Creative Writing
Content
Creative Writing - Basic Principles
Developing your writing style To be a good creative writer, it’s not necessary to have a vivid imagination, though that helps a lot. Many great writers of the English Language weren’t particularly creative, instead, they honed down their technique and style to garner interest in their stories. The greatest thing about creative writing is that it’s all yours (unless of course, you decide to plagiarize, which would completely defeat the purpose). But to be a good creative writer, the most important thing is practice. There are four things to keep in mind while writing a story or play. These are: 1) 2) 3) 4) Plot Characterization Dialogues Theme
These are the basic things required to write a story, but the tackling of the concept is where many would-be writers lag behind. Developing one’s writing style takes time, patience, and constant practice. Attempting too much, or writing too consciously may hamper your prose, not improve them. Here are a few ways you can improve your writing style and add color to your work. 1) Read: Reading can help improve your writing style immensely. There’s nothing wrong with being influenced by a certain author’s writing technique, in fact, you can even take a certain style a few steps further. Write: Without constant writing practice you can’t expect you creative writing skills to improve. Write constantly, even if you think your work is awful. It’s not necessary to stick to one genre even; experiment and innovate. There is a great possibility you’ll latch on to your individual style soon enough. Be natural: Use the language and words that come naturally to you. Opening a thesaurus and taking our difficult words will not make your writing better; in fact it makes it pedantic and pretentious. Be concise and clear: nobody knows what you want to say better than you do, and most of the time simple, clear sentences make more of an impact than heavy longwinded phraseology. Avoid being clichéd: try to craft original new sentences. Steer clear from done-to-death wordings and metaphors. You can create interest in your writing by being spunky, creative, and bold in your word choice.
2)
3)
4) 5)
Creating Realistic Characters
You can create complex well rounded characters easily by asking yourself questions about what type of person you wish to create. For example, where is your character from? What does he/she do for a living? How old is your character and what family background is he/she coming from? Etc. Following is a list of questions you could ask yourself about your character. 1) What does he/she look like? 2) What is your character called? 3) How does your character deal with conflict and trouble? 4) Are there other people in your characters live? How does he/she relate to them? 5) What is the purpose of your character in this story? Once you’ve got your characters figured out, you can turn to dialogue, and how you can create realistic, and interesting conversations between your characters.
Writing convincing dialogue Writing good dialogue takes practice and observation. People tend to over dramatize, or understate, in either case leaving the reader with a sense of disbelief. Dialogues play a great role in bringing fiction to life, and if handled properly can help create a wonderful piece of art. So how can you make sure your dialogue writing seems genuine and colorful? By following these tips: 1) Listen to how people talk: You’ll rarely find a priest swearing, or an English Professor using slang. Observe the way people speak, and note down any interesting figure of speeches they might use. Good writers are often good eavesdroppers too. Cut down on extraneous words and phrases: real speech doesn’t flow as smoothly as it seems to on paper, but most readers don’t care to read unnecessary words like “err…” “uh…” and “oh.” between dialogues. Use action to highlight your dialogues: Remind the reader that the characters they are reading about are as physical (theoretically) as they are. ‘He said’ ‘she said dialogues get monotonous if they aren’t broken up with movement. Don’t stuff in too much information: It should not be obvious that you are using dialogue to communicate information. In general, apply the three-sentence rule: give no character more than three uninterrupted sentences at once. Let the story unfold naturally.
2)
3)
4)
Avoid stereotyping your characters through dialect: Not only is this offensive, it also challenges the reader’s intelligence. Just like all Irish men do not have red hair, similarly not all Englishmen says “Bollocks.” Author Bio:
Alex Martin works as a staff writer for TermPapersCorner,Inc. Term Papers Corner Provide high quality custom term papers, custom essay and thesis writing service to students and professionals. You are free to reprint, copy and publish this article, but you must keep the copyrights and should not alter anything from Author's Bio.
