression on each newcomer’s face when they walk through the door. Most people are surprised at first. Then comes annoyance. There are quite a few angry faces, too.
(I’m thinking of Mrs. Potato Head in Toy Story right now, where she packs Mr. Potato Head’s angry eyes, just in case he needs them.)
Me?
I’m laughing. If I’d been one of the entrants facing a backed up schedule and nowhere to sit, I’d probably be sporting my angry eyes and a tight-lipped frowny face, too. Instead, I’ve been joking with the seated folks sitting close to me.
We’re watching it all unfold and waiting for an explosion. That should be fun.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write an angry scene. Pay attention to the expressions on your character’s faces, as well as dialogue or actions. Stay away from cliches (a mouth that’s simply a slash, eyes that flash, etc).
- Write a happy scene. As above, pay attention to expressions, not just dialogue and body language. Avoid sparkling eyes, wide or curved mouths and white teeth.
- For practice, set aside some time to describe the faces of the characters in your manuscript. (If you write memoir or are writing a family history, pick the faces of people you know). Now picture these people angry or happy (or some other emotion). Take time to describe not just eyes and mouth, but brow and chin. Wrinkles. Scars. Moles and warts.
- Write a poem about a person who is angry or happy (or, you decide what emotion), but don’t use facial expressions to convey the emotion.
- Write an essay about a time you were extraordinarily angry or upset. Write about your facial expressions…from the inside. Were your eyes hot and stinging? Was your brow so furrowed the muscles were tight? Remember, too, how your expression felt when the situation was resolved. Write down those feelings, too.
- As above, but use the “inner feelings” of your expressions in your manuscript for your point of view character.
Good Luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Image Copyright © Dawn Hudson | Dreamstime Stock Photos.
Friday, November 15th, 2013  I’m an eavesdropper. I admit it.
Wherever I go, I’m tuning in to the things that are being said around me.
I’m a snob, though. I generally don’t listen in on conversations between, for instance, the barista and the guy in front of me buying coffee. The guy buying coffee is passing time, waiting for his extra foamy tallboy. The barista is paid to be charming.
That conversation? Worthless. Usually.
I might listen in if there’s no one else around, but I’d rather listen to the old folks behind me, talking in hushed whispers. Or the goth couple hanging out in the corner arguing.
I love it when I’ve already sat down and gotten my coffee. (Black thanks, I’ll add a bit of cream for myself.) Because if I’m sitting, I can take notes. Awesome.
Conversation is great fodder for scenes. It can prompt entire stories.
Here’s Your Prompt:
(And your homework!)
Make time to sit in a place where you can overhear what other people are saying. With luck, you’ll start hearing things in the middle of the conversation.
After you’ve written a few lines, stop listening and re-read what you’ve written down. What story does it spark? Write it.
If you don’t like the first conversation, go listen to another. This time, stop transcribing when something catches your fancy.
If you can’t get out, do an internet search for “overheard conversations.” There are tons of them out there. Ignore the context and the celebrity of who said what. Find a conversation you like, and write from there.
Good luck!
Friday, November 8th, 2013  The Husband of Awesome™ and I closed up the garden last weekend. We wrapped up the delicate figs with blankets, hoping to baby them over until the spring. We gave the lawn a last once over, hoping it won’t need to be cut again this year. I hacked about a bazillion volunteer Rose of Sharon bushes out of the front flower bed.
There’s more to do, fertilizing and getting empty pots back into the shed, for instance. We just ran out of time.
I love tending the garden, whether it’s spring–and the ground is ripe for rebirth–or fall, when blooms are dying off and everything is ready for sleep. I love the dirt. (And puttering is a great time to noodle over plots.)
Gardens are so full of metaphor…and wonderful inspirations for writing.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write about the sending down of roots (or balling up of them -if the plant is trapped in a pot). Write about making roots of your own, or pulling up your roots and moving on. Write about severing your roots.
- Write about a character that’s been transplanted. If you journal, write about a move you made.
- Write about a garden in the spring, or the summer, or the winter, or the fall. Carefully choose imagery to depict the season. Does a tree look the same in summer as spring?
- Weeds. Write about pulling weeds in a garden, or culling the weeds from your life. Write about a character living in the weeds. Write about weed. 😉
- Is former US Poet Laureate Billy Collins correct, “The soil is full of marvels…”?
- What grows in the garden of earthly delights?
Good Luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Image Copyright © Mariykaa | Dreamstime.com. Used by permission.
Friday, October 18th, 2013  We experience tens of thousands of seconds–small moments–each day. Even our worst, or our most boring, day surely contains a meaningful moment or span of moments.
Omitting the most special and the most horrible of days, I am hard-pressed to define a single most meaningful moment in my day.
(Is that my ingrained sense of adventure surfacing? I can always find something interesting, even at the most mundane of times…)
I like when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. in the morning and I peek out the window into the back yard. I do this without fail: rain or shine, winter and summer.
There’s always something going on out there–even in the darkest of winter mornings–or maybe especially then: many times I’ve flipped on the light and caught some nocturnal beast in action.
