We all know how important it is to find the perfect opening and grip your reader. For this week's prompt , we are going to let you steal an opening line.

Find the opening line from a novel you like or just randomly open books in your home library and jot down first lines.

Either use that first line as the opening for a piece of writing of your own or think about how that line can apply to a scene or character in your novel and use it as a launching pad. Let us know the name of novel the line comes from and the author. If you found more than one first line you really liked share it. We’ll pool these and use some of them for a future writing prompt.

Write a story with this opening line: Everything was going along as usual, that is until...

END LINES PROMPT

We've talked about beginning lines before in our prompts, but how about the ending lines of a novel or movie? Aren't those really the clincher? How about I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (Casablanca) or Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Goodbye (Goodbye, Mr. Chips)?

For this week's prompt, select a book from a random shelf in your home library. Copy down the last sentence, and use this line to begin a short story. Or you may choose a line from the list of movies and novels I've given below as samples.

Post your 500 word story between 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. Thursday, March 10.

Don't worry about quality of writing, this is just a prompt to get your inspiration going. No detailed feedback is necessary, just a short comment.

P.S. I've pared down the list of options below (I tend to get carried away with these things..) If you want to see the entire list of options, see my original post, a bit further down on the list. Of course, you may also use your own end line from a favorite book of yours, or something that calls to you from your shelf.

And at that moment, as if by a miracle, the sick no longer died, and the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished with the morning sun.

~ Nosferatu, the Vampire (1922, Ger.)

THE MEDIATOR BETWEEN HEAD AND HANDS MUST BE THE HEART!

~ Metropolis (1927)

Fog, fog all time. You can't tell where you was going. Only that old devil sea, she knows.

~ Anna Christie (1930)

Yes, I can see now.

~ City Lights (1931)

The son of a #*@ stole my watch.

~ The Front Page (1931)

The Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come. People go...nothing ever happens.

~ Grand Hotel (1932)

I steal.

~ I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932)

I'm sorry for everybody in the world, I guess.

~ Rain (1932)

And Marsh will probably say he discovered her. Some guys get all the breaks.

~ 42nd Street (1933)

Oh, no! It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.

~ King Kong (1933)

…And they've got to tell me that I'm much more wonderful than anyone else because, Nellie ~ Nellie, I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of being just a morning glory. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid. Why should I be afraid? I'm not afraid.

~ Morning Glory (1933)

Scusi! Scusi! I'm also very good at parties! The Gay Divorcee (1934)

But what in the world do they want a trumpet for? Dunno.

~ It Happened One Night (1934)

There is no emperor. There is only an empress.

~ The Scarlet Empress (1934)

It’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done. It’s a far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known.

~ A Tale of Two Cities (1935)

Thank you, sir. Thank you. I’m glad it’s off my mind. Glad.

~ The Thirty~Nine Steps (1935)

Well, well, well, Mr. Beddini, what are you doing in this young lady's room?

~ Top Hat (1935)

She was beautiful when she died...a hundred years ago.

~ Dracula's Daughter (1936)

I’ve got to get more steps. I need more steps. I’ve got to get higher, higher!

~ The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

Stand still, Godfrey, it'll all be over in a minute.

~ My Man Godfrey (1936)

Never give a sucker an even break.

~ Poppy (1936)

Emily, I have a little confession to make. I really am a horse doctor, but marry me and I'll never look at any other horse.

~ A Day at the Races (1937)

This is good for cracking nuts. Isn't it?

~ The Prince and the Pauper (1937)

It's true, boys. Every word of it. He died like they said. All right, fellas. Let's go and say a prayer for a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could.

~ Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)

Sometimes I think it's harder to raise a husband than a baby. Blondie (1938)

Oh, dear. Oh, my. Hmmm.

~ Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

~ Pygmalion (1938)

And when the day comes, I want to stand beside you and see the ships go through the canal and know you built it for all the people in the world.

~ Suez (1938)

Papa, I've come home.

~ Golden Boy (1939)

...Tara!...Home. I'll go home, and I'll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!

~ Gone With the Wind (1939)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Goodbye.

~ Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)

Why was I not made of stone like thee?

~ The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

No pride at all. That’s a luxury a woman in love can’t afford.

~ The Women (1939)

No, not dead, Dr. Kenneth. Not alone. He's with her. They've only just begun to live. Goodbye Heathcliff. Goodbye my wild sweet Cathy.

~ Wuthering Heights (1939)

No, I think I might go on a piece. Maybe to the top of that hill.

~ Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

What man's mind can conceive, man's character can control. Man must learn that, and then we needn't be afraid of tomorrow. And man will go forward toward more light.

~ Edison, The Man (1940)

Well, isn't that a coincidence? We're going to Albany. I wonder if Bruce can put us up?...Say, why don’t you carry that in your hand?

~ His Girl Friday (1940)

Well, we’re going to marry and raise fat children and watch our vineyards grow.

~ Mark of Zorro (1940)

I did it. I did it all.I feel as though I'd lived through all of this before in another life.

~ The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Some fun – and adventure at last!

~ The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

Throw that junk.

~ Citizen Kane (1941)

You can't hurt me. I always wear a bullet~proof vest around the studio.

~ Hellzapoppin' (1941)

Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my valley then.

~ How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Aw, just another hood, I guess. Well, whoever he is, he don't mean a thing to anybody now, much less to me. Say, call Mae and tell her I'll be late, will ya?

~ Johnny Eager (1941)

When I want to kiss my wife, I'll kiss her anytime, anyplace, anywhere. That's the kind of hairpin I am.

~ The Strawberry Blonde (1941)

And then? And then what? What happened after? There is no then. There is no after.

~ That Hamilton Woman (1941)

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

~ Casablanca (1942)

Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.

~ Now, Voyager (1942)

That’s my girl, and that’s my boy.

~ A Guy Named Joe (1943)

You see, Marcus. The ending is only the beginning.

~ The Human Comedy (1943)

I’m not a cabdriver. I’m a coffeepot.

~ Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

And then one day when our first~born son was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes as they once were ~ large, brilliant, and black.

· Jane Eyre (1944)

POETRY LINES PROMPT

This prompt came from From Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg (have I mentioned I LOVE this book??)

I know that in my writing, poetry leaks through. But we all strive for gorgeous imagery in our fiction. It helps set the scene and transports the reader. For this week's prompt, we are going to use a line of poetry to jumpstart our imagination.

Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line (beginning, middle OR end, it doesn't matter, as long as it's a line that grabs you), write it down, and continue from there. A friend calls it writing off the page. If you begin with a great line, it helps because you start right off from a lofty place.

For example, I will die in Paris, on a rainy day...It will be a Thursday, by the poet Cesar Vallejo. I wrote, I will die on Monday at eleven o'clock, on Friday at three o'clock in South DAkota riding a tractor, in Brooklyn in a delicatessen, and on and on.

Every time you get stuck, just rewrite your first line and keep going. Rewriting the first line gives you a whole new start and a chance for another direction ~ for example, I don't want to die and I don't care if I'm in Paris or Moscow or Youngstown, Ohio.

Write a 500 word flash piece, start of story, idea, etc. based on a line you pick from a poem. Below are some samples that you can use, too.

Post between 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. on Thursday, March 17. Don't worry about quality of writing, this is just to get us going. Feedback will not be line~by~line, but just general reactions.

Petals on a wet, black bough

~ Ezra Pound

Let us go then, you and I...

~TS Eliot

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams

~ ee cummings

Our camels sniff the evening and are glad

~ James Elroy Flecker

To the gulls way and the whales way where the wind's like a whetted knife...

~ John Masefield

...through the green fuse drives the flower...

~ Dylan Thomas

Dirty British coaster with a salt~caked smoke stack

~ Masefield

There's a one~eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu…

~ J Milton Hayes

As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

~ Coleridge

The silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.

~ Yeats

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns.

~ Dylan Thomas

Yes! It was love ~ unchangeable ~ unchanged...

~ from The Corsair by Byron

... I have dreamt in my life dreams that have gone through and through me like water through wine, they have stayed with me and changed my ideas......

~ Wuthering Heights.

Blow, blow winter wind, thou art not so cold as a friend forgot...

~ W.Shakespeare

Time lurks in the shadows and coughs when you would kiss

~ W.H.Auden.

I grow old I grow old, shall I wear my trousers rolled, do I dare eat a peach?..

~ T.S. Eliot.

A small bird can freeze to death upon a branch without once having felt sorry for itself..

· D.H.Lawrence.

SYL’S SENTENCE PROMPT

In 500 words or less write a flash fiction story using the sentence below, somewhere in your story. The sentence can be first, last, or in the middle. It will be interesting to see how the stories vary, between the male and female members of the group. You will recognize the line as being from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's and was said by Audrey Hepburn. See what you can do with it!

The prompt:

It's useful, being top~Banana in the shock department!

Post your prompt between the hours of 12:00 midnight on March 24 and before midnight same day. The prompt should be written quick, with little editing. Do not try to make it perfect. Just use your creative juices and allow them to flow!

BEL CANTO PROMPT

In Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, which some of us read, the book opens

with a kiss. Patchett stretches out that opening moment. Here's the opening

paragraph.

When the lights went off the accompanist kissed her. Maybe he had

been turning towards her just before it was completely dark, maybe he was

lifting his hands. There must have been some movement, a gesture, because

every person in the living room would later remember a kiss. They did not

see a kiss, that would have been impossible. The darkness that came on them

was startling and complete. Not only was everyone there certain of a kiss,

they claimed they could identify the type of kiss: it was strong and

passionate, and it took her by surprise. They were all looking right at her

when the lights went out. They were still applauding, each on his or her

feet, still in the fullest throes of hands slapping together, elbows up. Not

one person had come anywhere close to tiring. The Italians and the French

were yelling,<I> Brava! Brava!</I> and the Japanese turned away from

them. Would he have kissed her like that had the room been lit? Was his mind

so full of her that in the very instant of darkness he reached for her, did

he think so quickly? Or was it that they wanted her too, all of the men and

women in the room, and so they imagined it collectively. They were so taken

by the beauty of her voice that they wanted to cover her mouth with their

mouth, drink in. Maybe music could be transferred, devoured, owned. What

would it mean to kiss the lips that had held such a sound?

For this weeks writing prompt, write about a kiss

But not any old kiss. This needs to be a first kiss between characters. We

all know there's nothing quite like that first kiss. As writers, how do we

convey that wonderful, awkward moment? It's not just a question for romance

writers. How emotional should it be? How physical? How sensual? The kiss may

be central to the piece or just a small part, but it must be described, and

the description must run for at least two sentences. It can be a first kiss

between characters in your novel or between any two characters you care to

create for this exercise.