MAGAZINE WRITING
Creative-Writing Exercises by Kim Kavin
As you now know, there are a lot of skills that go into being a great magazine writer. But at the heart of all of them is usually a passion for writing itself. There's no better way to rejuvenate and enhance that passion than by setting aside time to do some creative-writing exercises. While magazine writing is a creative enterprise, the term “creative writing” refers to a specific style of crafting words into sentences, paragraphs, and stories. When you're working on a creative-writing exercise, you should be more focused on the way words interact on the page than you might otherwise be on things like word count, punctuation, and even grammar. The idea is to set yourself free from the daily constraints of writing 1,000 or 1,200-word magazine features and instead let your writing instincts carry you as far as you care to go, on any subject that pops into your mind. The Web site www.creativewritingprompts.com offers more than 200 prompts that will get you started on creative-writing exercises. If you allow yourself the time to do one exercise each week, then you'll be able to use this free writing resource for four full years of your career. Doing creative writing exercises is sort of like taking a walk in the park as opposed to setting a treadmill's timer to maximize your walk's physical impact. When you're doing writing exercises, you should let your mind wander a bit off track, just to see where you — and your writing skills — might end up. You can do this in many ways, but two of the most common ideas are to focus on a detail or to focus on your imagination.
Focus on a Detail
When you focus on a detail for a creative-writing exercise, you shut out everything else around you and try to find new and interesting ways to describe an object you know all too well. The idea here is to do stream-of-consciousness writing — just letting the words flow out of you and onto the page, regardless of whether they make sense or not. You will be training your senses of observation more than anything, helping yourself to better gather information in the future so that you will have better material to work with when writing articles. You must put aside your notions of grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation when you attempt a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise. Forget everything you know about “cleaning up copy” and instead just let the words flow out of your mind, like water from a highpressure faucet.
Starting this kind of exercise is easy: Choose an object on which to focus, and just start writing. The object can be as complex as your car or as simple as the blade of grass growing outside your garage. The point is to write about that one object, and nothing else, for as long as you can, or for an allotted amount of time that you give yourself (say, anywhere from ten to thirty minutes). You'll soon learn that if you focus on any one thing long enough, you can find many interesting things to write about it. The task itself will be fun exercise for your brain, but the skills you get from doing the task will continue to benefit you throughout your magazine-writing career. Many talented magazine writers focus on details when crafting leads to complex articles. The bigger the idea or concept that you are writing about, the more simplified your lead needs to be to draw the reader in. Writing about a single blade of grass, for instance, could be an interesting opening to an article about pesticides and golf courses.
Focus on Imagination
You can also use stream-of-consciousness writing exercises to jog your imagination. This is obviously most helpful to writers of fiction, but nonfiction magazine writers who do these kinds of exercises tend to find them helpful in terms of broadening their capacity to come up with new and interesting article ideas. One prompt from the site www.creativewritingprompts.com is a good example of this type of exercise: “Use the first line of any nursery rhyme to tell a story.” You can certainly imagine any kind of story you want with this exercise, but in letting your ideas flow onto the page, you in many cases will see patterns and ideas that you may have subconsciously been working on all along. If nothing else, you may come up with an interesting turn of phrase that you can tuck away and use later to make one of your magazine articles really sing.
Word Limits
Some creative-writing exercises are not done in stream-of-consciousness style but instead with word limits. These types of exercises are terrific for writers who want to improve their conciseness, particularly for leads and nut grafs. Again, here's an example from www.creativewritingprompts.com: “In 200 words, describe a hot day.” Now, there are plenty of writers out there who could go on for 2,000 or even 20,000 words about a hot day. If you're one of them, then perhaps learning how to pare back your work to essential words and phrases will be a more helpful creative-writing exercise. Is it harder to write long pieces or short ones? Most magazine writers say that it is far more difficult to “write short.” Creative-writing exercises that limit you in terms of word count are an excellent tool to help you craft tighter leads and nut grafs later on in your full-length stories and query letters.
