Overall
Writing is a skill – like any other skill, you get better and more efficient at it. Successful writers write steadily. Don’t worry about speed. Think of every word written down as one closer to your goal.
Writing is also a cyclical process. Ideas are generated and get fed back in. Don’t sweat the messiness as this process is underway because readers will never see anything but the final results. No first draft will be perfect.
Day One
Describe one character with 5-7 single sentences that each describe him/her/it in a specific area, such as their love life, education, current situation, occupation, hobbies, problems, etc.
Day Two
For each of your sentences, write two more sentences that each on it, creating a paragraph about each area of description.
Day Three
Write a single sentence about each life area that runs counter to the previous sentiment. For example, a paragraph about how the character really wants children might have a sentence about how they’re sterile. A paragraph about how they’re happily married might merit a sentence about feeling attracted to the new office manager at work.
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P.S. Want to read some flash fiction being written before anyone knew to call it that? Try James Thurber’s Fables for Our Time. Or for something more contemporary, Michael Swanwick’s Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures.
Enjoy these story prompts and want more content like this? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
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Here’s your story prompt for the day. What if the creature depicted in this picture were sentient?
Someone asked me about the pictures I use in this blog. The majority of them are taken from my own photos. I like taking pictures for my own amusement. While some are from my cell phone, I’ve started carrying a digital camera around on a regular basis for freelancing work. I figured I might as well put them to use making the blog look more attractive. My plan is to keep doing prompts on Wednesdays, and as always, I’d love to see a snippet of what you produce if you use one of these.
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Active verbs slice to the heart of a sentence’s meaning, inject action, make prose dance with precise control. Active verbs cajole, captivate, charm, and compel. They lend the muscularity of manual labor, a scapel’s taxonomic precision, and the graceful sway and bob and glide and jump of a dance.
Seek out active verbs, make them your writerly quest. Enlist them in your cause and they’ll help explain a story’s nuances to a reader. Write them down on your shirt cuffs and use them to goad your sentences into performance, or suck on them in your sleep until each dream is a single verb: swim and replenish and grip.
Use verbs, but treat them kindly. Ride them hard but with the respect they deserve. You will find they reciprocate, and verbs will collect in your pockets like marvelous, multi-colored pebbles you can use to build your story.
Writing exercise: Find three verbs concerned with a particular profession and use them in a sentence that never mentions that profession or its tools. Then think about how that sentence might become a title. Then pick your favorite verb and embroider it on your pillow. Okay, I’m kidding about that last. But think about verbs, let them steep tea-strong in your mind, like catfish in the shadows of a riverbank, capable of flicking their tail and vanishing, leaving only a dark trace.
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One of Tiptree’s classic stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” may be one of her most celebrated, leading to responses from other writers like Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See” (Kindle version) and my own “Clockwork Fairies” (Kindle version). Tiptree uses her titles to maximum effect and you’ll notice that each of these beginnings interacts in a significant way with the title preceding it.
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Here are some specifics of how to evoke the senses and entrap your reader (particularly within the first three paragraphs). You may mechanically apply these techniques at first, but if you persist, you’ll find including sensory details becoming second nature and helping you build the story’s world, mood, characters, and even conflict.
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2. Hint at the conflict. The majority of great stories provide the reader with some clue to the conflict driving the story within the first three paragraphs. Here, for example, is the first paragraph of Kelly Link’s marvelous “Travels with the Snow Queen”:
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Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(fantasy, flash fiction) The mouse sang to the moon. He sang, “Great Wheel of Cheese in the sky, eaten by the Mysterious and restored each month to hover again, grant me a favor. Grant me a bride.”
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