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Looking for a prompt escape from football recaps and snow?

Looking for a prompt escape from football recaps and snow?

WRITING PROMPT: Test Drive
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings. If you’re having trouble with the captcha code sticking, feel free to e-mail your story to me at writersdigest@fwmedia.com, with “Promptly” in the subject line, and I’ll make sure it gets up.

You go on a test drive in a new car. With the dealership representative in the passenger seat, you pull to the side of the road, turn off the engine, and lock the doors.
“There’s something I should tell you,” you say.

Also, it’s not to late to Reject a Hit. Write a humorous rejection letter of a classic or contemporary bestseller for a shot at getting published in Writer’s Digest magazine.

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And now, after using my high-tech, bias-free methodology of putting the name of every commenter in a bowl (secret formula: as many posts as they commented, counting one comment per post, and assuming they didn’t win the previous month) and dunking a hand in, we’ve got a name.

Laying claim to the pile of Promptly swag this time around: Dorraine.

Dorraine* will be taking home Diane Wei Liang’s Paper Butterfly, Allie Larkin’s Stay, Robert Hass’ The Apple Trees at Olema, William Dietrich’s The Barbary Pirates, Laura Munson's This Is Not the Story You Think It Is, C.J. Box's Nowhere to Run, Michael Moorcock's The Jewel in the Skull, Christine King Farris' Through It All, Jean Kwok's Girl in Translation and Robert J. Ray's The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel.

To everyone who wrote a story, stories, or shared their thoughts in any form in the last month: An honest thank you for being a part of Promptly.

*Dorraine, can you contact me and provide your address so I can get the swag shipped out?

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Great Creative in 2010: Tap into inspiration. Learn strategies for making time to write. Plan your own low key writing retreat. Check out 26 writing contests that can get your book published. Create a book trailer with cinematic flair. Learn Sue Grafton’s writing secrets. Click here to check the February 2010 issue of WD out!

Swag-Offs | Traditional Prompts

Monday, February 08, 2010 7:07:25 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Friday, February 05, 2010

Want to write like J.D. Salinger? (Plus, weekend blizzard prompt)

One final J.D. Salinger post, and then I’ll leave him the way he liked it best: Alone.

After hearing back from a few people wondering about the Write Like the Masters tips I mentioned in my post about what made Salinger’s writing so great, I dug around and whipped up an excerpt about perhaps the most powerful aspect of The Catcher in the Rye: Holden Caulfield’s voice. (A voice so good that while Salinger may have only published one novel, it still sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year.)

And also, for one of the best articles about Salinger in the last week, check out “Dear Jerry, You Old Bastard: My Adventures Answering J.D. Salinger’s Mail” on Slate.

For our swag drawing, I’ll put all the comment names in a hat and pull one today, and announce the victor of the free books Monday. Have an excellent weekend – here’s to writing through blizzards!

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Voice Lessons from a Master Stylist
(From William Cane's Write Like the Masters)

Holden Caulfield is certainly like young people we all know: He has difficulty relating to his parents and he is alienated from all his friends and school associates. Not that young people don’t have friends; on the contrary, they have on average more friends than their parents and adults in general; but the fact is that young people often feel alienated from their world and from the older generation. They often move through adolescence feeling that no one understands them, even their best friends. This may be one reason why Holden appeals so strongly to young people. On analysis it’s clear that he has no deep relationships, and no personal connection with anyone other than his little sister, Phoebe. He is, as Christopher Booker has pointed out, a man who wanders from person to person without making any significant connection. For many young people, this is precisely what adolescence feels like.

Another characteristic that makes Holden Caulfield come alive for readers of all generations is his unique and facetious voice. In fiction and nonfiction, voice refers to the feeling and tone of writing, a certain flavor determined by word choice and phrasing that gives a text dimension and makes it distinctly and peculiarly human. The voice of a writer is usually easier to hear in first-person texts because third-person narratives so often mimic the “beige voice” of an objective reporter. With first person it’s usually easier to be intimate, unique, and quirky; indeed, open any page of The Catcher in the Rye and you’ll hear Holden’s voice loud and clear.