Adding to Your Skills by Kim Kavin
Sometimes, improving as a magazine writer comes from learning additional skills. Your words, after all, are not the only things in the magazine's pages. There are headlines, pull quotes, photographs, captions, and more. Each of these magazine-article elements adds to the reader's understanding of your words, and each can add to your understanding of how to craft great stories as well.
The Power of Photography
Pictures are often the most dramatic element on magazine pages. Readers respond almost viscerally to images, while they have to take time to read and think about words before they can form an emotional response. What does this mean for you as a writer? In many cases, your words will be cut to make room for bigger and better photographs with captions. If you want to write the best story in a magazine, then it has to be written tightly and in a way that complements the images chosen to run with it. Even if you don't intend to ever take photographs to go with your articles, you can practice crafting pieces that work alongside visuals by assigning yourself a topic and then not just writing about it, but also photographing it. This exercise will help you to understand that sometimes, images really do convey information better. It will also help you see that you should save the precious word count you have for information that can't be told through accompanying pictures. Whenever possible, ask your editor to show you a laid-out version of your article, complete with photographs and caption spaces. In many cases, you can use information that you had to cut out of your story to create powerful captions that readers will remember — essentially, mini-stories pegged to specific images that go along with your text. This can be as simple as creating a story titled “My New Niece, Heather.” Snap a few different digital shots of Heather playing, sleeping, and eating, and then write a story to go with them. You'll soon find that instead of spending an entire paragraph describing Heather's adorable smile, you can instead show a photograph of her smiling and write about the toy or activity that makes her so happy. What you'll learn in the end of this exercise is that you can be an even better writer if you learn to envision the entire story package, not just the words themselves. Editors will love you for it!
Practice Makes Perfect
If you do decide that you have a knack for photography, keep practicing. High-resolution digital cameras are coming down in price enough that many writers are buying them and using them to
submit images along with their articles. In most cases, writers receive additional compensation when they offer editors photographs along with stories. Taking pictures is a nice way to earn an extra few dollars while still researching a single article. Why do editors like writers who can also take pictures? You save them time and money. They don't have to hire a separate photographer, and they know your photos will match your story. There will be no miscommunication between separate writers and photographers who turn in words and pictures that fail to work together on the page. You'll learn more about adding photography to your magazine-writing career in Chapter 19. For now, think of taking pictures as being similar to the other creative-writing exercises discussed in this chapter. Simply trying to envision how your words will end up looking on the page will give you new and exciting ideas about how you can write them, or how you can suggest to an editor that they be packaged.
• •
Creative-Writing Exercises Reviving Your Commitment to Downtime
CREATIVE WRITING PROMPTS
Use the creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories. PROMPT 1 Close your eyes briefly. Think of one object that's in the room and focus on it. Without opening your eyes, recall as much detail as you can about it. After 3 minutes or so, open your eyes and write about that object without looking at it. PROMPT 2 A picture is worth more than a blank page. Take out those dusty albums. Pick out photo #14. Count however way you like, but make sure you stop at photo #14. Look at the photo for 2-3 minutes. Then for 10 minutes, write all the feelings that photograph made you feel. Don't censor yourself. Just write. PROMPT 3 Choose a poem you like. Take the last line and use that as the first line of your own poem. PROMPT 4 Electricity is a recent discovery. Think of 12 things to do when there's no power. PROMPT 5 Describe what you feel right now using your sense of smell. If you feel frustrated, write about what your frustration smells like. Use vivid words. Don't skimp on adjectives. PROMPT 6 Write about a weird day in your workplace. PROMPT 7 Moving from one plate to another, and one house to another, is a big task. Write about one of your most memorable house moves. PROMPT 8 Invent a hot or sensational issue and write a news story about it. PROMPT 9 "A funny thing happened on my way to..." PROMPT 10 Think of a product you wouldn't be caught dead using. The company who makes that product plans to stop its production. Write a strong letter to the company and convince them not to take that product off the market. PROMPT 11
