Let's write!

For today's challenge, describe a group activity from the level of the group, not the individuals in the group. As an example, you could describe an army setting out on a march across the country, and you might say that from the battlements of the fort, it looks like a long line of ants. But you wouldn't talk about individual soldiers in the army and what they're doing.

Some ideas: a play in a team sports game, traffic on a highway, a bus of tourists visiting a scenic lookout, children going out for recess.

Today's challenge: Write a paragraph or two in which your characters respond to a threat. They could fight it, run away, try to talk it down, whatever. The caveat is, this is in the middle of your book, so don't set up the threat or tell the reader what it is or give backstory. This is just the middle of a chapter, so make it feel that way.

Today's challenge is an exercise in just getting words on paper, without any thought about writing a complete story, developing plot or characters, or polishing your writing. Below is a sentence from a book. Copy it into your writing space. Then, starting with it, write whatever comes to mind.

She strained her eyes, trying to see through it, and could just make out possibly a globe of some sort, floating in mid-air.

Today is a non-fiction challenge, because writing non-fiction takes the same skills as writing fiction does: you not only need to be informative and instructive, but also engaging and entertaining.

Your challenge today is to write a bit about something you love. Not a person, but a thing or a subject, for example, your favorite childhood toy, the class you took that you enjoyed the most, somewhere you traveled that you think about when you want to relax and be happy. You could talk about the one thing you like to collect. Or you could talk about a gift someone gave you that you thought was really special. The possibilities are endless.

Focus on conveying to the reader your love of your topic and why you feel that way. It's not enough to say, "I love this thing"; you should be trying to reveal the wonders of the thing to the reader so that they love it, too.

Your challenge today is to do something completely new.

Find a single sentence (just one, no more than that) of prose (not dialogue) that you have written -- anything, whether it's been finished and posted or it's a work-in-progress -- and that is at least twelve words long. Rewrite the sentence in some way you've never done before.

Some ideas:
* Emulate the style of an author whom you've never tried to emulate before.
* If it's a drama, imagine instead that it's a comedy and make the sentence humorous, or vice-versa.
* Write it as a line in a poem. Bonus points if it's a sonnet and you do a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter.
* Switch the viewpoint to second-person present tense. (This assumes you've never written second-person present tense before.)
* Look up synonyms for every word in the sentence and rewrite it using them.

Today's challenge is a non-fiction challenge. We tend to think that "writing" means writing a novel or other fiction, but writing non-fiction uses the same skills. Successful non-fiction is not only informative and clear, but also engaging and entertaining.

For your ten minutes today, first, select a subject area that you are very familiar with -- it might be a favorite hobby of yours, or it might be your job, or it might be some subject that you're very interested in and have studied a lot. Now, select a particular focused topic within that subject. Write a few paragraphs explaining that topic to the reader, with a slant toward showing why it's done the way it is.

Remember that you want to keep the reader engaged in your topic just as much as you'd want to keep them engaged in your novel, so use the same skills you use in your fiction writing to bring the topic to life. You might create a character and show them doing the topic, or you might relate an anecdote about someone doing it incorrectly. Or you might relate the historical event that started the topic in the first place.

As an example, if I were writing a book about how to draw blood (the word for this is "phlebotomy", and the person who takes a blood sample at the doctor's office is a "phlebotomist"; no, I have no knowledge about this topic, it's just an example), I might write about the importance of injecting the needle cleanly and hitting the vein well by relating a true story in which my sister had a phlebotomist miss the vein and what they did to try to hit it. I'm not going to write it here, but my sister said it was very painful and left a big bruise.

Oh, I missed Wednesday, so there isn't much time for a challenge before tomorrow. So, today's challenge is

fast/quick

You can write about whatever that inspires, or, to change it up a bit, type as fast as you can for ten minutes, without stopping, about anything that comes to mind.

Write a couple of paragraphs of a conversation between two or more characters who are in the middle of doing something. Some ideas could be navigating and piloting a spaceship, jogging in the park together, or moving furniture. The caveat is that all characters must say something and they also must be actively doing something -- none of the characters should be idle, observing, or waiting for others to do their part.

Go find a back-of-the-book blurb of a published novel that you haven't read yourself (if you can't find one, just go look at any book listing on Amazon), then spend ten minutes writing as if you wrote the book yourself.

Note: It doesn't have to be the beginning of the novel. It could be a scene in the middle, where anything is happening. This is meant to be just, take someone else's book blurb and see what you can make of it.

Word prompt today:

post

What do you think of that? Blog posts? Fence posts? Snail mail? Something afterwards?