Today’s writing prompt: What challenged you as a fifteen-year-old?
When the prompt is a number or an age, you can adjust to whatever calls to you. For example, with this prompt you can write about what was challenging when you were thirteen, or fourteen, or sixteen. The exact age doesn’t matter. I chose fifteen because that is a pivotal year for some people.
Marlene, Tonga Room, Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, Junior Prom, 1965.
What makes up a good life?
What are the ingredients for a good life? If you could combine essential ingredients to produce a good life, what would those ingredients be? Is there a secret ingredient?
If there was a recipe for a good life, would people embrace it? Would they conform or rebel or ???
If you were going to stitch qualities for a good life into a quilt, what bits and pieces would you need? What would the final piece look like?
Is this even a fair or answerable question? Are there too many variables to consider?
If you could create, cajole, conjure, form, shape a good life, would you? What would it look like. . . that good life many people strive for.
Today’s writing prompt: What do you think a good life is all about?
Who do you want — or need — to apologize to?
Or maybe it’s a “thing” you need — or want — to apologize about.
Write an apology note, something you never need to send nor give to anyone.
Write it for yourself, to cleanse your palate, to lift the burden from your shoulders, to start from a new beginning.
Prompt: Write a note of apology.
Photos of bicycle and mallet by Jeff Cullen. (Click on Jeff Cullen to see his Fotolio photos)
Writing Prompt: Tell about an award or a prize you won.Do you have a villain in your story? Is this scoundrel executing gruesome acts? Is it hard for you to get into the head and heart of the “bad guy?” Does he or she have a heart?
Here’s an idea about how to flesh out your baddie. . . so that he/she is someone you can live with for the duration of your writing.
Do a freewrite. The antagonist was once a child. What were his/her passions as a teenager? What games did they play as children? What delighted this child? Write about his/her first car.
Choose a prompt and write as if you were answering from the villain’s point of view. Imagine you are a neighbor or a relative of the undesirable person. Write about the mean person from someone else’s point of view.
What is the turning point, or the chain of events that changed this innocent toddler into a dreadful creature?
Probably not much of this brainstorm writing will make it into the final cut, but it will help you understand this despicable creature and make him/her come alive.
Remember: There usually is a wicked character in stories. . . that’s what gives stories their heft, their meatiness.
An example is Anna Quindlen’s “Every Last One.” We meet an individual who is charming, likable . . .lovable. Then an event changes everything and everyone. Use a book of your choice as your textbook. Study how the author developed the character of the “bad” guy.
No one was born bad. How did they get that way? You are the puppet master . . . create and control your characters, even the evil ones. Just write!
“When we seek closure, we reach out to the zipper. it keeps us warm, prevents things from falling out of purses and lets us cram way too much into our suitcases. When it gets stuck, so do we. Without it, life would be filled with the endless ennui of buttoning and snapping.” — Helen Anders
Today’s writing prompt: Zipper
Have you heard about varying length of sentences?
Here’s what Mary Gordon says about that:
“One of the things that I try to do is to have a paragraph that begins and ends with a sentence of approximately the same length and verbal structure. . . . in the middle, the sentences tend to be longer and more complex.
It allows for a kind of velocity to happen . . . A shorter sentence you actually have to read more slowly . . . If you are a writer, you have more power than the greatest tyrant in the world because of punctuation. You get to tell people how to breathe . . . a sentence that has very little punctuation, you actually have to read more slowly because you’re not stopping to breathe. So it’s a slowing down and then a kind of build up – a crescendo and then a decrescendo . . . ”
Excerpt from The Liar’s Wife by Mary Gordon:
“The late sun sparkles on the river. She has not given up the habit of trying to find the right words for the color of the sky. Pearl grey, she thinks, and then changes from pearl to oyster, the inside of an oyster shell. And all at once, there is something like a rip in the matte greyness, and light pours through, as if someone had slit a great cloth bag of sugar, and the sugar had spilt out. Only one tree is singled out by the light, and that one called a maple sugar. It amuses her to say to herself, ‘the sugar light falls on the sugar maple,’ and then she wonders if she thought of sugar because of rationing. She believes that she spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about the food she can’t have. She has been told the sacrifice is honorable, and she believes it, and is glad to do it. Only sometimes she yearns, ashamed, for the taste of sugar.
Mlle Weil says: ‘the tree looks like a torch thrown down by an angel.’
Once more, in relation to Mlle Weil, Genevieve finds herself abashed and she feels she must accuse herself. She is thinking of angels and I of sugar.”
From an interview by Alicia Anstead, The Writer, September 2015
Note from Marlene: I love how Genevieve struggles to find the right word for the color of sky. I ponder the perfect description for stars in the dark sky. I’ve heard “diamonds spilled from a velvet pouch.” I love that. Wish I had thought of it.
However you parse your words. . . Just write!
Write about your first car, someone else’s first car, or your fictional character’s first car.
You can use this as a way to get to know your fictional character better. You probably won’t use this information in your fiction, but you might!
Write about a first car. See where it takes you.
Prompt #1: What are you angry about? Mad about? Annoyed about?
Complain! Go ahead and vent. Spit it out.
You can answer from your experience, or from your fictional character’s point of view.
Prompt #2: Regarding Prompt #1, is there anything you can do about it?
If yes, write possible solutions, compromises, ideas, brainstorm.
If not, let it go. Write about how you can release it, breathe it away, banish it, whisk it away.
How can you let go of your fears, worries, annoyances? How can you just let go?