List 30 uses for a hanger. PROMPT 12 Think of a memorable character (from a book, film or TV show). Craft a story about that character losing the most valuable thing he or she owns. PROMPT 13 Write from the point of view of a the last tree standing in a forest. PROMPT 14 I once dreamed about ... PROMPT 15 Make this the first line of your story: Catching the signal from one of her friends, Angela brushed her skirt, took a deep breath and walked towards where he was sitting. PROMPT 16 List 20 rules you've broken. PROMPT 17 Create a news story with this headline: Army Tough Guy Trampled by Deer. PROMPT 18 Use this plot in a short story: holiday house they rented turns out to be run-down servants quarters. PROMPT 19 Make a list of the 10 most unusual jobs you are interested in. PROMPT 20 Why would an antiques dealer leave town? PROMPT 21 Write about a time you pampered yourself. PROMPT 22 What happens when two friends visit an old house that one of them inherited from a distant relative? In the house, there is a 100-year old mirror that has never been broken. PROMPT 23 Write about a task, job or chore you dislike. PROMPT 24 Write a story about an empty glass. PROMPT 25 List 10 things you can do with tissue paper. Pick one from the list and write about it.
PROMPT 26 Write about what you'd cook for an enemy. PROMPT 27 Take two people who dislike each other and stick them in the backseat of a cab. What happens? PROMPT 28 Complete this famous tagline with your own: Please don't squeeze the _________. PROMPT 29 Write from the point of view of a spoon inside the dishwasher. PROMPT 30 Write a story on this plot: mailed Valentine card never arrives. PROMPT 31 Why would a trader own a gun? PROMPT 32 Use the following words in a story: college student, crumpled paper, train, laptop. PROMPT 33 What images does this line in one of Gregory Corso's poems spark in you: "They want to make buttons our of my bones" ..................many more @ www.creativewritingprompts.com
Developing your writing style To be a good creative writer, it’s not necessary to have a vivid imagination, though that helps a lot. Many great writers of the English Language weren’t particularly creative, instead, they honed down their technique and style to garner interest in their stories. The greatest thing about creative writing is that it’s all yours (unless of course, you decide to plagiarize, which would completely defeat the purpose). But to be a good creative writer, the most important thing is practice. There are four things to keep in mind while writing a story or play. These are: 1) 2) 3) 4) Plot Characterization Dialogues Theme
These are the basic things required to write a story, but the tackling of the concept is where many would-be writers lag behind. Developing one’s writing style takes time, patience, and constant practice. Attempting too much, or writing too consciously may hamper your prose, not improve them. Here are a few ways you can improve your writing style and add color to your work. 1) Read: Reading can help improve your writing style immensely. There’s nothing wrong with being influenced by a certain author’s writing technique, in fact, you can even take a certain style a few steps further. Write: Without constant writing practice you can’t expect you creative writing skills to improve. Write constantly, even if you think your work is awful. It’s not necessary to stick to one genre even; experiment and innovate. There is a great possibility you’ll latch on to your individual style soon enough. Be natural: Use the language and words that come naturally to you. Opening a thesaurus and taking our difficult words will not make your writing better; in fact it makes it pedantic and pretentious. Be concise and clear: nobody knows what you want to say better than you do, and most of the time simple, clear sentences make more of an impact than heavy longwinded phraseology. Avoid being clichéd: try to craft original new sentences. Steer clear from done-to-death wordings and metaphors. You can create interest in your writing by being spunky, creative, and bold in your word choice.
2)
3)
4) 5)
Creating Realistic Characters
You can create complex well rounded characters easily by asking yourself questions about what type of person you wish to create. For example, where is your character from? What does he/she do for a living? How old is your character and what family background is he/she coming from? Etc. Following is a list of questions you could ask yourself about your character. 1) What does he/she look like? 2) What is your character called? 3) How does your character deal with conflict and trouble? 4) Are there other people in your characters live? How does he/she relate to them? 5) What is the purpose of your character in this story? Once you’ve got your characters figured out, you can turn to dialogue, and how you can create realistic, and interesting conversations between your characters.