Salinger makes use of teen barbarisms and he employs numerous leitmotifs, that is, words or phrases that recur with a character and lend him personality. F. Scott Fitzgerald used the same technique in The Great Gatsby (1925) (one of Salinger’s favorite books) where an effective leitmotif was Gatsby’s habit of calling people “old sport”—a phrase that did more to characterize him as affected upper crust than it did to describe the people he addressed. Similarly, in The Catcher in the Rye we have the often repeated goddamn, madman, and phoney. Such words characterize Holden more than the people he describes. The use of leitmotifs is one way Salinger achieves a unique voice for his protagonist. The frequent use of italics, careful attention to diction (general word choice), and repetition all add to the sound of Holden’s voice. For example, “The terrible part, though, is that I meant it when I asked her. That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.” This passage from the end of chapter 17 illustrates the use of italics, careful word choice, and repetition, helping maintain the intimate and unique sound of Holden’s voice. No one used voice better than Salinger, and if you pay attention to the way he captures the voice of his main character in The Catcher in the Rye—as consistently and saliently as Twain does in Huckleberry Finn—you’ll surely be learning the technique from a master.

(For more about the book, which features sections on everyone from Dostoevsky to King, click here.)

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WRITING PROMPT: The Wait is Over
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings. If you’re having trouble with the captcha code sticking, feel free to e-mail your story to me at writersdigest@fwmedia.com, with “Promptly” in the subject line, and I’ll make sure it gets up.

After a year’s wait, you finally strike—it's yours. But once you get home, you discover that it’s nothing—nothing—like you thought it’d be.

Traditional Prompts

Friday, February 05, 2010 6:09:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [3]

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

What bestseller would you have rejected? Now is your chance!

In our March/April issue, which hits newsstands Feb. 23, we feature a new call to arms: Reject a Hit.

While combing through our dusty archives for the 90 Secrets of Bestselling Authors feature that ran in our 90th anniversary issue, WD Editor Jessica Strawser stumbled upon a series of funny and intriguing rejection letters of yesteryear—which generated an idea.

Every so often, you hear about how the latest book was rejected countless times before it sold a gazillion copies and sprung up on every type of “–seller” list known to man. So let’s step into the role of the unconvinced, perhaps even curmudgeonly editor: What harsh rejection letters might the authors of some of our favorite books—be them legendary or contemporary—have had to endure?

Humorously reject a hit in 400 words or fewer and send your piece to wdsubmissions@fwmedia.com with “InkWell: Reject a Hit” in the subject line, or post it here. Some of our favorites could appear in a future issue of WD.

Behold, for instance, this troubling letter (featured in the upcoming magazine), discovered in a fictional steamer trunk in the attic of our archives:

Also, registration is now open for the Writer’s Digest Editors' Intensive that takes place March 13-14 at our headquarters in Cincinnati. The event features a full day of workshops, Q&As, info on approaching and querying literary agents and publishers, info about building blogs and using social media, and a reception. Perhaps the coolest feature: Each attendee also gets a one-on-one critique with an editor regarding the first 50 pages of his/her manuscript. Click here to learn more – hope to see you there!

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WRITING PROMPT
Feel free to send your piece to wdsubmissions@fwmedia.com or post your response (400 words or fewer) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings (next one: Friday). If you’re having trouble with the captcha code sticking and you’d like your story to appear here, make a note of that and e-mail your story to the submissions address, and I’ll make sure it gets up.

Reject a hit!

Traditional Prompts | WD Mag Wednesday

Wednesday, February 03, 2010 6:38:09 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [4]

Monday, February 01, 2010

Your Monday Creativity Wake-Up Prompt: The Man Who Speaks in Poems

Here’s to the start of a new writing week (and, to the pending premiere of Lost)!

WRITING PROMPT: The Man Who Speaks in Poems
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below.

By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings (how about we do one Friday?). If you’re having trouble with the captcha code sticking, feel free to e-mail your story to me at writersdigest@fwmedia.com, with “Promptly” in the subject line, and I’ll make sure it gets up.

Write a prose story about a man who speaks only in poems.