Good morning kisses with my Husband of Awesome™ are also meaningful…
…as is hitting my daily word quota in the early morning. (Yay! Hooky day!) 🙂
Can you define a most meaningful moment of your day?
Some time ago, Real Simple Magazine featured an article where they asked writers to pontificate on their most meaningful time of the day.
The article features a meaningful moment as written by each author, and spans the entire day. Interesting reading.
Here’s Your Prompt
- Choose the most meaningful moment of your day today, and write about it. You could write an essay, a diary entry or a poem.
- Tomorrow, record your small moment for each of the hours of the day you’re awake. Write a few sentences about each small moment. Take special care to record the setting, the occasion, and how you felt at that moment. Be brief and concise.
- Make a date of it! Spend the day with your partner and prep him or her about “the most meaningful moment.” At the end of your date, each of you should write down the most meaningful moment on a post card or index card. When you’re done, exchange cards.
Good luck!
PHoto Copyright © Winterberg | Dreamstime Stock Photos
Friday, October 11th, 2013  I’m reading Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables currently as part of my Project 100–and I’m quite enjoying it. Anne is an imaginative, talkative , young girl of ten who is forever getting into scrapes brought on by her flights of fancy. As the book begins, she’s adopted by a quite sensible spinster woman whom Anne refers to as Aunt Marilla.
Aunt Marilla is a dried up, middle-aged woman who lacks imagination and sucks the life out of people with her discreet and circumspect habits. Sensibility is her motto, and fun takes a back seat to decorum every time. She’s unfashionable, and dresses Anne like a mini version of herself.
But little by little, Anne wins her over. As the book progresses we see Aunt Marilla untwisting her panties and enjoying life a lot more–even though she’d thought adopting Anne had been a mistake from the beginning: she’d asked the orphanage for a boy.
I was just starting to like Aunt Marilla. But near the middle of the book, Anne–now thirteen years old–starts a “literary club” with some other young women. They are required to write one story “out their own heads” each week, and then meet to read them aloud to each other and critique them.
(My kind of party!)
When Anne tells Aunt Marilla, the aunt replies: “Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”
Oh, boo, Aunt Marilla! I don’t like you again.
Nonetheless, Marilla (sort of) brings up a good point: we can’t always write fiction. So, in honor of that, today our prompts are non-fiction related!
Here’s Your Prompt:
In honor of family–natural, adopted and chosen–lets write family stories in a variety of styles:
- Choose a memorable event that you were involved in that your family was not: being away at camp, attending a concert, something on your bucket list, etc. and write a letter home telling all about it. Be certain to include all the parts of a letter: salutation, body, closing and signature.
- Write a newspaper story about a BIG family event: a milestone anniversary or birthday, a wedding, a graduation, etc. Here’s information on how to write a news story.
- Write a journal entry of your earliest memory. Ask family members for their input on what they remember of the same event and incorporate that into the narrative.
- Flip through some old family photographs and choose one or two of the same day that evoke strong memories for you. These strong memories could be good or bad, it doesn’t matter. Just find something you’re passionate about one way or the other. Use the photos as the basis of a scrapbook entry. Lay them out on the page and decorate with magazine clippings, fancy paper, bits of ribbon, etc. Finally, journal about the events of the day. Include your not only the facts of what happened, but your feelings on the topic.
Good Luck!
Friday, July 19th, 2013  We’re having a heat wave, which is no surprise, because it’s July on the East Coast.
Unfortunately, the AC decided to give out today. I’m waiting for a call back from some AC Repair companies to let me know if they can make it out anytime soon.
(This rots, because I had plans for today. Big Plans!)
Instead, we’re sitting here stewing – literally, not figuratively, because at least the basement is a cool 73 degrees. And I have iced-tea brewing – my favorite.
Hope you’re keeping cool!
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Temperature spikes usually make people uncomfortable. Write about heat. Irritable people, tensions escalating, tempers flaring. Write about:
- Tempers flaring out of control in the office, or
- Tempers flaring out of control on public transportation: a bus, in a taxi, or on an airplane.
- Write about a married couple — or a young couple living together — trapped in a sweltering apartment and no funds to get to the movies or somewhere where they might spend some time getting cool.
- Heat also brings up the possibility of passion. Write about sex on a tropical island, or in a candle lit room. Write about hot, passionate kisses. Write about forbidden sex or your deep-in-your-heart sexual fantasy. Write long, torrid sex scenes designed to make your reader squirm, where the climax is, achingly, pages and pages later.
Good luck!
Friday, June 28th, 2013  Most people work to earn a living.
So, unless you write about fabulously wealthy people all the time, I’m going to assume that your characters are working-class folk.
And even if you write fantasy, your character is going to have to make a living somehow–whether it be by herding sheep or in the castle guard–so I think you might find this useful.
For most people, work defines who they are. When you meet someone at a party, you’re inevitably asked, “What do you do?” We’re slotted into pigeonholes at first meet: he’s a computer programer, she’s a lawyer, he owns a plumbing and heating company…
This works for fabulously wealthy people who spend their time on good causes, too: She does books for a soup kitchen, he’s a doctor at a free clinic, she reads to the blind.