REMEMBER ME PROMPT

Someone comes up to your character and starts a conversation by saying,

Remember me? We ...

TRUTH PROMPT

Write a scene/snippet/sketch/story, whatever comes to your mind, from the

following Hemingway line:

What is true at first light and a lie by noon.

DATING AD PROMPT

If you Like Pina Coladas

Taken from The Writer's Block by Jason Rekulak (the first option, the

second 2 I made up)

The personal ad section of any newspaper is a fantastic resource for fiction

writers, each listing is practically a character sketch in itself,

describing everything from age and weight to interests, occupation, religion

and desires. So what are you waiting for? Pick up your local newspaper,

choose an ad that intrigues you.

You can either:

1. Write from the point of view of its author. Never mind the boring 40 yo

artist who enjoys conversation and walks on the beach. Instead, write about

the sexy 23 yo female ISO generous older gentleman. Or the Rubenesque

Beauty seeking friendly, funny Couch Potato. Or (if you really want to go

out on a limb) the married couple ISO female sex servant/slave for weekend

fun in our beach house.

As you write, concentrate on the attributes that writers might be

unintentionally revealing about themselves (i.e. middle~aged men who feel

compelled to mention their pilot's licsnes, or women who end their ads with

NO LOSERS, NO CHEATS, NO HEAD GAMES!!!) Write a short story or the

beginning of one about this character.

2. If you don't want to look in the newspaper, or if you'd like to explore

this further, instead, write a personal ad from the POV of one of your

characters in your novel or story. What is he/she looking for? How would

they represent themselves in an ad?

3. Write a short prompt about an ad that your character sees in the personal

ads that either intrigues them, angers them, what do they do? Do they call

the number?

GENRE WRITING PROMPT

Write about something that scares you, and scare us in the

process. Make us believe in something that isn't there. Or make us want to

be in love. Or bring us back to the days when we believed in things we

couldn't see, hear or feel. Make us long for a genie who will grant us our

wishes or a horse that flies.

Write a very short story or the beginning of story in the romance, fantasy

or horror genre or try your hand at an erotic ghost story. (See below) Or

work on a romantic scene for your novel or a scene that involves ghosts or

some other paranormal phenomenon that can't be explained with logic.

Post up to 500 words. You can write a 500 word complete flash fiction piece

or post the first 500 words of a longer piece. (Maybe Terri will come up

with some markets for us if we write short pieces.) Remember that these

pieces are first drafts and not meant t be polished writing so you don't

need to write publishable prose before posting. Feedback should be one to

three sentences. You are not meant to spend a lot of time on this.

Need some ideas. Below is a market you can write for, but remember to put a

warning label on it and since you can only post 500 words, you may want to

repost the complete story during a free post week/weeks.

The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories

Editor Greg Wharton is currently seeking erotic short fiction for the

anthology project The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories, to be published and

distributed by Venus Book Club, The Science Fiction Book Club,

Book~of~the~Month Club, and Doubleday Book Club.

Who doesn't feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up every so often?

Perhaps you feel as if you have been here before; you have a strong sense of

deja vu. Maybe you can't shake the feeling that someone is watching. You

can't

believe your eyes, or perhaps, you can't quite figure out what it is you

think

you just saw. Why do you smell roses when none are present? And despite

being

afraid, why are you turned on?

The stories in The Big Book of Erotic Ghost Stories won't be limited to just

the traditional ghost or haunting. It doesn't have to rattle chains, or go

bump in the night. Though they might, and many might scare us if we let

them. The

hauntings in these stories can also be a mood or feeling. Something often

recurring to the mind, not easily forgotten. Memories that won't fade or

scars

too deep to heal.

Form, style, and content may be individually interpreted, but all submitted

stories should be focused both on a haunting or ghost, and be highly erotic.

Pansexual in scope, the stories may contain any aspect of sexuality but The

Big

Book of Erotic Ghost Stories will be focused for a primarily female

readership.

Give us intriguing stories with memorable characters. Of special interest

are

previously UNPUBLISHED erotic stories that meld with the romance, urban

fantasy, magic realism, and gothic horror genres.

ASSUMED IDENTITY

Your character has been living under an assumed identity for several years,

someone has found out who they are. Why have they taken on another identity

and who found them out? What are the consequences?

JUMP START PROMPTS

I picked up these three prompts from The Writer's Block by Jason Rekulak.

It is full of great suggestions for story prompts when you are low on

inspiration. It also has pictures throughout it and spark words, to get your

imagination going. (It is a cute block, too, thus Writer's Block)

Jason Rekulak believes that inspiration can be found anywhere~~in dreams,

highway billboards, newspaper personal ads, the Yellow Pages, restaurant

menus, family photo albums, and bizarre morning TV talk shows.

This is an excerpt from the book I thought was funny, and appropriate:

Follow the lead of crime writer Charles Willeford. Never allow yourself to

take a leak in the morning until you've written a page, he says. That way,

you're guaranteed a page a day, and at the end of a year you have a novel.

1. Trace the journey of a five~dollar bill through the lives of 5 different

owners. What was exchanged during the transactions? How much (or how little)

did the transaction mean to each of the people involved?

2. Write from the point of view of someone who committed a murder today. Do

not mention the murder OR Write from the point of view of someone who had an

abortion today. Do not mention the abortion.

3. Invent a character who sees a phone number on a restroom wall. Describe

what happens when he or she dials it.

Here are more jump start prompts, posted by various members of P&P:

4. Write about a character with an unusual job, but one that brings them

into contact with others. For example, ghostbusters. It doesn't have to be

that unusual. It could be someone who works in a pickle factory, writing

ads about the different kinds of pickles or someone who works with the

blind. Let the job fuel the story.

5. We are all writing contemporary novels. Lets write something that takes

place in a time before this time. It can take place during the Civil War,

before Christ, during the Vietnam War, during the time of Martin Luther

King, in Regency England. Use the time setting to fuel the story.

6. Write about a heart that won't quit. (This can be literally or

figuratively)

7. Start your story with this: She touched the little box in her pocket and

smiled.

8. Write a scene or story that begins with a phone call at 3:00 in the

morning.

9. Write a love story set in Cyberspace. Have the story consist entirely of

alternating chat lines.

10. The prompt is from Writing Prompts Prescription for writer's block: fear of poverty. ~ Peter Mayle at http://www.geocities.com/charlottedillon2000/Prompts.html

Begin your piece with: He/She saw the flashing blue lights in the review mirror.

11. Write a story starting with the sentence: I opened my e~mail with a mix of apprehension and excitement.

12. Within the story, you must use this text: a hot, dust~bearing.

The theme is: endings.

The setting is: Antarctica.

Within the story, you must use this bit of text: a flameless ember.

13. You wake up, go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. A different face stares back at you. Begin your story here.

14. It was Erica Jong who said, If you don't risk anything, you risk more. Write about what this means to you.

15. Write the story of a disastrous family picnic.

16. Take two people who dislike each other and stick them in the backseat of a cab. What happens?

FIRST LINE PROMPTS – HORROR

Use one of these first lines from a novel to start the prompt:

Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his

heart.

(The Picture of Dorian Gray)

Nola lay facedown on her bed, staring at the knife in her hand. (Piers

Anthony and Julie Brady, Dream A Little Dream)

The World had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted

(Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon)

UNFAMILIAR PLACES

A character wakes in an unfamiliar bed or other sleeping place. The

character may or may not remember how he/she got there. It's up to you. The

character may be alone or with one or more others. Begin with this phrase:

So and So (character's name) woke to the (smell, sound, feel, sight,

taste)......

INTERACTING WITH OTHER MEMBER’S CHARACTERS

Here's something we can all have some fun with.

Take any character from your novel and create a scene or a scene beginning

in which he/she interacts with any character from someone else's novel, ie,

the novel of someone else in this study group. For example, Gary, my body

guard, meets Millie in a pastry shop in New Orleans. Or for an even bigger

complication; the coffee shop is haunted by a ghost from one of Joan's

stories, trying to get attention while Gary and Millie discuss creme

fillings.

Of course, these pieces won't find their way into our novels, but it could

spur some ideas and will allow the creators of the other characters to see

their characters through different eyes.

While Millie and Gary are discussing creme fillings, and the ghost of one of

the twin sisters is trying to warn them to stay away from a certain spot

down the street... who was that crazy woman outside plowing people down with

her shopping cart?

CHARACTER 1 AND CHARACTER 2 PROMPT

This is modified from a writing prompt service for romance writers. It could

just as well be a suspense prompt or a sci~fi prompt. Use it in whatever way

it works for you.

Character 1 just stood there, in the middle

of character 2's bedroom (or bathroom or kitchen or laboratory or spaceship

or place of your choice as long as it belongs to character 2), stunned ( or

traumatized, or shocked, or lost in disbelief, or speechless or a word of

your choice.)

LETTERS FROM SUMMER CAMP PROMPT

This prompt came from a Writer Online contest, LETTERS FROM SUMMER CAMP

Write a Dear Mom and Dad letter up to 500

words that creatively describe summer camp. These

letters can be funny, nostalgic, wistful, horrifying,

reflections of the world today, satirical, anything your heart

desires as long as they are imaginative.

VOICE PROMPT – HARD BOILED DETECTIVE

Let’s experiment with voice. Find a voice in a novel that is different from the ones you are writing in ~~ a hard boiled detective might be a good choice.

If that doesn’t appeal to you, use some other voice~~a wise guy’s, someone who would be comfortable as a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel, a cowboys, a bar wench two centuries ago, an American slave. Someone who talks like Dickens wrote might be fun.

Post two paragraphs from the novel of your choice, capturing the voice, and then your own story using a character with a similar voice as the narrator/protagonist. You have 500 words for your own story prompt~~not counting the two paragraph example.

In the meantime, please share excerpts from old~fashioned, hard boiled detective novels, a list of terms~~vocabulary~~ would be great if anyone comes across something like that, thoughts on the style and/or plots of these novels and any other material you think might be relevant or helpful.

Here’s a taste of hard~boiled from Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels.

From: Survival... Zero:

They had left him for dead in the middle of a pool of blood in his own bedroom, his belly slit open like gaping barn doors, the hilt of the knife wedged against his sternum. But the only trouble was that he had stayed alive somehow, his life pumping out, managing to knock the telephone off the little table and dial me. Now he was looking up at me with seconds left and all he could do was force out the words, Mike ...there was no reason.