Writing convincing dialogue Writing good dialogue takes practice and observation. People tend to over dramatize, or understate, in either case leaving the reader with a sense of disbelief. Dialogues play a great role in bringing fiction to life, and if handled properly can help create a wonderful piece of art. So how can you make sure your dialogue writing seems genuine and colorful? By following these tips: 1) Listen to how people talk: You’ll rarely find a priest swearing, or an English Professor using slang. Observe the way people speak, and note down any interesting figure of speeches they might use. Good writers are often good eavesdroppers too. Cut down on extraneous words and phrases: real speech doesn’t flow as smoothly as it seems to on paper, but most readers don’t care to read unnecessary words like “err…” “uh…” and “oh.” between dialogues. Use action to highlight your dialogues: Remind the reader that the characters they are reading about are as physical (theoretically) as they are. ‘He said’ ‘she said dialogues get monotonous if they aren’t broken up with movement. Don’t stuff in too much information: It should not be obvious that you are using dialogue to communicate information. In general, apply the three-sentence rule: give no character more than three uninterrupted sentences at once. Let the story unfold naturally.
2)
3)
4)
Avoid stereotyping your characters through dialect: Not only is this offensive, it also challenges the reader’s intelligence. Just like all Irish men do not have red hair, similarly not all Englishmen says “Bollocks.” Author Bio:
Alex Martin works as a staff writer for TermPapersCorner,Inc. Term Papers Corner Provide high quality custom term papers, custom essay and thesis writing service to students and professionals. You are free to reprint, copy and publish this article, but you must keep the copyrights and should not alter anything from Author's Bio.
MAGAZINE WRITING
Creative-Writing Exercises by Kim Kavin
As you now know, there are a lot of skills that go into being a great magazine writer. But at the heart of all of them is usually a passion for writing itself. There's no better way to rejuvenate and enhance that passion than by setting aside time to do some creative-writing exercises. While magazine writing is a creative enterprise, the term “creative writing” refers to a specific style of crafting words into sentences, paragraphs, and stories. When you're working on a creative-writing exercise, you should be more focused on the way words interact on the page than you might otherwise be on things like word count, punctuation, and even grammar. The idea is to set yourself free from the daily constraints of writing 1,000 or 1,200-word magazine features and instead let your writing instincts carry you as far as you care to go, on any subject that pops into your mind. The Web site www.creativewritingprompts.com offers more than 200 prompts that will get you started on creative-writing exercises. If you allow yourself the time to do one exercise each week, then you'll be able to use this free writing resource for four full years of your career. Doing creative writing exercises is sort of like taking a walk in the park as opposed to setting a treadmill's timer to maximize your walk's physical impact. When you're doing writing exercises, you should let your mind wander a bit off track, just to see where you — and your writing skills — might end up. You can do this in many ways, but two of the most common ideas are to focus on a detail or to focus on your imagination.
Focus on a Detail
When you focus on a detail for a creative-writing exercise, you shut out everything else around you and try to find new and interesting ways to describe an object you know all too well. The idea here is to do stream-of-consciousness writing — just letting the words flow out of you and onto the page, regardless of whether they make sense or not. You will be training your senses of observation more than anything, helping yourself to better gather information in the future so that you will have better material to work with when writing articles. You must put aside your notions of grammar, sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation when you attempt a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise. Forget everything you know about “cleaning up copy” and instead just let the words flow out of your mind, like water from a highpressure faucet.
