*** If you enjoy these prompts, or are looking to improve your writing or submit a manuscript, do take a look at my seven online courses… five currently half price and two FREE! (coupon codes on the online courses page) and / or my Writer’s Block Workbooks… now available in eBook and paperback format!
I also run a free Monday mentor group. Do join us and pick my brain. 🙂
Every weekday I post a set of poetry prompts on poetrywritinggroup.wordpress.com and a set of story prompts on the script, novel and short story blogs. As you’ll see by the heading numbers, you may have missed a few but the links are listed on the relevant group’s Exercises page so you can always find them there. So here are your poetry and short story exercises…
Poetry Writing Exercises 1504: Tuesday 23rd October
Here are your four poetry exercises for today. If you enjoy these prompts, do take a look at my online courses… five are currently half price (when using the coupon codes on my main blog’s online courses page) and two others are FREE!
Time yourself for 15 minutes per exercise, having a break in between each one or move on to the next. When you’ve finished, do pop over to this blog’s Facebook Group and let everyone know how you got on. I also run a free Monday mentor group. Do join us and pick my brain. 🙂
Below are the four – you can do them in any order.
- Keywords: happy, basic, approach, epic, bitter
- Random: aware of his / her mortality
- Picture: what does this inspire?
- Tuesday Title: Understand and Get
Have fun, and if you would like to, do paste your writing in the comment boxes below so we can see how you got on! Remember though that it counts as being published so don’t post anything that you would want to submit elsewhere (where they require unpublished material).
See below for explanations of the prompts, they do vary…
- Sentence starts = what it says on the tin. You can use it at the beginning of the poem or include it later, and being poetry it doesn’t have to be exact – just be inspired by it.
- Keywords = the words have to appear in the poem but can be in any order and can be lengthened (e.g. clap to clapping).
- Single-word prompt = sometimes all it takes is one word to spawn an idea. Sometimes it easy, sometimes hard but invariably fun.
- Mixed bag = an object, a location, a colour.
- Picture prompts = nothing other than a picture. What does it conjure up?
- Title = the title for your piece.
- Haiku poem= 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables
- Random = whatever takes my fancy!
Story Writing Exercises 1508: Tuesday 23rd Oct
Below are your four story exercises for today. You can do them in any order. Time yourself for 15 minutes for each one, then either have a break or move on to the next one.
Hello everyone and welcome to the thirty-seventh month of this competition! In September I received 34 entries from 18 authors for the theme of ‘complex’. NB. You can all send in three stories for a better chance of being picked!
Underneath our photo the brochure says, ‘Portugal’s premiere holiday apartment complex’. We are twenty luxury apartments ‘with stunning views and swimming pool’.
He wore silver braces to keep his Harlequin trousers suspended. On his feet he sported battered Converse trainers, rubber soles hanging at the toe. A striped sock was visible on his left ankle; however it appeared that his right ankle was bare. Perhaps it was out of solidarity with the foot that his chest was also naked. His arms had escaped this indignity as they were enshrouded in a moth-eaten woollen cardigan.
She first spotted her mark strutting towards the pier. A good-looking man followed by a couple of lesser mortals.
My layabout husband never worked but he wrote the rules, dictating economy and control.
A compound sentence is made up of two simple sentences joined by a conjunction. Complex sentences contain an independent clause and at least one dependent clause. A compound-complex sentence is comprised of more than one clause joined by a conjunction, with at least one of those clauses being complex. In other words, it is a compound sentence with a dependent, or subordinate clause. So, if a person gets on a bus at 9 am traveling 50 miles per hour going to Newark, and stops for lunch twice, what color are the bus driver’s eyes, and where are the survivors buried?
Alan Barker with ‘Maze of Confusion’
Celia Jenkins with ‘The Complex Nature of Middle Children’