I didn't try to fake him out. He knew what was happening. I said, Who, Lippy?

His lips fought to frame the sentence. Nobody I ...not the kind ...No reason, Mike. No reason.

And then Lippy Sullivan died painfully but quickly.

I went out in the hallway of the shabby brownstone rooming house and walked up to the front apartment that had SUPER scrawled across the top panels in faded white paint and gave it a rap with the toe of my shoe. Inside, somebody swore hoarsely and a chair scraped across bare wood. Two locks and a bolt rasped in their sockets and the door cracked open on a safety chain.

The fat~faced guy with the beery breath squinted up at me in the light from behind him, then his eyes narrowed, not liking what he saw. Yeah?You got a phone, buddy?

What if I do?

You can let me use it.

Drop dead. He started to close the door, but I already had my foot in the crack.

I said, Open up.

For a second his jowls seemed to sag, then he got his beer courage up again. You a cop? Let's see your badge.

I'll show you more than a badge in a minute.

This time he didn't try smart~mouthing me. I let him close the door, slide the chain off, then pushed in past him. The room was a home~grown garbage collection, but I found the phone behind a pile of empty six~pack cartons, dialed my number and a solid Brooklyn voice said, Homicide South, Sergeant Woods.

Captain Chambers in? This is Mike Hammer.

Behind me a beer can popped open and the fat guy slid onto a chair.

When the phone was picked up I said, Hi, Pat. I got a stiff for you.

Softly, Pat muttered, Damn, Mike ...

Hell, I told him, I didn't do it.

Okay, give me the details.

Here’s a site where you can find a bunch of Mike Hammer excerpts:

http://www.interlog.com/~roco/excerpts.html

This next is an excerpt from Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe in The Big Sleep

Give me the money.

The motor of the gray Plymouth throbbed under her voice and the rain pounded above it. The violet light at the top of Bullock's green~tinged tower was far above us, serene and withdrawn from the dark, dripping city. Her black~gloved hand reached out and I put the bills in it. She bent over to count them under the dim light of the dash. A bag clicked open, clicked shut. She let a spent breath die on her lips. She leaned towards me.

I'm leaving, copper. I'm on my way. This is a get~away stake and God how I need it. What happened to Harry?

I told you he ran away. Canino got wise to him somehow. Forget Harry. I've paid and I want my information.

You'll get it....

The gray plymouth moved forward, gathered speed, and darted around the corner on to Sunset Place. The sound of its motor died, and with it blonde Agnes wiped herself off the slate for good, so far as I was concerned. Three men dead, Geiger, Brody and Harry Jones, and the woman went riding off in the rain with my two hundred in her bag and not a mark on her.

NOT~SO SUBURBAN NEIGHBOR PROMPT

Imagine your most ordinary, bland suburban neighbor. Maybe someone you know now, or you knew growing up. Now, instill them with a story. Something dark, or dramatic, or profound, that happened to them in their life and they keep secret and hidden. Most of us keep secrets. We don’t reveal everything that’s happened to us in our lives.

For example, in my quiet boring hamlet, a serial killer was loose. When they caught him (finally) he turned out to be married and the father of five and living a very suburban, ordinary life (about a mile from me as it so happens). Secrets. And it doesn’t need to be anything quite so obvious, or bizarre. Imagine your chubby, balding neighbor who the deepest thing you talk about in passing is which is the best fungicide for the roses. Now imagine he was a prisoner of war and just never brings up those horrors.

This touches a bit on how little we know about the people with whom we become acquainted – and how much we sometimes assume.

SAID BOOKISM PROMPT

Take a short piece of dialogue from your novel~~around 100~200 words and rewrite it using those awful said bookisms. (You can also make something up or pick some dialogue from a favorite novel.) Let’s see how awful we can make it by using said bookisms and adverbs to describe the emotions of the speaker and to avoid that perfectly good word said.

Here’s some examples of said bookisms from the dialogue exercise Rebecca created some time ago.

A said~bookism is replacing the word said with some other word or adding an adverb to it. People don’t just talk, ie he/she said. They always: replied, whispered, shouted, uttered, remarked, commented, intoned, murmured, wondered, laughed, hissed, muttered; or said bleakly, happily, merrily, snidely, nastily, angrily, loudly, softly, in astonishment, under his breath, with a smile, or ... well, you get the idea. Quite apart from the hilarity that arises from inadvertent Tom Swifties ~~ I'm afraid we'll have to amputate, said the surgeon disarmingly ~~ it is this variety that becomes repetitive and annoying. That's because the reader is constantly being distracted from the dialogue and forced to examine meaningless, uninteresting tags.

http://www.lerwill.net/Margo/Writing/Said%20bookisms.htm

Here’s an article on said bookisms that I found interesting~~ Said bookisms, she growled by Margo Lerwill.

Some of the highlights for me:

The very thing that editors love about the word 'said' is the thing that makes some writers shun it. 'Said' is unremarkable, unadorned, invisible. It blends into the background, allowing the dialogue to dominate the sentence and the reader's eye to skip along unimpeded by the writer's clever turn of phrase.

Because said bookisms are not 'said', they are not invisible to the modern reader's eye. Said bookisms may cause the reader to pause or stumble over the writer's word choice. The last thing the writer wants is the reader stopping and stepping out of the story for any reason, even for a second. Each time you give the reader pause, you roll the dice and risk the chance that he or she won't feel like getting back into the story. If this is an editor, and the writer loses the bet, a rejection slip is forthcoming.

Many successful authors use said bookisms to one degree or another. My favorite fantasy author, George R. R. Martin, uses them occasionally. However, I am not George R.R. Martin, and neither are most writing hopefuls out there. Professional authors with established audiences have already proven their talents for storytelling. When an editor sees a said bookism in one of their manuscripts, that editor is unlikely to fear that it is just the first of many, a sign of an amateurish disdain for 'said.' When a said bookism appears in the manuscript of an unpublished writer, that's one point off in the editor's mind. How many points off do you get before they put the manuscript down? That depends on the editor. Is it worth the risk to you?

There are many fixes available to a writer who has discovered said bookisms riddling a first draft. Progressing from simple to tricky, they are: changing the bookism to 'said,' cutting the dialogue tag entirely, creating a new sentence using the tag, describing an action or the scene in a way that expresses the emotion of the tag, and strengthening the dialogue so it stands on its own.

Here’s one of the examples she gives about how to fix them or the right way to convey those emotions:

· Money~changers in my Father's house! Jesus raged.

· Money~changers in my Father's house! Jesus said.

· Money~changers in my Father's house!

· Jesus flushed with rage. Money~changers in my Father's house!

· Jesus hurled the coin~laden tables down the temple steps. Money~changers in my Father's house!

· Money~changers in this holy place? How dare you turn my Father's house into a den of thieves!

Have fun.

BODICE RIPPER

How to write a best selling bodice ripper.

Let your fantasies run wild. Dream of making mad love to that that hunk or chick you passed at the supermarket last week examining hearts of palm. Think about writing your own bodice ripper or the female fantasy equivalent.

Pre~prompt Activity The prompt is at the bottom, but in addition to the Thursday prompt, please post a paragraph from a bodice ripper if you can find one. (Of course, you don’t have one by your bedside. We would never accuse you of that.) Or post some of your favorite bodice ripper terms. Help get us in the mood to write one of these. Let’s have some fun this holiday week.

I did some searching on the web but mostly found disclaimers that anyone write them and a couple of references to the fact that they are dead. You can’t tell that by my supermarket book shelves.

Definition of a bodice ripper:

A work of popular fiction characterized by scenes of unrestrained romantic passion.

A bodice ripper is variant of romantic fiction, often historical fiction, in which the heroine often loses her virginity by violence. They are typically full of unrestrained romantic passion. Usually the cover depicts a large~breasted female whose bodice is being ripped by a muscular, often shirtless man. Often she firsts resists him, but is later overcome with passion.

The ingredients of a bodice ripper are instantly recognizable. The cover illustration shows a bosomy female whose bodice is being ripped. It has to be fat (what is called in the trade a good read), and I think some editors require that the heroine be ravished every ten pages. The emphasis is on plot rather than character, the action is movement without motivation. The books infuriate feminists, who understandably object to females being repeatedly ravished and often enjoying the ravishment, yet the market for them is amazing and insatiable. The women who read them are avid readers who devour several a week. These are the most successful romances. http://www.elizabethmansfield.com/ezine/article_01.html

Some bodice ripper vocabulary

His ardour bulged!

Could, she wondered, the core of his being be allowed to throb?

frenzy of desire'

alabaster breasts

An example:

Armondo crushed Catherine in his strong embrace, his manhood pressing against her and promising a night of rapture they would never forget. Of course, that was the precise moment that the timer went off on the oven, signaling that the brownies were done. Catherine's breasts were heaving with desire. Could they finish before the brownies burned?

This is from http://www.katyterrega.com/backissues/newslettervII~11.html with a little help from Carol (moi) It would be a more accurate bodice ripper without the brownies.

THE PROMPT: Write a spoof on the bodice ripper. You can write just a paragraph or up to 500 words. Your story or paragraph can feature a female bodice ripper or breeches ripper. You can use a character from your novel or make up a new one.

EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER PROMPT

This is from an article called Emotional Rollercoaster: Writing Anger by Apryl Duncan at Fiction Addiction. There are also articles on Writing Love, Writing Revenge and Writing Suspicion. http://www.fictionaddiction.net/angry.html

For this week’s prompt, I suggest we do the writing anger one. You may use either a character from your novel, and beef up one of your scenes or you can make up a character for the exercise. Or use it to help develop your hard~boiled short story if you are doing one and that works. You can take up to 500 words, but notice how the examples do it in fewer words. (If love, revenge or suspicion works better for you and your place in your novel, then by all means do that. The examples are all at the same site.) Remember this is a first, quick draft. We don’t expect perfection, and feedback will be one or two sentences.

Emotions are hard enough to deal with. Now try writing about them. Many people feel they're running straight into a wall when they have to tackle their character's emotions.

So just how do you capture those moments and put them into words? Let's take a look at how not to do it:

Elaine was mad as hell. She punched Tony in the stomach.

I hate you, she yelled.

You're so stupid, Tony gasped for breath.

Elaine kicked him in the shin as she screamed, Go to hell.

Another bad example:

Carrie felt her blood boil. Her fingers tightened into a fist.

She threw a punch at Andrea. And then another.

Andrea punched back as she fell backwards.

Then Carrie grabbed a chair and crashed it over Andrea's head.