Starting this kind of exercise is easy: Choose an object on which to focus, and just start writing. The object can be as complex as your car or as simple as the blade of grass growing outside your garage. The point is to write about that one object, and nothing else, for as long as you can, or for an allotted amount of time that you give yourself (say, anywhere from ten to thirty minutes). You'll soon learn that if you focus on any one thing long enough, you can find many interesting things to write about it. The task itself will be fun exercise for your brain, but the skills you get from doing the task will continue to benefit you throughout your magazine-writing career. Many talented magazine writers focus on details when crafting leads to complex articles. The bigger the idea or concept that you are writing about, the more simplified your lead needs to be to draw the reader in. Writing about a single blade of grass, for instance, could be an interesting opening to an article about pesticides and golf courses.
Focus on Imagination
You can also use stream-of-consciousness writing exercises to jog your imagination. This is obviously most helpful to writers of fiction, but nonfiction magazine writers who do these kinds of exercises tend to find them helpful in terms of broadening their capacity to come up with new and interesting article ideas. One prompt from the site www.creativewritingprompts.com is a good example of this type of exercise: “Use the first line of any nursery rhyme to tell a story.” You can certainly imagine any kind of story you want with this exercise, but in letting your ideas flow onto the page, you in many cases will see patterns and ideas that you may have subconsciously been working on all along. If nothing else, you may come up with an interesting turn of phrase that you can tuck away and use later to make one of your magazine articles really sing.
Word Limits
Some creative-writing exercises are not done in stream-of-consciousness style but instead with word limits. These types of exercises are terrific for writers who want to improve their conciseness, particularly for leads and nut grafs. Again, here's an example from www.creativewritingprompts.com: “In 200 words, describe a hot day.” Now, there are plenty of writers out there who could go on for 2,000 or even 20,000 words about a hot day. If you're one of them, then perhaps learning how to pare back your work to essential words and phrases will be a more helpful creative-writing exercise. Is it harder to write long pieces or short ones? Most magazine writers say that it is far more difficult to “write short.” Creative-writing exercises that limit you in terms of word count are an excellent tool to help you craft tighter leads and nut grafs later on in your full-length stories and query letters.
Adding to Your Skills by Kim Kavin
Sometimes, improving as a magazine writer comes from learning additional skills. Your words, after all, are not the only things in the magazine's pages. There are headlines, pull quotes, photographs, captions, and more. Each of these magazine-article elements adds to the reader's understanding of your words, and each can add to your understanding of how to craft great stories as well.
The Power of Photography
Pictures are often the most dramatic element on magazine pages. Readers respond almost viscerally to images, while they have to take time to read and think about words before they can form an emotional response. What does this mean for you as a writer? In many cases, your words will be cut to make room for bigger and better photographs with captions. If you want to write the best story in a magazine, then it has to be written tightly and in a way that complements the images chosen to run with it. Even if you don't intend to ever take photographs to go with your articles, you can practice crafting pieces that work alongside visuals by assigning yourself a topic and then not just writing about it, but also photographing it. This exercise will help you to understand that sometimes, images really do convey information better. It will also help you see that you should save the precious word count you have for information that can't be told through accompanying pictures. Whenever possible, ask your editor to show you a laid-out version of your article, complete with photographs and caption spaces. In many cases, you can use information that you had to cut out of your story to create powerful captions that readers will remember — essentially, mini-stories pegged to specific images that go along with your text. This can be as simple as creating a story titled “My New Niece, Heather.” Snap a few different digital shots of Heather playing, sleeping, and eating, and then write a story to go with them. You'll soon find that instead of spending an entire paragraph describing Heather's adorable smile, you can instead show a photograph of her smiling and write about the toy or activity that makes her so happy. What you'll learn in the end of this exercise is that you can be an even better writer if you learn to envision the entire story package, not just the words themselves. Editors will love you for it!