Photo: (c) Surrealmuse.com

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Get Creative in 2010: Tap into inspiration. Learn strategies for making time to write. Plan your own low key writing retreat. Check out 26 writing contests that can get your book published. Create a book trailer with cinematic flair. Learn Sue Grafton’s writing secrets. Click here to check the February 2010 issue of WD out!

Traditional Prompts

Monday, February 01, 2010 7:18:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [17]

Friday, January 29, 2010

What is it About The Catcher in the Rye? (Here’s to You, J.D. Salinger)

At the age of 91, J.D. Salinger died Wednesday.

I remember being 16 and reading a book with a bizarre carousel horse on the cover, and being completely taken, wooed, left mumbling things about “phonies” and wishing I knew what a hound’s-tooth jacket looked like so I could work on the swift acquisition of one.

But at work yesterday, as I thought about Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye, I stopped dead when I couldn’t remember why: What made the book so good in the first place?

I pondered it on the way home—was it Holden? The writing? The plot, the metaphors, the conclusion? Hell, was it the setting? (For more on the mechanics, I’ve discovered that Write Like the Masters has some solid insights into Salinger’s prose.)

Later, the question surfaced again. It’s been said that the book was merely like a toy or a timepiece, something you were lucky to get a hold of at a specific moment in your life: the right book at the right time.

And now that he’s gone, there’s a lot of talk again about the habits of the author himself, which complicates such wondering. A recluse, rumored to do strange things (a taste for urine?) in his strange home as he wrote off the world in pursuit of strange things we may never know. (Former WD Editor Maria Schneider and I talked about him every so often, deeming him the “holy grail” of writing magazine interviews, something you could aspire to, but never would really get.)

When I finally reached my computer late last night, it occurred to me why I like the book, and Salinger, so much.

Who cares that he did whatever he may have done in his self-imposed exile, or that if I had written to pitch an interview, he never would have written back. Who cares if Catcher was a literary mirror to some for teen angst, the perfect book for the right moment in time—after all, I wonder if hitting that one moment is all most of us can hope for anyway, as writers, and as readers.

At the end of the day, my own love for the book is pretty selfish: Catcher, like all books that strike writer-types, has an energy that can make you want to write.

And back then, just like today, when merely starting to write anything can seem like an impossible task in the face of everything else that’s going on (when I was 16 I believe it was standardized tests, skateboarding and the dissolution of month-long relationships), I think that’s a pretty great thing.

Even if I never did find my own hound’s-tooth jacket.

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WRITING PROMPTS: Literary Roadshow—J.D. Salinger Edition
In 500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring, write a story inspired by or including the following (from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye). Feel free to take the prompts home or post your responses in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings.

“You’re sorry. You’re sorry. That’s very funny,” she said. She was still sort of crying, and all of a sudden I did feel sort of sorry I’d said it.
“C’mon, I’ll take ya home. No kidding.”
“I can go home by myself, thank you. If you think I’d let you take me home, you’re mad. No boy ever said that to me in my entire life.”

And/Or:

“Daddy’s going to kill you. He’s going to kill you,” she said.
I wasn’t listening, though. I was thinking about something else—something crazy. “You know what I’d like to be?” I said. "You know what I’d like to be?”

Literary Roadshow

Friday, January 29, 2010 5:46:19 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [4]

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Ingredients of Solid Scenes

OK, OK, so I know this isn’t technically from WD mag on WD Mag Wednesday, but it’s from WD, right? After browsing some of the WritersOnlineWorkshops.com courses, I pulled this intriguing bit from the Novel Writing: Scene Fundamentals course as a nice breakdown for newer scribes (or as a good refresher) of, well, the key fundamentals of scenes. And as always, a prompt shall follow.

Onward!

(If you’re interested in this WOW course or other ones, a fresh batch starts tomorrow and can be found here; enter the code JAN10 to grab a friend-of-Promptly 15 percent discount from this course or a slew of others.)