And like it or not, what we do for a living–or to fill the time–shapes us. We spend a huge amount of our time in pursuit of it: exposed to the politics, embroiled in projects, learning our pecking order, gaining experience both good and bad.
So knowing what your character does for a living is important–even if it’s never mentioned in the book. Because what he learned on the job is a takeaway to his life. Keep this in mind when creating new characters.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- Write a scene or a story about an important event in a person’s life…but come at it from the perspective of work: you can only reveal things as they are happening on the job.
- Write a story about a person who keeps making the right decisions at work, but keeps landing in deeper and deeper trouble for them.
- Write the scene (or an entire story) about a bitter person who’s got the dream of a lifetime–her dream of a lifetime–and how it ruined her.
- Go large on the work idea: write a story that takes place at a business. The characters can only be seen as how they act on the job – no scenes away from the workplace.
- Write a story where your main character is having trouble keeping his job. This difficulty can be central to the story or not.
- If you Journal…
- Write about the loss of your job.
- Write about all the summer jobs you’ve had, or about your favorite summer job.
- Write about your Worst. Job. Ever. (Or worst boss!)
- Have you ever been profoundly effected by someone else’s job — or job loss? Write it.
Good Luck!
Friday, May 31st, 2013  I attended Balticon this past weekend. (Had a terrific time, as usual.)
Balticon takes place at a hotel in Hunt Valley, Maryland and gets booked solid by the time the event rolls around. On the opening day, the hotel entrance is over-crowded by folks who come from all around loaded for bear with all the things they can’t live without for four days.
It’s amazing to see what folks travel with, and how they travel: like the eight folks that traveled together down from New York in a single car, but got separate rooms because they needed the space.
Then there’s the dichotomy of those who will travel as light as possible, forgoing even a change of clothes (I hope they brought their toothbrush!) so they’ll have room in the car for all the treasures they’ll take home; and those who travel with trunks filled with costuming gear, and you’ll see changed several times a day.
I’ve seen folks come in with several coolers and (little red) wagons loaded with food so they never have to leave the hotel in search of a less-expensive meal. (And NOT at Balticon, I’ve seen these same folks pull their wagons and coolers up to a gaming table so they can play all night without having to leave their chair!)
Here’s Your Prompt:
Good Luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo Copyright: © Clarita | Dreamstime Stock Photos
Friday, May 24th, 2013  I’m heading over to Balticon later on today, and it’s been a frenetic week preparing. Not because I’ve got such a large schedule — I deliberately don’t have much of one at all this year — but because life just got in the way.
I’m sure there’s a blog post/writing prompt for “life getting in the way” but that seemed kind of vague to me this morning. Watch for it later, I’m certain.
So, today’s prompts are rather random. Just some ideas I’ve been playing with that haven’t gone together for one huge post…and they all start with the photo.
Your options: choose the photo for the prompt, one or some of the prompts, or all of them (that might prove interesting!) and write away.
The Random Prompts
- A woman on her honeymoon is shocked to learn a major secret from her husband’s past.
- “Uncle John, I don’t like this.”
- I loved her with all my heart – but every day she became more of a leech.
- While driving to work one day, you decide to drive by the office, and just keep going.
- A woman on her honeymoon is shocked to learn a major secret from her husband’s past.
Friday, April 5th, 2013
I got inspired by doors today.
Doors are like choices, or decisions. Prompts for action: should you open it or leave it shut? Should you step through, or remain on this side?
And there are so many doors, and an equal (if not double!) amount of choices.
What’s more, the sight of a door leaves one with the impression of what might be behind it. A set of French doors with sheer white curtains might inspire a light and airy dining area. A solid wooden door on the face of a Boston brownstone might convey upper-crust society. A green door, surrounded by ivy and flowering potted plants might imply adventure.
But the frightening aspect is that the appearance could be illusion. A giant troll could live behind the fairy door. An impoverished family — self-imploding on the fracturing nature of drug addition or alcohol abuse — might live behind the brownstone door. The French doors might conceal the dark recess of a sociopath’s hideaway.
Here’s Your Prompt:
- As you drive, or walk, down the street today, take notice of doors. Choose one which inspires you and write the story of what lies behind it.
- If you’re writing a story or a novel, make a list of all the figurative doors (choices) which your character might have to walk through. Make the list long and detailed. Choose the most horrific option for your character, and write how he or she resolves the situation. Don’t just write about the scene, show the scene: let us know how the character is feeling — and thinking — about the decision. Was it the right decision to make, despite the horror of it?
- If you journal, or write memoir (or even family history) write a story about when you — or someone else — literally stepped through a door. Were your expectations met or not? Were you surprised by the situation you found behind the door? How did you feel about what happened?
- If you write poetry — make a list of doors. Describe them: their color, their surroundings, their ornamentation. Decide what lies behind each door. Write a poem about the most interesting one, or, write a poem about all of them.
Good luck!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo © Colleen Coombe | Dreamstime Stock Photos
|
Writers - Maryland Writer's Assn.
|
| 