Yikes! A female Arnold Schwarzenegger. But where's the emotion? Did you feel the punches Carrie landed? Did you feel the chair crashing over Andrea's head?

The scene merely described the action. There wasn't any emotion attached to the characters.

Another common mistake found in emotional writing is using clichés. For instance, in the first example above, Elaine was mad as hell.

Sure, people say they're mad as hell but what does it mean really? How mad is hell?

Now that you know what to avoid, let's examine the right way to describe your character's anger:

J. F. Freedman's http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451197429/fictionwritin~20 contains a pivotal scene where a mother finds out her 14~year~old daughter is having an affair with the same man she is. See if you can feel the anger radiating off the page:

Joe. It's Joe being my lover that has you so bent out of shape, isn't it? Not that

I'm having sex, but who I'm having it with. She walked up to her mother, stuck her face right in her mother's face. You're jealous, aren't you? That I'm having an affair with your lover. She taunted her deeper. Did you think you could keep him all to yourself?

Emma...

He doesn't even like you. He just takes pity on you.

The rage took over. All~encompassing, all~overwhelming. She reached back and threw a punch at her daughter, threw it as hard as she could, and it caught Emma flush on the face, and she fell from the force of the blow, fell off the edge of the platform where they were standing next to the stairs, and she fell straight down, fifteen feet, her head hitting the ground below with a dull thud, like a sack of potatoes.

Another prime example of anger writing comes from Bentley Little's http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0451192249/fictionwritin~20. In this selection, a woman comes home to find her boyfriend in a very compromising position:

There was no silent second of shock, no delay of any kind. She ran instantly into the bathroom and yanked Matt up by his hair. Get out! she screamed. Get the hell out of my house!

...She dug her fingers into Matt's upper arm and shoved him as hard as she could into the hall, picking his clothes up from the floor next to the tub and throwing them after him. She did not touch the woman but continued screaming all the while, anguished, angry invectives that included both of them.

Now it's time to turn what you've learned into some real anger~writing.

Try this exercise:

Choose one of your current characters or create a new one. Take this character through three levels of anger.

For instance, go back to the dog in the trash example. Maybe the kids don't come in the kitchen to clean up the dog's disaster area. So your character starts to clean up the trash.

You could move your character from the low boil of a minor annoyance (LEVEL I). But maybe your character discovers her own credit card bills in the trash. She realizes these high~ticket items must have been charged by her teenage son (LEVEL II). A little more research and she finds out that her teenage son bought lingerie for his girlfriend (LEVEL III).

HEROIC AND MULTI~DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS – DONALD MAAS PROMPT

We’ve been talking about what makes fascinating characters~~heroic qualities or flaws.

This exercise is from the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass.

THE PROMPT:

1) HEROIC CHARACTERISTICS

PREPARATION FOR THE PROMPT:

What makes a fictional character a hero or heroine to you? What is his or her greatest heroic quality?

WRITING: Assign that quality to your protagonist. Find a way for him or her to actively demonstrate that quality in a scene.

2) MULTI~DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS

PREPARATION FOR THE PROMPT:

What is your protagonist’s most defining characteristic?

What is the opposite of that characteristic?

WRITING: Write a short scene or part of a scene in which your character demonstrates that opposite characteristic. Don’t explain why he/she is acting out of character. Just have the character do it.

BRONTE PROMPT

Curious about Bronte's mad wife in Jane Eyre, author Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, the prequel to Jane Eyre. Rhys' novel reveals the tragic life of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress who enters a loveless marriage with the coldhearted Englishman, Mr. Rochester. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the author provides a haunting portrait of the fine line between love and madness. Mr. Rochester describes his distrust of the West Indian people and, in particular, his distrust and disgust of his own wife:

It was at night that I felt danger and would try to forget it and push it away. 'You are safe,' I'd say. She'd liked that ~~ to be told 'you are safe.' Or I'd touch her face gently and touch tears. Tears ~~ nothing! Words ~~ less than nothing. As for the happiness I gave her, that was worse than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.

Write a story, using external and internal dialogue, that reveals the narrator's hidden feelings about a friend, lover or spouse.

HERLAND PROMPT

This story prompt comes from the book Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1915. This book is a feminist utopian novel about a society that has existed for two thousand years cut off from any male. Three male explorers set out to find the rumored city and are surprised at what they discover. This quote is from a discussion between one of the women and the male narrator.

Take the scene and develop a 500 word story about the courtship methods of a man who is trying to attract a woman, using nothing but his personal attraction.

We can quite see that we do not seem like–women–to you. Of course, in a bi~sexual race the distinctive feature of each sex must be intensified. But surely there are characteristics enough which belong to People, aren’t there? That’s what I mean about you being more like us–more like People. We feel at ease with you.

Jeff’s difficulty was his exalted gallantry. He idealized women, and was always looking for a chance to protect or to serve them. These needed neither protection nor service. They were living in peace and power and plenty; we were their guests, their prisoners, absolutely dependent.

Of course we could promise whatsoever we might of advantages, if they would come to our country; but the more we knew of theirs, the less we boasted.

Terry’s jewels and trinkets they prized as curios; handed them about, asking questions as to workmanship, not in the least as to value; and discussed not ownership, but which museum to put them in.

When a man has nothing to give a woman, is dependent wholly on his personal attraction, his courtship is under limitations.

SMALL SPACES PROMPT

Write a story or scene with at least two characters that takes place in a small space~~a bathroom, a closet, an elevator, a phone booth, crawl space, a box~~whatever small space you can think of. The more unusual, the better. Your story should be around 500 words and should be posted on Thursday between midnight and midnight. If you would like to post next week’s prompt, sign up under this message.

RISING ABOVE PREJUDICES PROMPT

Do you have an experience to share that didn't allow another person's opinion shape who you are? Did you rise above their claims and let love move you onwards? Or have you written a fictional story that will move us and educate us with prejudices. After all, even fiction is truth, just written in a another way. If so, follow the guidelines below and help us make this a better world.

Here's a list of prejudices to help you but you may also use your own:

Gender

Race

Social classes

Weight

Religious

Socio~Political

Age

Sexual Orientation

Mentally & Physically Challenged

Geographical/Nationality

NURSERY RHYME PROMPT

I’ve always loved old nursery rhymes: I thought it might be fun to use an old nursery rhyme as the basis for a modern day story ….so here are three of my favorites… stay close to the nursery rhyme theme, take your pick and have fun!

Ding Dong Bell: Pussy’s in the well: Who put her in? Little Tommy Thin, Who pulled her out? Little Tommy Stout

What a naughty boy was that; to drown poor pussy cat;

who ne’er did any harm. But killed all the mice in Father’s barn.

THERE was a little girl; And she had a little curl; Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good; She was very, very good, But when she was bad she was horrid.

Boys and girls, come out to play. The moon doth shine as bright as day!

Leaves your supper and leave your sleep, And come with your playfellows into the street.

Come with a whistle, Come with a call, Come with a good will, or not at all.

A LITTLE MAGIC PROMPT

Magic Realism is a literary term that describes the line between reality and the super~natural, fantastical, or magical blurring in a novel. It is a literary situation where a writer can pull a hat trick from his sleeve and introduce situations and characters that do not actually appear in the real world.

Probably the most famous novel written employing this method is a Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It won the Nobel Prize in literature, and is arguably one of the greatest novels ever written.

In that novel many fantastical events occur during a multi~generational family saga. One example is when a young woman of such astonishing and unearthly beauty is born into the family. She drives men mad with lust and chaos and tragedy follow on her heels. Ultimately she turns into a butterflies and escapes the insanity.

Another very famous novel that employs this technique is Mikhail Bulgakov’s brilliant theological allegory The Master and Margarita. This novel is set (and was written) in Stalinist Russia in the 1930’s, when atheism was the state policy and religious freedom was oppressed. The premise of this novel is that a certain VERY BAD GUY (who is often pictured with horns on his head and cloven hoofs) is not pleased with this turn of events. If people are told the VERY, VERY GOOD GUY doesn’t exist, then that means they are being told he doesn’t exist. This annoys him. He proceeds to disguise himself as a university professor and go to Moscow with his fallen angels and wreak some havoc. One scene involves a not so nice cohort of the VERY BAD GUY boarding a street car in the form of a black cat.

You get the idea.

So since my cherry tree bloomed yesterday and the magic of spring is in the air, let’s put a little magic in our writing. That’s the prompt. Magic or Magic Realism. Think in terms of the fantastic, the impossible, or even a little divine intervention.

WHAT IF PROMPT

I took two exercises from What If and stuck them together. Feel free to mix it up and do as you wish with it.

Write three different scenarios, one showing fear, one showing anger and one showing pleasure about a man and a woman at a corner hailing a cab. If you only want to write one or two, fine. If you want to write about the emotion(s) but with a different setting, that's fine too, or if you want to use different emotion(s), ya you guessed it, that's fine with me. Basically, use two characters in a particular setting, but convey different emotions. My only rule is: have fun with it. 500 words is not a lot, but I've seen what everyone can do, so ...

P.S. If we've already done this one (it kind of sounds familiar to me for some reason), then take those two characters and write about sex. I think it would be fun to see everyone write about a sex scene in a taxi cab and see what we come up with.

BLIND DATE PROMPT

In honor of National Poetry month (April), this week’s trigger is a poem from the Atlantic Monthly. Write whatever it inspires. Here are some different ways you can do this:

Read the poem, close you eyes and see what comes to mind.

Use the title and write about a Blind Date

Use one of the questions in the poem. such as How many close friends have died and where do you think they went And how do you talk to them now that they're gone?and see where it takes you.

Use any image from the poem, such as first sip of wine or clash of cutlery and build a story or story start around the image.

Have fun. Rules first. poem last.

Don’t worry about polished writing, but do spell check to make it easy on your readers.

Consider this development of a story idea for your idea file or draft flash fiction, not a finished piece.

BLIND DATE

By Steve Orlen from the Atlantic Monthly

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/antholog/orlen/blinddate.htm

After Where were you born? and How long were you married?

Comes the first sip of wine, and after that the clash of cutlery

And the shuffling shoes of the waiter, then the silence so brief

You almost don't hear it. What are the smallest objects you have lost?

What sudden smells make you stop and think back?

And the struggle, the summoning up, the visualizing, the squinting into the past.

Now and then she interrupts and asks

For a story, a theory, speculations, interpretations.

How many close friends have died and where do you think they went

And how do you talk to them now that they're gone?

And your mind is eagerly opening, swelling, a cavern in which

What have been formerly hidden from you by the public din

Now dart around like bats with their insistent, intimate squeakings.

