Prompts

What if . . . Prompt #9

Take any situation from real life, reel life, or from fiction and change the story.  Start out with “What if . . . ” and go from there. What if you hadn’t taken that job, moved to that city? What if you had gone a different route?  What if Dorothy didn’t follow the yellow brick road? What if the top of the Empire State Building was closed that evening?  Change your story to what could have happened. Change the ending to a well-known movie or book or poem. Use your imagination. Go wild. Be quirky. Write freely. Prompt:  What if . . .

Quotes

Dream it through with Andre Dubus III

“Dream, dream, dream it through. Write more with your body and less with your head. Don’t think a story through, don’t think it out. The danger in thinking it through is that most of us are not smart enough to do it that way. We have to go one moment at a time.” – Andre Dubus III, in the November 2013 issue of The Writer magazine.

Prompts

Develop Character . . . Prompt #4

I’ve been thinking about characters lately. If you are going to participate in NaNoWriMo, how about doing some freewrites now, set the stage for the “real” writing in November. And if you aren’t part of NaNoWriMo . . . today’s prompt will work for you, also. If you have a fictional character you work with, put your character in a setting he or she wouldn’t normally be in. For example, put your conservative character in an improv situation where he/she has to rap. Have your wild character volunteer to help with bingo in an assisted facility. Today’s prompt:  See what your character does in unusual situations.