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There is no magic formula for a scene. Like a recipe, each scene is going to require different quantities of the ingredients that comprise it, depending on the intention of the scene and the goals of the novel you are writing. To this end, scene writing is simply a breaking down of the different craft elements and an understanding of the way in which they intertwine. Many of you might simply rely on your writerly intuition to accomplish this balance, but for those of us who struggle with the “how much is too much” conundrum, it’s important to provide a clear checklist of what a scene should contain:

    * Action: This is perhaps the most fundamental element of a scene. Something has to happen. And that something has to compel the eyeballs, as yours are being compelled now, to scan to the end of each and every sentence. Scenes function a bit as a chain reaction; one scene builds upon another, upon another, upon another until we get a full sense of the world inside your novel—or, as Blake might say, the grains of sand that make up your fictional beach. How is the action of this scene related to the overarching plot of your novel? Are you revealing in this scene that your lawyer, a main character, once considered shy and reclusive by the other characters and your narrator, is really a lecherous cad, making moves on his assistant and astounding the reader with new, unexpected information? Well, you sure can. But how do you do it? Does he call her into his office and make a speech, or does he just act creepy, smell her hair a bit when he thinks she’s not paying attention? Stare at her cleavage when she’s fixing the copier, maybe? Your call. But make it memorable, because this guy is secretive about his creepy activities. His actions might reveal his intentions, whether he wants them to, or not.
    * Characters and their baggage: By characters, I don’t simply mean flat, two-dimensional characters. They must have a complex history, desires, and motivations. And by baggage, I mean that your characters must have histories and desires; they must want something—both in the short-term (the scene) and the long-term (the novel/story). A story about a barber in a hair cutting contest is much more interesting if the barber is blind. What stands in your character’s way? What understanding of the character will the reader take away from the scene that will help them decipher the rest of your novel? What will your characters say (dialogue)? And what are they thinking (indirect speech)?
    * Setting: Each scene must make the physical setting jump off the page for the reader. What does the terrain look like? Feel like? Smell like? Remember, too, that setting is often used to create a mood or a tone of the scene. A story that begins “on a dark and stormy night” will certainly be darker in tone than one that begins on a “bright and fragrant spring morning.” Our lecherous attorney from Bullet Point Number One might be set most convincingly in a cramped, humid office space, dark and dank enough to make everyone hot and bothered, whether or not they share his sweaty desires. If he’s a twisted creep, after all, chances are he’s not a particularly gifted attorney with a spacious, wood-paneled office and expensive art on the walls. He’s an ambulance chaser with a poor record of catching those ambulances; or maybe he’s a divorce lawyer, but one that isn’t so great at keeping his hands off the merchandise. Does a big sign reading “Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe” light up the entryway in blinking neon? If it does, then that decision is part of your setting.
    * Point of View: The POV character functions, in essence, as the reader’s eyes and ears in the fictional world. We see the story through the perspective of that individual character, or, to put in another way, we’re in that character’s “head.” Decide which POV character is the best fit for your scene. Who is going to provide the best perspective, details, and insights? And, importantly, will that character actually be present at your fiction’s critical moments? If you want the climactic courtroom scene to be described, bomb-filled backpack being discovered in the corner and all, your POV detective will need to be in the observer’s gallery of the courtroom. Or maybe the judge should describe the story … you get the picture, but your readers won’t get it if the POV character you’ve created for them can’t be available to them at the right times.
    * Conflict: Have you ever listened to someone tell a story that seemed to go on and on and on with no real point or purpose? My Aunt Kathy recently told a story about her neighbor’s cat Pumpkin and how she’s always doing the darndest things. Pumpkin jumps up on window sills and takes naps in the old dog house in the garden. Pumpkin chases rabbits in the yard, and she likes to play with the other neighborhood cat, Sam, who is black and white. Kathy spent a full twelve minutes describing Pumpkin’s coat, which, would you believe, is orange? Have you fallen asleep yet? If not, keep in mind that this is how your scene will read if you have not thought to include a conflict or a complication in the scene. Maybe Aunt Kathy’s neighbor, Bart, is a dog person. Hates cats, as a matter of fact. And Bart doesn’t find Pumpkin’s intrusions into his rabbit farm to be amusing at all. Did Pumpkin’s owner ever actually sign the paperwork for that restraining order against Bart? If not, Pumpkin might be toast. Now you’ve got a conflict worth exploring.
    * Text/Subtext: Hemingway once said, “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.” What he means is that if what you’ve written is written carefully, your reader will be able to read further into your story, beyond what is immediately written. The adage “less is more” is useful when writing your scenes. Don’t give too much away; practice the art of subtlety. Remember, you are learning to trust your readers to read closely, to intuit that your antagonist is evil because of his dark and penetrating eyes or his menacing looks.