Did your mother like you? How do you start a conversation with a stranger?

By now, the answers come easier, more flowing, a zone, a spigot, a well.

What parts of yourself have you given up since leaving your home town?

Have you ever been lost? Broke? Hungry? Have you ever asked your sister

What she thought of you back then, when you were kids?

The conversation a call and response, and when she enters the taxi,

And waves bye~bye, you are left standing at the altar

In the Church of Lost Memories wearing that ridiculous tie,

Your hands in your pockets, jingling the change, sniffing the ancient air

For clues, for distillations, perfume fresh from the flowers.

Have you ever? Have you ever?

BANANA PROMPT

In 500 words or less write a flash fiction story using the sentence below, somewhere in your story. The sentence can be first, last, or in the middle. It will be interesting to see how the stories vary, between the male and female members of the group. You will recognize the line as being from the movie 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' and was said by Audrey Hepburn. See what you can do with it!

The prompt:

'It's useful, being top-Banana in the shock department!'

Syl

ANGER PROMPT

Write down a list of things that made you angry in the last week (or month, if you week has been mild). Try to remember everything from stubbing your toe on a chair leg to your child's adamant refusal to do what you asked to your senator's cowardly vote on a bill you strongly support. Pick one item from your list and freewrite about it. Either write a true story (how you felt and why you felt that way) or a bit of fiction using the same anger motivation. - from 'The Writers Idea Book' by Jack Heffron

The prompt response should be posted in here on Thursday, March 31st.

Enjoy!

Maria

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE PROMPT

My original idea for a writing prompt was to provide several short, objective newspaper articles. The exercise would be to retell the item from the POV of one of the individuals involved.

The following is a possible example:

Patsey and Siobhan from the Lunatic Fringe in Main Street have finally set up on their own, and say they will be specialising in haircuts, head massages, pedicures, manicures, sinecures, cut-throat shaves 'exactly in the old traditional style', and spring rolls. Patsey says they wanted to create 'a real sanctuary' for men to indulge in some of the body luxuries that are only second nature to women at this stage. It will be an exclusively male preserve, apart from the staff. So if you notice more than the usual pedestrian traffic in Bishop Culhane Shopping Arcade, chances are that it's more than the nice June weather that's attracting them.

However,having just spent over ninety minutes searching for suitable material, I give up. If you feel like taking a crack at this one, it could be fun, or if you happen to see an article you could use in this way, fire ahead.

ALTERNATIVE PROMPT

Wendy Peters clicked on her answering machine. She listened to the first two messages and deleted them both, but the third message froze her to the spot.

I hope this gets the juices flowing.

Evelyn

LINGERIE PROMPT

Write a story or scene or part of a story or scene that includes in it somewhere a reference to an item of lingerie. Make sure you describe the lingerie. You could use female or male undies, and they don’t have to be sexy. They could be long johns or a garter belt. or a girdle. Just make sure they belong to an adult.

If you chose to do the prompt , you must post between midnight and midnight April 21. You may post up to 500 words. Feedback should be general--one or two lines.

Have fun.

Carol

UGLY TURNS BEAUTIFUL PROMPT

This prompt is based on an exercise from the book, WordPainting by Rebecca McClanahan. Choose one image from the list of ugly, (some even disgusting) items below and write a story or scene packed with description that redeems that image, removing it from the world of ugliness and disgust. These images exist in both nature and people. Try to show that beauty exists within the ugliness.

If you chose to do the prompt, you must post between midnight and midnight April 28. You may post up to 500 words. Feedback should be general--one or two lines.

Have fun and stretch yourselves.

Kathy

(From McClanahan)

Amputee’s stump

A crooked yellow tooth

Wrinkles

A smoggy sky

Cockroaches

Stretch marks

A charred corpse

Varicose veins

Maggots

Obscene graffiti

Rubble from a bombed building

(From me)

Bug parts

Lint

Mulch

Sour milk

The nasty stuff at the bottom of an old coffee cup

Scars on wrists (from a suicide attempt)

A glass eye

Cottage cheese cellulite thighs

An old shed

A rusty bike with one wheel missing

The face of a burn victim

The thin, malnourished body of a sick person

Hair in an old man's ear

THINGS YOU’D NEVER DO PROMPT

Here's what I came up with (I love the book this is taken from!):

Using first person, describe an event or action you are fairly sure you will never experience first hand. Be very specific - the more details you incorporate the more likely it is that your reader will believe you. Include your feelings and reactions. - from What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter

Maria

PLAYING WITH OPENING LINES

I’ve been playing around recently trying to find the best way to open my mystery. Just for fun, I looked at the opening lines of some other novels, chose a few good ones, and used them as models for my potential opening.

Here are some examples:

Model: I think my lover is killing me. Grant Michaels, Dead on Your Feet

My version: Driving a cab can be murder.

Model: It was January in Trenton. The sky was gunmetal gray, and the air sat dead cold on cars and sidewalks. Inside the offices of Vincent Plum, bail bond agent, the atmosphere was no less grim, and I was sweating not from heat but from panic. Janet Evanovich, Three to Get Deadly

My version: It was October in Rhodes, New York. The sky was turquoise, and the breeze danced with the falling leaves before scattering them in red and gold patterns across the sidewalks and the still-green grass. The usual protest groups—pro-this, anti-that—were out in full force downtown, waving hand-lettered signs and chanting with an exuberance born from the two weeks of beautiful weather we’re allotted each year. Inside the garage at Sunbeam Taxi, however, the gray, oil-stained atmosphere was more like the dead of winter. And I was developing the icepick-sharp headache to prove it.

Model: Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

My version: Whatever the hell you do, don’t—I repeat, do not—call me Rainbow.

For this week’s prompt, find an opening line you like, then use it as a model to write an opening that launches a story or scene of your own. In using a model, you can simply take out the original nouns and verbs and put in new ones, like this:

Model: I think my lover is killing me.

Your version: I think my [noun] is [doing something] to [something].

Or you could try to follow the model’s rhythm, tone, use of contrast. In other words, try to figure out what 'grabs' you about the model and use that grabber in a sentence of your own.

Pick any opening line that you like, or try one of those that follow. Then use it as the opener to a story or scene—500 words max, including your opening sentence. Post the results between 12:01 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. EDT on Thursday, 5/12.

Some good opening lines:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside or Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Every time they got a call from the leper hospital to pick up a body Jack Delaney would feel himself coming down with the flu or something. Elmore Leonard, Bandits

When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, LEO GURSKY IS SURVIVED BY AN APARTMENT FULL OF SHIT. Nicole Kraus, The History of Love

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a gigantic insect. Franz Kafka, 'The Metamorphosis'

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe. I don’t know. Albert Camus, The Stranger

I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I'm thinking I should've put some plastic down. Vic Gischler, Gun Monkeys

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups

Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else’s breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost nonexistent bumps, but huge pendulous, full ones. Barbara Hodgson, The Sensualist

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenburgs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

All children, except one, grow up. J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. Trisha McFarland discovered this when she was nine years old. Stephen King, The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon

It was a pleasure to burn. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW YOUR PROTAGONIST?

Let’s see how well we know our protagonists. Imagine your protagonist is now aged and dying. They are looking back over the 'time' that was your novel. How do they feel about that time in their lives? What is their spiritual outlook as they face death? (By spiritual I do not necessarily mean religious) Does death frighten them silly or are they resigned? Where are they when they are old? At home with a care-giver? In a nursing home? Being taken care of in the home of one of their children? Etc.

The most important issue here (I think – not a hundred percent sure) is WHO they are as they face death and examine that period of their life that was 'the novel'.

500 Word Limit - Post between midnight Wednesday and Midnight Thursday. Feedback need only be a sentence or two – but if you post a prompt you must give feedback to every single person who posts.

'AND SO IT BEGINS' PROMPT

For this week, I offer the prompt below.

'And So It Begins' contest

Write a flash fiction story of up to 500 words that begins with the first sentence:

'He read the note, folded it, and edged it into the gutter.'

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI POEM PROMPT

Read the following poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, savoring the images and sounds. Let it roll over you and take you where it will. See what it prompts whether it be something related to the poem as a whole or a single image, whether it be images of marching bands, music, death, sidewalk cafes, hung over broken down Irish bartenders, relatives or whatever.

Post up to 500 words between midnight Wednesday and Thursday. You are not expected to post a polished story so don't worry about how good it is. I've deliberately given you little time. Write quickly from your emotions. Be in the moment. Have fun.

Feedback should be one or two sentences.

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

marches right down Green Street

and turns into Columbus Avenue

where all the café sitters at

the sidewalk café tables

sit talking and laughing

and looking right through it

as if it happened every day in

little old wooden North Beach San Francisco

but at the same time feeling thrilled

by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band

as if it were celebrating life and

never heard of death

And right behind it comes the open hearse

with the closed casket and the

big framed picture under glass propped up

showing the patriarch who

has just croaked

And now all seven members of

the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band

with the faded gold braid on their

beat-up captains' hats

raise their bent axes and

start blowing all more or less

together and

out comes this Onward Christian Soldiers like

you heard it once upon a time only

much slower with a dead beat

And now you see all the relatives behind the

closed glass windows of the long black cars and

their faces are all shiny like they

been weeping with washcloths and

all super serious

like as if the bottom has just dropped out of

their private markets and

there's the widow all in weeds, and the sister with the

bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school

and Uncle Louie with the wig and there they all are assembled

together and facing each other maybe for the first time in a long

time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face

outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and oompah oompah

goes the band very slow with the trombones and the tuba

and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears

nothing or everything and it's a glorious autumn day in old

North Beach if only he could have lived to see it Only we

wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later can be seen

straggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like hungover

brokendown Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah

.... Lawrence Ferlinghetti

NORA ROBERTS QUOTE PROMPT

For this Thursday's prompt, I decided to post a few lines from a book I'm reading. Use one, two or all three (for the BIG challenge) in your prompt response.

Here they are:

'I guess not. Will they be arrested?'

'You don't seem deficient in the guts department.'

'It was beautiful; she couldn't deny it. It looked so strong, so vivid.'

--- All quotes from 'Blue Dahlia' by Nora Roberts

'ROOM TO WRITE' PROMPTS

These prompts are both from Room to Write by Bonni Goldberg. I chose them from the book at random, but both have to do with exploring an abstract concept to understand it in a fresh or deeper way.

These days, new is associated with better. It is a word that is used to persuade people to buy products and ideas. We often find it near improved. But like many descriptive words, it has various connotations.