Practice Makes Perfect
If you do decide that you have a knack for photography, keep practicing. High-resolution digital cameras are coming down in price enough that many writers are buying them and using them to
submit images along with their articles. In most cases, writers receive additional compensation when they offer editors photographs along with stories. Taking pictures is a nice way to earn an extra few dollars while still researching a single article. Why do editors like writers who can also take pictures? You save them time and money. They don't have to hire a separate photographer, and they know your photos will match your story. There will be no miscommunication between separate writers and photographers who turn in words and pictures that fail to work together on the page. You'll learn more about adding photography to your magazine-writing career in Chapter 19. For now, think of taking pictures as being similar to the other creative-writing exercises discussed in this chapter. Simply trying to envision how your words will end up looking on the page will give you new and exciting ideas about how you can write them, or how you can suggest to an editor that they be packaged.
• •
Creative-Writing Exercises Reviving Your Commitment to Downtime
CREATIVE WRITING PROMPTS
Use the creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories. PROMPT 1 Close your eyes briefly. Think of one object that's in the room and focus on it. Without opening your eyes, recall as much detail as you can about it. After 3 minutes or so, open your eyes and write about that object without looking at it. PROMPT 2 A picture is worth more than a blank page. Take out those dusty albums. Pick out photo #14. Count however way you like, but make sure you stop at photo #14. Look at the photo for 2-3 minutes. Then for 10 minutes, write all the feelings that photograph made you feel. Don't censor yourself. Just write. PROMPT 3 Choose a poem you like. Take the last line and use that as the first line of your own poem. PROMPT 4 Electricity is a recent discovery. Think of 12 things to do when there's no power. PROMPT 5 Describe what you feel right now using your sense of smell. If you feel frustrated, write about what your frustration smells like. Use vivid words. Don't skimp on adjectives. PROMPT 6 Write about a weird day in your workplace. PROMPT 7 Moving from one plate to another, and one house to another, is a big task. Write about one of your most memorable house moves. PROMPT 8 Invent a hot or sensational issue and write a news story about it. PROMPT 9 "A funny thing happened on my way to..." PROMPT 10 Think of a product you wouldn't be caught dead using. The company who makes that product plans to stop its production. Write a strong letter to the company and convince them not to take that product off the market. PROMPT 11
List 30 uses for a hanger. PROMPT 12 Think of a memorable character (from a book, film or TV show). Craft a story about that character losing the most valuable thing he or she owns. PROMPT 13 Write from the point of view of a the last tree standing in a forest. PROMPT 14 I once dreamed about ... PROMPT 15 Make this the first line of your story: Catching the signal from one of her friends, Angela brushed her skirt, took a deep breath and walked towards where he was sitting. PROMPT 16 List 20 rules you've broken. PROMPT 17 Create a news story with this headline: Army Tough Guy Trampled by Deer. PROMPT 18 Use this plot in a short story: holiday house they rented turns out to be run-down servants quarters. PROMPT 19 Make a list of the 10 most unusual jobs you are interested in. PROMPT 20 Why would an antiques dealer leave town? PROMPT 21 Write about a time you pampered yourself. PROMPT 22 What happens when two friends visit an old house that one of them inherited from a distant relative? In the house, there is a 100-year old mirror that has never been broken. PROMPT 23 Write about a task, job or chore you dislike. PROMPT 24 Write a story about an empty glass. PROMPT 25 List 10 things you can do with tissue paper. Pick one from the list and write about it.
PROMPT 26 Write about what you'd cook for an enemy. PROMPT 27 Take two people who dislike each other and stick them in the backseat of a cab. What happens? PROMPT 28 Complete this famous tagline with your own: Please don't squeeze the _________. PROMPT 29 Write from the point of view of a spoon inside the dishwasher. PROMPT 30 Write a story on this plot: mailed Valentine card never arrives. PROMPT 31 Why would a trader own a gun? PROMPT 32 Use the following words in a story: college student, crumpled paper, train, laptop. PROMPT 33 What images does this line in one of Gregory Corso's poems spark in you: "They want to make buttons our of my bones" ..................many more @ www.creativewritingprompts.com