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WRITING PROMPT: Up in the Air
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings.

A thud.
On the plane, everyone looks around.
Another thud.
And another.
Then, a knocking from below.

Traditional Prompts | WD Mag Wednesday

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 7:22:03 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [3]

Monday, January 25, 2010

Your Monday Creativity Wake-Up Prompt

They come from cafes, malls, parks and trains. They can border on the bizarre. They can be like putting a puzzle together, or chipping a statue out of stone with only a face, or perhaps a hand, poking out to guide you.

Let’s take a stab at an occasional Stolen Dialogue prompt series—basically, snippets of dialogue overheard in the real world. Perhaps as a remnant of my reporter days, if a louder-than-normal conversation is happening nearby, I often jot down a few lines of stray conversation to decode and use as a mini writing challenge, or to get a feel for a different dialogue beat. Here, if you’re up for it, is a snippet from last weekend—and here’s to hoping we all have productive writing weeks.

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WRITING PROMPT: Newfangled
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings.

“It’s new, but it doesn’t look new.”
“It never did.”
“They never do.”

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Great Creative in 2010: Tap into inspiration. Learn strategies for making time to write. Plan your own low key writing retreat. Check out 26 writing contests that can get your book published. Create a book trailer with cinematic flair. Learn Sue Grafton’s writing secrets. Click here to check the February 2010 issue of WD out!

Stolen Dialogue

Monday, January 25, 2010 7:15:22 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [8]

Friday, January 22, 2010

Surviving a Writing Group (plus weekend prompt)

If you’ve ever been involved in a writing group, you know things can get awkward. Part of that awkwardness tends to take the form of silence—the nemesis of any writer whose piece has just been read.

In my first writing group, in between twirled thumbs and wall-stares, I realized that (well, most of the time) it’s not the spectacularly bad quality of your piece that stifles your peers. It’s often the fact that developing a language for critiquing, and greasing the wheels of the dialogue, can be monstrously hard. But once you do, the group run smoother, members are left less haunted by nonresponses, and in the end, everyone gets more from your meetings.

Writing groups are on my mind because Kelly Nickell, the executive editor of WD Books who sits across from me, periodically spotlights one of her favorite releases on the WD homepage as a Kelly’s Pick. After reading her post featuring Becky Levine’s Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide, I nabbed a copy of the book from one of the displays near her desk, and was intrigued by the worksheets inside.

For your critiquing pleasure, I’ve posted some points below from the worksheet on fiction. Here’s to hoping it might help fill some of the silent spaces in your own group …

(For the complete worksheet, drop by the Kelly's Pick page, or click here to check out the book.)

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Plot
• Can you identify the hero’s overall goal? Describe it here or note that you aren’t seeing it clearly. What steps is the hero taking to achieve that goal?
• What are the cause-and-effect story reasons behind the characters’ actions?
• What are the subplots in the story? What connections has the author made between these subplots and the hero’s main plot?

Character
• How do the hero and other characters react to the world around them? How do they respond to each others’ dialogue and to the actions and events taking place?
• How has the author portrayed her characters as real, layered people?
What complex and contradictory traits do the characters possess?
• What actions do you see that don’t match the character development the author has created in the story so far? What story reasons, if any, does the author give for these shifts?

Voice and Point of View
• How would you describe the voice of the story? What kind of personality do the voice and point of view evoke?
• Where do you see places that the narrator slips out of her own point of view? If the story is told in multiple points of view, track where and how the shifts are made clear and where they may be confusing.