New can mean novel, modern, recent, strange, renovated, re-created, original, fresh, unaccustomed, and the latest. New isn’t always better; it’s just different. This may at first seem like a small point. It isn’t. It is the kind of realization that could be the turning point for your protagonist. To look beyond the surface meaning of a single descriptive word is to find a source of fresh material.

The prompt: Write a short piece in which something new is both an improvement and a disadvantage for someone.

Besides describing the concrete, physical world, creative writers explore the abstract one: how to love, how to attain freedom, how to face fear. You relate these experiences through the development of characters; you show instead of explain them to the reader.

Whether through humor, drama, or symbolism, characters often relate abstract conditions by failing at them. The writer reveals their failings and we learn from their mistakes.

The prompt: Pick an abstract concept: love, innocence, fear, freedom, and so on. Depict an aspect of this concept through a character failing at an incidental activity, such as organizing the contents of a closet or parallel parking on a crowded street.

You have from 12:01 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, June 16, to write and post a 500-word response to one of these prompts. If you post, you must comment (briefly—just a couple of lines) on the work of anyone else who posts a response to the prompt.

BRINGING OUR CHARACTERS ALIVE THROUGH DESCRIPTION AND PLACE

All of these prompts and examples come from Rebecca McClanahan's book, Word Painting.

When Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim was asked about his creative process, he replied, 'If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.'

The characters in our stories embody our writing. They are our words made flesh. Sometimes they even speak for us, carrying much of the burden of plot, theme, mood, idea and emotion. But they do not exist until we describe them on the page. Our characters come alive through description.

Jim Grace, in his novel, The Gift of Stones describes his father's arm comparing it to a tree, and could be seen as a metaphor for life, or the narrator's impression of it.

My father's right arm ended not in a hand but, at the elbow, in a bony swelling. Think of a pollard tree in silhouette. That was my father's stump. Its skin was drawn tight across the bone and tucked frowning into the hold left by the missing lower joint. The indented scar was like those made in the ice by boys with stones – a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish puss.

You don't have to confine your description to scenes in which your character appears. Photographs can provide a smooth entry into physical descriptions. In Tim O'Brien's story 'The Things They Carried,' he introduces Martha through one of the photographs Lieutenant Cross carries in his wallet:

It was an action shot – women's volleyball – and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her entire weight, which was just over one hundred pounds.

Photographs also supply visual clues to a character's past. We can also portray characters by imagining how they might look in the future, a kind of descriptive time travel. In Andrew Miller's novel Ingenious Pain, the narrator describes a yound boy named Sam, 'an agile, scrawny, wonderfully ugly boy of eleven years.' The description continues:

At fifteen he will be untellable from a red-faced son of the plough in spotted neckerchief and leather breeches, roaring in some market town. By thirty he will be one of these at the table; still lusty, but already half broken by work and worry, drinking to forget.

You can also describe character through setting. A character's surroundings can provide the backdrop for the sensory and significant details that shape him or her. In describing a character's surroundings, you don't have to limit yourself to a character's present life. Describe the house where he grew up or the room he shared with his twin brother. In Flaubert's description of Emma Bovary's adolescent years in the convent, he foreshadows the woman she will become, a woman who moves through life in a romantic malaise, dreaming of faraway lands and lovers. We learn about Madame Bovary through concrete, sensory description of the place that formed her. In addition, Flaubert describes the book that held her attention during mass, and the images she particularly loved – a sick lamb, a pierced heart.

Living among those white-faced women with their rosaries and copper crosses, never getting away from the stuffy schoolroom atmosphere, she gradually succumbed to the mystic languor exhaled by the perfumes of the altar, the coolness of the holy-water fonts and the radiance of the tapers. Instead of following the Mass, she used to gaze at the azure-bordered religious drawings in her book. She loved the sick lamb, the Sacred Heart pierced with sharp arrows, and poor Jesus falling beneath His cross.

THE PROMPT

Choose one physical feature of your character – hair, eyes, hands, etc. – and describe it metaphorically. (Remember Emily Dickinson's eyes, the 'color of sherry the guests leave in the glasses'?) If you wish to take the metaphor further, describe the feature in terms of a setting you associate with your character.

Describe a photograph (or video) of your character that reveals something about him/her that your story does not yet reveal. If the photograph was taken during a time period not covered in the story, your description might serve as a flashback.

We sometimes refer to a place as having 'character', meaning it has been shaped by the hands of time, people or events. Describe such a place (a beach house, auto salvage yard, abandoned schoolhouse, ancient forest, barn, burned out church) revealing the elements that suggest its history. Pay close attention to physical details. What initials are carved into the wooden school desk? Are weeds crawling through the Edsel's broken window? Choose details that evoke both the human touch and the touch of nature. Did this place affect your character?

You have from 12:01 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, June 30, to write and post a 500-word response to one of these prompts. If you post, you must comment (briefly—just a couple of lines) on the work of anyone else who posts a response to the prompt.

"I’LL NEVER FORGET"…PROMPT

LIMIT--500 WORDS. Don't worry about perfect--just write.

Mandatory Elements:

SOMEWHERE WITHIN THE 500 WORDS OR LESS INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE.

"I'll never forget the day my father walked in and said_________"

SETTING:

MAKE THE SETTING A REAL-LIFE PLACE/TIME IN YOUR LIFE. THE STORY DOES NOT

HAVE TO BE TRUE, BUT MAY BE IF YOU WISH. ALSO, FEEL FREE TO CHANGE THE

FIRST PERSON POV TO ANOTHER OF YOUR CHOOSING.

ELEMENTS/CHARACTERS OF CHOICE:

CHOOSE FROM THE FOLLOWING LIST OF ELEMNTS. MAKE UP YOUR OWN NAMES FOR EACH.

USE A MINIMUM OF TWO CHARACTERS IN THE SCENE, BESIDES THE NARRATOR, BUT

FEEL FREE TO CREATE NEW ONES.

MOTHER

SISTER

BROTHER

AUNT

UNCLE

COUSIN

FRIEND

DOG

CAT

BIRD

AIRPLANE

SAILOR

BROKEN DISH

WIDE FRONT PORCH

FROST

RAIN

TORNADO

UNEATEN MEAL ON THE TABLE

PHONE RINGING

BABY

AUTOMOBILE

GOOD LUCK!

THE BEGINNING IS THE ENDING PROMPT

Your story must begin and end with the same sentence AND the sentence must contain the word "pants".

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS PROMPT

Pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust. Those are the seven deadly sins. Not pretty, but even your protagonist can exhibit some of these sins to some degree from time to time.

You can write a scene for your novel in which anger, lust, etc are the dominant themes/motives. You can write a complete piece of flash fiction. You can set the stage for lust by writing a description of a place. You can suggest the emotion without naming it. You can have one or more of these sins be the subject of a sermon, a conversation between two people, a homework assignment. You can personify a sin. Create a battle between one of the sins and its countering virtue. Use your imagination. Try a different genre, a different historical period, a time when values were different, a children‘s story, a story that requires a mature subject warning. Write something funny or scary or serious.

Have fun.

Carol

VOICE PROMPT

I’m posting this one early because it is difficult. Stories are due between

midnight Wednesday of this week-July 27-and midnight Thursday.

It is a teaser for the voice exercise which we will be doing for posting

Aug. 12-Aug. 17. Hopefully, it will whet your appetite for the exercise.

You have two choices. Post up to 500 words, Feedback should be general.

You can expand on your story when we do the prompt exercise in August.

Given the number of choices in the exercise, 500 words is probably a good

goal per exercise.

Try to get outside your normal boundaries and have fun.

Carol

PROMPT CHOICE NUMBER 1

I recently read Ahab's Wife, and yes, it is about the wife of the captain

in Moby Dick. One of the interesting things about it is that it is more

than just the same story from another POV (and maybe this makes it a good

comparison to The Historian, which is the Dracula story from a historian's

POV.) Ahab's Wife doesn't just follow Ahab's sea adventures, In fact, his

wife hears about them while she is on shore. The novel looks at her other

marriages, i.e., it looks at her as more than just Ahab's wife. The story

is about her, not Ahab. It brings in a section on American slavery, and

it has references to cannibalism. In that way, it stands out from the normal

retelling of a story. It has what some agent’s would call that extra something,

that gimmick that makes it marketable.

Think of a classic story, one you know well, one that you may have read

over and over because it haunts you. Find a character who is not a POV

character, and retell an episode in the book from that character’s POV,

or describe the main character from that character’s POV or tell us something

about that character’s life that the book does not tell us.

PROMPT CHOICE NUMBER 2

Two people witness something. It can be a crime, a lecture or presentation,

or just something they observed other people doing or a conversation they

overheard. They can be together or not when they witness the event. Just

create people who are very different in attitude, motive and background,

i.e. one could be a drunk who doesn’t want to get involved and one could

be an eight-year-old, who wants to tell all. They would notice different

things, speak differently and have a different attitude.

Write either one piece in which they each give their different versions

of the event to someone or write back-to-back to back pieces in which they

separately tell someone who wasn’t there about the event or incident.

Use characters from your novel and create a scene or write a piece of flash

fiction.

JOURNAL PROMPT

I thought for this week's prompt it would be fun to get a start on something

that people could submit to a journal. Here are three possibilities:

1. The First Line (www.thefirstline.com) publishes short stories of 300-3,000

words and pays $10 for each story selected. Each submission has to begin

with the first line posted on the site. Here's the current choice:

"That was the best game we've ever had!"

Any story you write must use that for the first line, exactly as it is

(including the quotation marks). The submission deadline for stories using

this first line is 11/1. Submissions guidelines are at

www.thefirstline.com/submission.htm.

2. Write a story of 500 words or less that dramatizes one of the following

emotions, but without naming that emotion: fear, anger, pleasure. The research

where you might submit it. Post possibilities along with your prompt.

3. Write a couple of 100-word stories (without going over the 100-word

limit for each). Consider writing a genre story (horror, mystery, fantasy)

and preparing a submission to Flashshot

(http://flashshot.tripod.com/guidelines.htm)

when they reopen to submissions on 11/15. Flashshot accepts up to three

stories at a time. To see some of the things they've published recently,

look here: http://flashshot.tripod.com/secret.htm.

Despite my tardiness putting this up (apologies to all), you have until

midnight to write and post your prompt. Prompts are limited to 500 words

max. If you post a prompt, you must respond to everyone else who posts

one, too--no detailed feedback required, just a general response. Cheering

each other on is always good!

