Looking to add some fun to your writing life? You may enjoy this playful exercise of combining words that don’t really go together, then making sense of them to start a story or poem. It’s a type of puzzle based on a fun task I experienced in a poetry workshop years ago in Tampa, Florida, in a program called “The Writer’s Voice.” It helped us warm up our creative juices and generate new ideas—sort of a wordsmith arts and crafts … Read More »

Here’s a strong cup of hot coffee—a writing prompt to get you writing in the morning, or any time of day. It’s a modified version of an exercise I was assigned in a college class on Human Potentials, a field of study made popular in the 1970s by American author Jean Houston. We explored many capacities that we human beings have, including the ability to observe, in a flash, what we see in front of us. As writers, we know … Read More »

(Author’s note: This post contains religious content. It’s intent is not to push a particular religion’s beliefs on you, but to establish a context for the writing exercise.) Imagine for a minute that three years ago or so, you were just minding your business and going about your life when this guy came and turned everything upside down. When he looked at you, you felt as if he knew everything you’d ever done. And though you should’ve been embarrassed at … Read More »

Forty-four years ago, radio and television stations across the country received this on their teletype machines. It wasn’t a test of the emergency broadcast system; it was the real thing. (Hatefulness is the code word that was supposed to prove this was authentic.) While most people heard the Emergency Broadcast System via its tests or when there were severe weather warnings, it was initially built to respond to a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. On February 20, 1971, someone … Read More »

The tag line and inspiration for today’s writing prompt comes from the great philosopher Barney Stinson, who had one rule: new is always better. (Barney was born around 1975 so he probably doesn’t remember much about New Coke. Just sayin’.) Today’s writing prompt introduces your character to something new, and in this case new actually is better. (So, no stories about New Coke.) This could be your character’s first day in the house she fell in loved with and bought. … Read More »

If you never watched LOST, it started with a mess of people flying from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles when the plane broke apart and crashed on a deserted (or so they thought) tropical island. Except this island has polar bears and an abandoned zoo and other people, creatively known as “The Others,” and a tape recorded by a French woman that’s been repeating non-stop for 16 years, and a monster made out of smoke that could beat the anything alive to death. After … Read More »