HeroJourneys

Here is the February writing prompt, from Darren Eggett:

On writing badly

It’s easy to write when you don’t care about quality. I’m not saying that quality isn’t important — it is. I am saying that sometimes we, as writers, get hung up on quality to the point that we stop putting words on paper.

There’s a lot of freedom, and a lot of fun, in deciding to write badly on purpose.

This exercise comes in 2 parts. First, select a genre and write the worst possible scene in that genre. Use stereotypes, passive sentence structure, whatever. Just make it as bad as you possibly can.

The office door was walked through by a leggy dame. A red cocktail dress was worn by her. So attractive was she that I didn’t notice the snub-nosed .55 that was held by her until my face was pointed at by it.

For the second part of this exercise you need A) a character; and B) an unescapable situation.

You’ve written yourself into a hole and don’t know how to get out. Happens to all of us. If you currently have a character stuck in a story, use that. If not, use the first thing that comes to mind.

When advertising agencies get stuck for new ideas they’ll often brainstorm the worst possible ideas (“Listerine also works great for getting sleep seeds out of baby’s tender eyes.”). After several minutes of bad ideas they’ll start looking for good ideas again. Often something generated as a bad idea becomes a springboard to a good idea going forward.

Set a timer for 20 minutes and write your character out of their problem in as many truly bad ways as possible. Actually do the writing — get into the character’s voice, give setting details, let us see the process they use to escape their trap. Try not to spend more than 3 minutes on any single solution — remember these are BAD ideas, so don’t worry about making the writing good — just get through as many as you can before the timer goes off.

Above all, HAVE FUN.

My writing group (the awesome The Pointe Writers Group) recently decided to do online writing prompts and exercises.

I thought a blog would be a great place to do them, to let anyone in who wanted to participate, and to create a fun little social interaction area.

Expectations: People do the exercise and then post it as a comment. Others are free to read and comment on those exercises.

So, here is the first one. I got this from James Maxey at our COWW (COdex Writer Workshop) in 2008. He called it a noun exercise for getting more concrete in writing.

Look around you where you are writing this. Pick specific items that you see and write them into a story. Try to get as many specific items as you can in 10 minutes.

Ready? Go!