SONG PROMPT

1) Take song lyrics and write the background story to tell the song's

inspiration,

or tell what happens next, or create the character you see as the speaker

of the lyrics or the subject of the song. Or let the lyrics take you wherever

they will. You can use the whole song or a line. You can use them in your

story or leave them out. Post both the lyrics and the resulting prompt

story.

2) Do any of the prompts from our web site.

Post up to 500 words between midnight Wednesday and midnight Thursday.

USING ASTROLOGY TO TAP YOUR MUSE PROMPT

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves." - C. G. Jung

This month and next, Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. Due to the way Jupiter's gravity tugs on Mars and perturbs its orbit, astronomers can only be certain that Mars has not come this close to Earth in the Last 5,000 years, but it may be as long as 60,000 years before it happens again.

This kind of stuff excites me, gets me inspired. The short story I recently wrote here, "Trying to Beat the Moon" was inspired by the moon. The poem below (see example) was inspired by Mars. Another poem I wrote was inspired by a lunar eclipse. I think we all use nature, and astrology in our writing at times, but may not even realize it. Let’s get in touch with our astrological selves!

Take three or four of the astrological words from the list below and study them. Write down all that comes to mind about the words in a list. Go through the list and using what seems to resonate with you and write a story. You could use these terms as a metaphor for an emotion, such as lost love, you could write about the last time you went out and looked at the stars, use your imagination. See my example of a poem I wrote using astrology as a metaphor for loss.

Write as fast as you can for 5 minutes, not worrying about grammar, punctuation, etc.

Include all three words in your prompt story.

asteroid

atmosphere

aurora borealis

billion

chaos

chasma

canyon

comet

cosmic ray

crater

density

disaster

disk

Doppler effect

dinosaurs

dorsum

eccentricity

ellipse

explosive eruption

exponential notation

filament

fireball

fissure

flare

Galilean Moons

granulation

greenhouse effect

heliocentric

ice

inclination

ionosphere

Jupiter

labyrinthus

limb

light-year

linea

lunar month

magnitude

Mars

metal

meteor, meteorite or meteoroid

nuclear fusion

oceanus

opposition

orbit

red

resolution

resonance

retrograde

silicate

solar cycle, solar wind

speed of light

sublime(orsublimate)

sunspot

terra

tessera

tidal heating

white dwarf

young

zodiacal light

Here's an online dictionary of astronomical terms:

http://www.seasky.org/astronomy/astronomy_glossary.html

GARAGE SALE/TAG SALE PROMPT

Write a story where a character either attends or holds a garage sale. What are they selling? What do they purchase?

USING APPOSITIVES PROMPT

Using appositives to enrich your writing and generate ideas.

This is an exercise I use in one of my poetry workshops, but it can just as easily be applied to fiction or nonfiction prose writing. It is taken from The Poet’s Companion" by Kim Addonizio, who has also published a novel, and DorianneLaux.

Kathy and Nancy are familiar with this exercise since they took the poetry workshop.

An appositive is a word or a group of words that explains the original but in more detail. They are a way to say more, to go further in the implications of your thoughts, in the details of your memory or experience. They are a way of digging in, a process of discovery at the level of syntax.

For example, take this line: My grandmother sits in the kitchen. We can add appositives to grandmother and to kitchen in order to provide more detail. i.e.

1. My grandmother sits in the kitchen

2. My grandmother, Stella, sits in the kitchen. Stella is a noun appositive. It tells us her name. You can also use noun phrase appositives

3. My grandmother, Stella, a tiny woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel, …. And you can add appositives to kitchen

4. My grandmother, Stella, a tiny woman with long white hair and the face of a Botticelli angel, stands in the kitchen, a long low room filled with the smell of grilling onions and roasting garlic.

Now we’ve presented the scene in much greater detail than the original. We catch a glimpse of the grandmother, inhale the scent of her kitchen, discover something of the meaning that the image holds for the narrator. These appositives can then be used to generate stories.

Get the idea? Let’s try some.

HERE’S THE PROMPT.

Following are some sample sentences using appositives. Study them. Then complete the blank using your own appositives. Pile on the appositives when you write yours. Some of my poetry students have written appositives that run several hundred words. See how far you can push yours.

1. MODEL: I wanted to return to that place,

WITH ONE APPOSITIVE DESCRIBING PLACE: I wanted to return to that place, the tiny fishing village in Mexico.

WITH TWO APPOSITIVES DESCRIBING PLACE: I wanted to return to that place, the tiny fishing village in Mexico, the tourist spot with the tiny alcoves overlooking the bay.

WITH THREE NOUN APPOSITIVE: I wanted to return to that place, the tiny fishing village in Mexico, the tourist spot with the tiny alcoves overlooking the bay, the town where we fell in love.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE OF ONE I DID FOR THIS: I wanted to return to that place, that ancient Aegean land where black shrouded women and cocky boys speak to God, where octopi dangle from stunted trees outside the market like Christmas tinsel; that hot, dirty city where everyone's an orator, where dust collects in eyes, cakes hair, and tints everything a pinkish gray; that center of democracy, the acropolis, the towering rock on a hill where Poseidon’s trident struck, where the sacred olive tree still grows; those green mountaintops where golden gods rise and descend like the sun.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE FROM GILLIAN, ONE OF MY POETRY STUDENTS: I want to return to that place, that morning, six o’clock, a the air windless, bone-dry and cold, and the sky a cushioned bowl of white, a thick mantle of snow cloud, I stood in the snow and the woman passed black haired, praying silently, plait swinging under her red shawl, beads wound round her fingers, the sky white and still, embracing us, the hills hushed around us, steps muffled in deep drifts, sealed off we were in a silent bowl of white sky, the town and hills in one place, one moment of softness, mother-soft. The air cool and taut, heavy with things kept hidden in its folds, rustling under its motionless cover and from the dense stillness a black crow came, coral beaked, cutting the downy air, settled on the black and white cornice, eye casting scant, clever glances, wings still and gleaming against the white snow, like the black rocks in the far off frozen hills, and the crows specks skittering there, distance diminishing their flight, leaving them motionless, sealed off in the hush of the snow, all of us held in the arms of the snowy world, in the arms of the pregnant world.

YOUR SENTENCE: I wanted to return to that place, _______________________

MODEL: I remember the scent of my father, the cologne and cigarettes, the whiskey on his breath.

YOUR SENTENCE: I remember the scent of my father, _______________________

3. MODEL: All that I love tonight - your body curled besides mine, the vase of white lilies, the one bird calling from the yard - might be lost tomorrow.

YOUR SENTENCE: All that I love tonight - _______________ - might be lost tomorrow.

4. MODEL: The kitchen counter was dirty, littered with cigarette butts, crowded with unwashed plates.

YOUR SENTENCE: The kitchen counter was dirty, _____________________

MODEL: You were the one who took risks, who swam naked in the river, who laughed when the cops came.

YOUR SENTENCE: You were the one who took risks, __________

APPOSITIVES USING ADJECTIVE PHRASES

6. MODEL: She’s cautious, afraid to leave the house at night.

YOUR SENTENCE: She’s cautious, _____________

Do one or all of the six exercises, pushing each as far as you can.

Post either the sentences you create or take one or more and turn it/them into stories or story beginnings. You can abandon the original sentence or use it in the final piece. If you abandon it, please post your original sentence that prompted the story idea.

Post your prompt story or sentences between midnight Jan. 18 and midnight Jan. 19. You may post up to 500 words.

Have fun.

Carol

P.S. You can also let one of your characters complete one or more of the sentences.

For the Thursday, Jan. 26 prompt, you may do any of the following:

1. If you didn’t do the Jan. 19 prompt, you may do it this week.

2. If you only did part of the Jan. 19 prompt, you may do the rest of it or you may do the same sentences for a different character.

3. You may expand any of the sentences into a story or scene.

4. You may make up a sentence or sentences of your own for one or more of your characters , and use the method outlined in the Jan. 19 prompt, to extend it through appositives and verbals.

5. You may apply last week’s exercise to these additional sentences. These are "verbals" rather than appositives, i.e. you dig deeper and deeper into verbs rather than nouns or adjectives or phrases.

1.Example: The cat sits before the window, staring at the garden, anticipating the moment she'll be let out into it.

The cat sits before the window, ____________________________

2. Example: Lurching down the street smelling of cheap wine, the man approached me.

_______________________________, the man approached me.

3.Example: Exhausted, dispirited, temporarily defeated by the world, you want someone to hold you.

_______________________________________, you want someone to hold you.

4.Example: The boy studies his father to remember him when he gone, to fix his image forever in his mind.

The boy studies his father ____________________________________

Don't forget that you can use characters from your NIP's if you want. Post up to 500 words of whatever you write for this prompt between midnight Wednesday, Jan. 25 and midnight, Jan. 26.

OUT OF THIS WORLD PROMPT

Posted by Kathy on Monday, 30 January 2006, at 12:36 a.m.

The prompt for this Thursday is a two-part exercise. You may do both parts of the prompt, or one, whatever you choose.

THE FIRST PART OF THE PROMPT IS: Read a horoscope - either a favorite one you've kept, or one for today. It can be a typical horoscope or a funny one. (It doesn't have to be yours.) Write a 500 word story or beginning of a story about a character who's experiencing what's described in the horoscope. The 500 words can be part of a story or a complete story or scene. You can apply it to your novel in progress or write something completely new.

You have from 12:01 a.m. until 11:59 p.m. on Thursday to post. If you choose to participate in a prompt, you have to give a response to the other prompts you must comment (briefly—just a couple of lines, not a "real" critique) on the work of anyone else who posts a response to the prompt.

I've posted some sample (funny) horoscopes below, but to find on Google, just do the following:

1. Visit a search engine such as Yahoo! or Google.

2. Type in the keyword "horoscope."

3. Press Enter on your keyboard or click the Search button to submit your query.

4. Click on a site that best suits your interests or needs from the list of search results provided by the search engine.

5. Follow the directions provided by the site to access your horoscope reading.

6. Click the Back button on your Web browser to return to the list of search results and choose another site to explore.

The following sample horoscopes, which you may use, are from the website:

http://www.humorscope.com/. It's a hilarious site, I love reading these:

Aries (March 21 - April 19)

You've heard that when economists use the word "nice", they're actually saying that something is homoscedastic and nonautoregressive. Today you will find out what they mean when they say something is "like, totally kewl."

Taurus (April 20 - May 20)

Nothing unusual today. Unless you count that episode with the iguana...

Gemini (May 21 - June 20)

Today is an especially bad day to try something new involving explosives. Try to keep a low profile.

