Writing prompts

Three writing prompts from The Writer’s Block by Jason Rekulak:

1. Write about a library or bookstore that has special significance to you. Which authors did you discover there?

2. Write about your partner’s first sexual experience.

3. Write about the physical characteristic you would have killed to change in junior high school.

Writing prompt: Book store

Inside Between Two Covers New and Used Books, Sarah Simpson stood behind the counter, waiting for her next customer.  When Dexter Roberts, a young man wearing a hoodie and skinny jeans, walked up to the counter to pay for a copy of [title of book], she tried to not be judgmental.

Write a scene based on the above sentences.

No Pulitzer for fiction this year

According to this New York Times article, no Pulitzer will be awarded for fiction this year.  An excerpt from the article says “The finalists were Denis Johnson for “Train Dreams,” a book that was originally published as a novella in The Paris Review in 2002 and then repackaged and released as a hardcover by Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Karen Russell, whose debut novel “Swamplandia!” was published by Knopf when she was only 29; and David Foster Wallace for “The Pale King,” a book that was unfinished at the time of the author’s death and later completed by his editor.

What do you think about the decision? Would you agree with The Washington Post book critic who was quoted in the NYT article as saying there was only “one finished real novel” on the list? If you were on the committee, what book, if any, would you have voted for? Do you think giving writing awards is a good idea?

Writing process: Deciding what to write about

In the video “Life & Poems,” poet William Stafford says:

“In everyone’s life there’s all this torrent of things happening; and a writer, maybe one way to say it, would be someone who pays attention, and close attention at least at intervals, to that torrent.…A writer isn’t someone who has to dream up thing to write but (someone who) has to figure out what to pick up out of the current as it goes by. The current happens to everybody, the selection happens to some, and the crystallizing of the selection happens to a writer.”

Writing prompt: What is happening in your life right now? Write about that.

Writing prompt: Silly similes

Read these funny similes and then write some of your own.

  1. Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
  2. He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.
  3. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
  4. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
  5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
  6. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
  7. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
  8. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
  9. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
  10. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
  11. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM.
  12. The lamp just sat there, like an inanimate object.
  13. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
  14. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
  15. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
  16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
  17. Even in his last years, Grand pappy had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
  18. He felt like he was being hunted down like a dog, in a place that hunts dogs, I suppose.
  19. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
  20. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
  21. The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
  22. Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”
  23. The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
  24. He was as bald as one of the Three Stooges, either Curly or Larry, you know, the one who goes woo woo woo.
  25. I felt a nameless dread. Well, there probably is a long German name for it, like Geschpooklichkeit or something, but I don’t speak German. Anyway, it’s a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little square plastic gizmos that close your bread bags. I don’t know the name for those either.
  26. She was as unhappy as when someone puts your cake out in the rain, and all the sweet green icing flows down and then you lose the recipe, and on top of that you can’t sing worth a damn.
  27. Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.
  28. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
  29. Her lips were red and full, like tubes of blood drawn by an inattentive phlebotomist.
  30. The sunset displayed rich, spectacular hues like a .jpeg file at 10 percent cyan, 10 percent magenta, 60 percent yellow and 10 percent black.

Poetry: Ruth Stone

In this New York Times article about the death of poet Ruth Stone, she is quoted as having said that poetry is “emotional opinion” and that, to her, poetry “just talked to me, and I wrote it down. So I can’t even take much credit for it.” Here’s one of Stone’s poems posted on poets.org:

 

Always on the Train

by Ruth Stone

 

Writing poems about writing poems

is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.

Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

 

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;

bird perches, miles of telephone wires.

What is so innocent as grazing cattle?

If you think about it, it turns into words.

 

Trash is so cheerful; flying up

like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.

The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,

squares of clear plastic–windows on a house of air.

 

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,

red and silver beer cans.

In bits blown equally everywhere,

the gaiety of flying paper

and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

(The poets.org website includes forums on everything from how to write poetry to the difference between voice and style.)

Writing process: Getting ideas

In this article posted on http://www.bluecatscreenplay.com, the author provides tips on how to come up with an idea for a screenplay. The suggestions could help with most any writing project. For instance:

  • Set limits on your project. Know exactly what it is you want to write.
  • Read newspapers to get ideas.
  • Watch documentaries.
  • Take a drive in your car.
  • Go for a walk.
  • Take the day off and visit garage sales.
  • Learn a new sport.
  • Ask yourself what’s troubling you.