writing exercises

Microfiction Practice #1: Witmers and Sheila

May 1, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See yesterday’s post for some background.]

Prompt #211:

Genre: action/adventure
Word: quixotic
Action: balancing the books

Story (98 words, per Microsoft Word):

Sheila’s quixotic pet project – planting an Earth Day flag in the rain forest – had surely been doomed from the start. Her accountant Witmers had said so on Day 1, repeated it on Day 2 and all the other days. Sheila didn’t care. “Just get us the money,” she said. Witmers got them the money, yes. But did he really have to grasp the expenses with such a tight fist? Could he not have reconsidered the truly fatal decision: helicoptering them in, but trusting the guides to get them out – the damned bargain-basement Sherpa guides in their Everest off-season?

A New Writing Challenge

April 30, 2020 by John 2 Comments

Details forthcoming, probably in a real post on Saturday. For now, though: I’ve entered a fiction-writing contest, the first round of which will take place next week. Stories to be submitted to the contest in each round will have to follow these rules:

be of a fictional genre randomly assigned to each entrant by the contest organizers, from among this list: Action/Adventure; Comedy; Drama; Fairy Tale/Fantasy; Ghost Story; Historical Fiction; Horror; Romance; Romantic Comedy; Sci-Fi; and Suspense/Thriller.
include a word randomly assigned by the organizers;
include an action randomly assigned by the organizers (this apparently will be loosely of the [verb]ing a/an/the [noun] format, à la the old Mad Libs game); and
be no more than 100 words long.; and
take no longer than 24 hours to write.

It is, in short (ha!), a microfiction-writing contest.

With the assistance of several Facebook contacts, I’ve come up with a list of 37 “actions.” I also used a random-noun generator page I found on the Web to give me a list of 50 nouns. Putting this together with the 11 possible genres, this yielded a total of over 20,000 possible combinations. I then ran a little program to randomly select 1,000 from among all these possibilities, and you can find that list here (in the form of an Excel spreadsheet).

Of course the contest organizers will have their own lists of random words and actions — lists which they will not publish in advance — so this isn’t a real test. Nonetheless, I hope to practice for the first round, at least: every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll pull a randomly selected combination of those three main constraints from the list of 1,000 randomly selected possibilities. And I’ll write a 100-word “microfiction” based on it. And of course, I’ll post that little story here, together with the prompt which led to it.

(I will not post here the actual contest entries I may come up with, lest I run afoul of some little micro-rule or other designed to guarantee the contest rights to first “publication.”)

We’ll see how this goes. Things being what they are, here and everywhere else right now, I may well opt to continue the experiment through the rest of May.

In the meantime, expect my first practice story by tomorrow afternoon sometime. I anticipate no applause.

A Half-Dozen Words to Bend Your Writing Mind

March 5, 2009 by John 2 Comments

[Last in a series of posts involving six words. Part 1 asked you to define your life in a half-dozen words; Part 2, your life’s work. This one is much narrower in scope.]

This isn’t normally the way I’d start a post — with poetry. (That typically happens only in my regular Friday whiskey river-triggered ruminations.) But I wanted to open with something useful to non-writing site visitors, as well as the writers who stop by.

So let’s begin simply. And if you’re a writer looking for a challenge, keep reading!

Sestina
by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Pretty great, huh? Yet a certain type of writer regards this with apprehension (if not outright terror).

[Read more…]

Line Burners

December 8, 2008 by John 3 Comments

You’ve probably encountered references to NaNoWriMo here, at least in the comments — the so-called “(Inter)National Novel Writing Month” of November. This project encourages people who want to write fiction to, well, do it; everyone who signs up agrees to try writing a complete 50,000-word novel over the course of the thirty days.

(There’s no penalty for not succeeding, and “winners” — anyone who meets the 50K target — don’t win much more than the approbation of peers and a cool badge to display on their Web sites. A few NaNoWriMo participants, however, have gone on to publish what they started and finished there.)

If you do the NaNoWriMo math, dividing 50,000 words by 30 days, you get the average number of words to be written each day: a little over 1,666. It’s a pretty ambitious schedule for people with otherwise busy lives (day jobs, families and other relationships, keeping up with current events, hobbies, and so on). And yet, as I’m finding, there’s a writing challenge even harder — for me — to keep up with. It’s called Burning Lines.

Here’s how it started, with an exchange of comments on Kate Lord Brown’s What Kate Did Next blog. (Kate’s next post actually announced the start of the project.)

Years ago, I’d participated online in what we then called a “round-robin” story. The idea was to enlist, oh, a dozen people or so in a community writing project. We worked up a schedule of rotation: Writer 1, then Writer 2, and so on; each writer, in turn, would add a new installment to the end of a story begun by Writer 1. No deadline for each installment, as I recall, but it was understood that we’d have day to consider and post each one. So it unfolded in a stately pace (as it now seems), over the course of however long it took.

The Burning Lines project adds a whole ‘nother layer to the experience — a layer of… excitement? mania? fear? chaos? disorientation? all the above?

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The Touraine Passenger

September 6, 2008 by John 4 Comments

Flag of former French province of Touraine Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.

(If you’ve no other ideas for how, even generally, to use the word “Touraine,” er, well, you do know by now that Google can be your friend, right?)

Need more details? Read on.

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Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

September 1, 2008 by John 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I said, I’d try to incorporate into the story — somehow — a picture of the two sentences’ author.

If you’d prefer not to know in advance what the two sentences are, and don’t care to see the picture of their author, you can read the first section here. (At the end of that page is a link to a PDF version of the whole story.)

If on the other hand you do want to read the details, the original challenge was here.

And, finally, if you want to read more about my experience of writing a story to these specifications, well, just keep reading below.

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First Lines, Last Lines

August 9, 2008 by John 2 Comments

Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:

First sentence:

I ask your forgiveness.

Last sentence:

I am a mountain tiger.

Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.

Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.

Report back sometime before Labor Day.

Long version:

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