Dialogue
• What do the dialogue beats tell you about the characters? How do the beats layer in extra meaning to the characters’ spoken words?
• How is information revealed through dialogue? Can you show the author any places she may have used dialogue to dump too much information all in one chunk? How can the author trim this information, and where can she weave it through the story?

Description
• How many details does the author use in her descriptions? Are there places the author could trim the words used to convey a character’s appearance or a setting?
• How well does the author paint a picture of her characters? What kind of image do you see when you first meet a character in the story?

Scene Structure
• What does the author do to keep tension rising across a scene? How does the author increase the level of tension to keep the reader turning pages?

Best of luck at your writing group!

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WRITING PROMPT: That Damn Cat
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings.

You could have done it. It all should have been simple.
“If it hadn’t been for that damn cat …” he mumbles.

Traditional Prompts

Friday, January 22, 2010 8:36:58 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [5]

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Up for a Writing Challenge?

Promptly regulars Mark James and Martha Warner are embarking upon a challenge that’s intense, awesome and perhaps even a bit insane (the good kind): They’re planning to tackle every Promptly prompt in 2010. Branding the effort The 144 Club, here are excerpts from Martha’s blog post (I’ll try not to steal too much of it so you can check out the full entry here).

“Back in November Mark James and myself committed to writing on the Promptly blog (comments section) with each prompt posted by Zac. It was fun, enlightening, and stretched my writing boundaries. We enjoyed ourselves so much that month we decided to continue.

“To give it an added dimension, for the beginning of a new year, Mark came up with this brilliant idea of the 144 Club.

1. Write to as many of Zac’s posts/prompts in 2010 as possible. Without any major life issues, we can safely say all of them.

2. For each prompt we post, we put a dollar in a jar. (Which keeps us accountable for writing on a regular basis.) If we forget to use the must-have [a predetermined element that needs to be in each story], it’s two bucks.

3. At the end of 2010 we will donate to a charity.

“The point being we will have 144 stories EACH to potentially make and mold into something bigger. Who knows where the next big story will come from? I don’t. So, I’m taking this opportunity (and good excuse) to write three times per week. In the end, we’ll do a little good for someone and a lot of good for our creative selves.”

I’m excited to be a part of the project, and I’m going to brainstorm some ways to match their efforts (donating books/materials to a charity? Matching funds?). Here’s to hoping my prompt generator can keep up with them—and you, if you want to get on board …

And don’t forget, if you’re in Cincinnati tonight, stop by and party with the crew of WD! Expect networking, giveaways, and last but surely not least, birthday cake—with our 90th anniversary magazine cover printed on it. (Remember the fuss I was making about the shiny silver ink? That’s right: Now it’s edible!)

Hope to see you there.

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WRITING PROMPT: Dining Room Enigmas
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below. By posting, you’ll be automatically entered in our occasional around-the-office swag drawings.

He takes his fifth drink and coughs. His companion takes his first and kisses a waitress on the cheek. Across the room, your associate’s palms sweat as she prepares to tell them the truth.

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Great Creative in 2010: Tap into inspiration. Learn strategies for making time to write. Plan your own low key writing retreat. Check out 26 writing contests that can get your book published. Create a book trailer with cinematic flair. Learn Sue Grafton’s writing secrets. Click here to check the February 2010 issue of WD out!

Traditional Prompts | The 144 Club

Wednesday, January 20, 2010 7:46:46 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [7]

Monday, January 18, 2010

Your Monday Creativity Wake-Up Prompt

Happy MLK Day, everyone.

Here's to hoping 2010 is treating you and your writing well. I'll be back Wednesday with a full post.

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WRITING PROMPT: The Broadcast Boon
Feel free to take the following prompt home or post your response (500 words or fewer, funny, sad or stirring) in the Comments section below.

You’ve never done it before, but this time you call in to the radio station. You win something you didn't anticipate—or want.

Get Creative in 2010: Tap into inspiration. Learn strategies for making time to write. Plan your own low key writing retreat. Check out 26 contests that can get your book published. Create a book trailer with cinematic flair. Learn Sue Grafton’s writing secrets. Click here to check the February 2010 issue of WD out!

Traditional Prompts

Monday, January 18, 2010 6:35:24 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [5]

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