Cancer (June 21 - July 22)

Your feet will continue to trouble you today, although you won't be quite able to put your finger on what's wrong. You haven't been that flexible in years.

Leo (July 23 - August 22)

A man wearing two left shoes and a shirt with only one sleeve will approach you today, and try to interest you in a no-load mutual fund. Trust him -- he knows what he's doing.

Virgo (August 23 - September 22)

You will discover a large deposit of gold, when you're out on a stroll. Unfortunately, wealth will not make you happy.

Libra (September 22 - October 22)

Today you will put your foot down, regarding your turn at dinner preparation versus dining out. In other words, "if you ain't broke, don't fix it."

Scorpio (October 23 - November 21)

Soon you will start work on a mystery novel, "The Curse Of The Mummy's Nose", told from the point of view of your cat, Erik.

Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21)

Good time to invest in stock. (The canned kind, not the financial kind.)

Capricorn (December 22 - January 20)

You will combine a therapeutic technique based on rapid eye movement with yoga postures, creating something that looks so silly, passers by will actually fall over laughing.

Aquarius (January 21 - February 18)

Good day to make as much goulash as possible.

Pisces (February 19 - March 20)

This is not a good day to start a new romance. Particularly not a new romance based on a personals classified ad in the back of Mad magazine.

SECOND PART OF PROMPT: Choose from the following Twilight Zone titles to name your story. Or, if you choose to not do the first part of the prompt, use one of these titles to inspire a 500-word story.

TITLES (taken from episodes of The Twilight Zone)

Where is Everybody?

One for the Angels

Mr. Denton on Doomsday

The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine

Time Enough at Last

Perchance to Dream

Judgment Night

And When the Sky Was Opened

The Four of Us are Dying

Third From the Sun

I Shot an Arrow into the Air

The Purple Testament

Mirror Image

The Monsters are Due on Maple Street

The Big Tall Wish

The Man in the Bottle

Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room

A Thing About Machines

The Howling Man

The Eye of the Beholder

Nick of Time

The Lateness of the Hour

The Trouble with Templeton

A Most Unusual Camera

The Invaders

Twenty-Two

The Odyssey of Flight 33

Long Distance Call

A Hundred Yards over the Rim

Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up

The Obsolete Man

Deaths-Head Revisited

Five Characters in Search of an Exit

A Quality of Mercy

Nothing in the Dark

One More Pallbearer

Dead Man's Shoes

The Hunt

Showdown with Rance McGrew

A Piano in the House

The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank

Four O'Clock

I Sing the Body Electric

Of Late I Think of Cliffordville

On Thursday We Leave For Home

Passage on the Lady Anne

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

A Kind of a Stopwatch

The Last Night of a Jockey

The Old Man in the Cave

Probe 7 - Over and Out

The 7th is Made Up of Phantoms

A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain

Ninety Years Without Slumbering

Number Twelve Looks Just Like You

I Am the Night - Color Me Black

Come Wander with Me

Have fun with this!

Kathy

BORING DAY PROMPT

Describe the most boring day you've ever had, but write it in such a way that the day was not boring at all. You can be as outlandish as you wish. Just remember to give warning if you include sex, violence or bad language.

Really let your imagination carry you away. Most of all--have fun!

You can modify the sentence, include it in the midst of a short story, put it at the beginning or the end. The story may be funny, serious, fantasy, romance, mysterious, YA, children's story, or whatever.

Or--you can take this idea and branch off into any other direction that suits your fancy. Just remember -- NMT 500 words, and posted between 12:01 AM and 12 midnight next week Thursday, February 9. If you post a story prompt, please give a short comment or feedback to others who do.

The sentence to build your story around is:

"The most boring day I ever had was........"

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT...

The prompt for April 27 and May 4

Posted by Carol on Thursday, 20 April 2006, at 12:00 p.m.

SETTING: One of the things that came up in our discussion of marketability is the importance setting can have in making a story stand out from the pack. It doesn’t have to be an exotic setting although that helps, but the writer has to convey the setting in a way that pulls the reader in whether setting is a time or a place or both.

Setting doesn’t have to be a city or town or area of the country. It can be the kitchen in an old farm house where someone is canning tomatoes. The trick is to appeal both to the emotions and to the senses: show us what people are feeling, what they're thinking, and, when appropriate, what they're seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling.

One of the best examples of setting so important it becomes a character is The Old man and the Sea. by Ernest Hemmingway.

Another example where setting is an integral part of the plot is The Vampire Lestat. Could that novel have been set anywhere else but New Orleans?

This is from an article call the Fictional Dream which refers to John Gardner’s book "The Art of Fiction." I had this in my files and don’t have a citation on who wrote the article.

How many times have you become so engrossed with a story that you lost the sensation of lumpy bed pillows behind your neck; you no longer smell the gardenia candles at the bedside; you don't hear the screen door clattering against the door jamb, and you are not conscious of the black lines on the pages in front of you because you are in the middle of the scene.

You hear sisters shouting at each other and the hissing of a restaurant grill. Plates and dishes clatter. Voices mingle and hum. You see the blueberry colored booth cushions and polished chrome counter. Plates of meatloaf and mashed potatoes pass on perfectly balanced trays. You smell the gravy and the soup of the day—chicken noodle. The real world falls away, and you don't realize your arm has

fallen asleep or the cat is kneading the blanket over your feet. You're only worried about why the sisters are arguing, and wondering who is the woman in the corner with the garish hat, and why is she stabbing at her meatloaf and how is she related to the sisters?

Nevada Barr, author of the Anna Pigeon series, sets her mysteries in different national parks around the country. Hunting Season is set in the Mississippi Delta during the rainy season. "On either side of the two-lane asphalt road, land melted away in a soggy field of stubble rising and falling as gently as the chest of a breathing child, the 'hills' of Mississippi. Ditches ran full and creeks were beginning to back up at the culvert under the road. Leaves blew and fell, stuck and slid with the rain till there was little difference between earth and sky" (Hunting Season, page 172). This scene lets you feel the cold and the dreary rain as Anna drives down the highway. Barr deftly crafts the scene to add to the hopelessness and bleakness Anna Pigeon is feeling while attempting to unravel a murder.

In Blind Descent, Nevada Barr creates the setting so well that one begins to feel the chill and claustrophobia associated with caves. As she sat in the deep puddle, the darkness began to harden around her. It was not a mere absence of light, it was a substance, an element, a suffocating miasma that filled her ears, clogged her nostrils, bore down on her shoulders and chest. When the pressure on her eyelids became such that she could feel the black leaking like raw concrete into her brain, she reached up and switched on her lamp (Blind Descent, page 19). The reader begins to have trouble breathing reading a passage like that. Again, Barr creates a scene so bleak that the reader feels the chill along with Anna Pigeon and begins to wonder if all the light has been drained from the world, along with all hope of affecting a subterranean rescue of Anna's friend in Lechuguilla Cavern.

Write a scene in which setting is an integral part of what is happening. Try to pull the reader into the time and place through sensory details. Let us walk through the dark streets of the decaying city with your character or smell the sweat and old socks in the locker room after the basketball game or feel the corset squeezing the heroine’s middle and making it hard to breath as she gets ready for an 18th century ball.

This prompt is for Thursday April 27 and Thursday May 4. You may post your prompt story either Thursday or you can do the exercise twice and post both weeks. Stories must be posted between midnight and midnight on the prompt day. You may write a scene for your novel in progress or create something new.

Whether you produce flash fiction or part of a longer work you may only post up to 500 words.

If you post a prompt story, you must give feedback to the other prompt stories. Feedback should be general, a line or two or just a pat on the back. These are not expected to be polished gems. Have fun.

Carol

TIME FOR PHUN, FUN, PFUN PROMPT!

Posted by Syl on Tuesday, 16 May 2006, at 8:40 p.m.

Prompt for Thursday this week and the next

Hey gang. TIME FOR PHUN, FUN, PFUN!!Our prompt this week will stir both the muse and the funny bone.

We are staying with the idea of character as setting and adding how a few simple words can reveal a character.

Before beginning the prompt, please read the quote below. This came as an email to Bill and I from a grumpy old friend of ours who is NOT a writer. Or at least he doesn't think he is. But everytime he sends us emails of his escapades, we are rolling in the floor by the time we get finished. He sent this one the other day. I changed the location, names, to protect the guilty, and to keep our friend from having a coronary when he imagines the libel suits that he could get should the characters he's writing about have good lawyers.

So, read this post, below, first, then write, in 500 words or less,a scene in a place you might frequent. Show us the personalities of the characters, the setting, by showing us what you see, hear, touch, taste, smell. This might be a beauty shop, a barber shop, a doctor's office, grocery store, bar, restaurant, etc. Or perhaps even the line forming at the door of the outhouse at your grandma's house. Let yourself have fun with this. Post your writing (don't worry about editing) Thursday before midnight. This same prompt carries over to next week Thursday.

I know you all go crazy when given this type of prompt--so I'm hoping to get some belly laughs out of it and to get us all going with the posts!

I don't live a very eventful life but I've got to tell you about my visit to the City Barber Shop in Metropolis, Illinois, just off the town square. I've been getting my haircuts there, good, bad, embarrassing and terrible for 12 years. It's a very old fashioned barber shop like you may remember in the 1930's when hair cuts were 25 cents.

There are 5 chairs starting at the far end with Willard Burch who owns the shop. In addition to being a barber, he is a hog farmer in a small town about 15 miles from Metropolis plus he is part owner in an old hardware store near there. A genuine entrepreneur. He is probably the best barber in the shop but he takes forever to cut hair and he has a terminal case of BO. One time when I was getting flat tops, Willard was cutting my hair and when he raised his arm up and put his arm pit right in my face to do the flat part on top, I almost passed out.

Then there is Manual, who all the Mexicans wait for. He is by far the fastest barber there but you never know what in the hell to expect. Sometimes it is necessary to wear a cap after Manual gets through with you until it grows out and sometimes it's not half bad. He tells me how unruly his grandkids are and how this new generation sucks.

Next is Ronnie. He lives in a very small town about 10 miles away. He has a terrible case of acne but he thinks he is a ladies man and he loves to play pool, drink and dance. He has a sign behind his chair which reads "Life Is Too Short To Dance With Ugly Women". He claims that he was at one time a women's hairdresser. Sometimes when he wets the towel with hot water to wipe off your neck and face, he will wipe his face first. He spends about half of his time outside smoking and he generally seems to be bordering on being a ne'r-do-well. All the ladies who bring their little kids in for a haircut wait for Ronnie because he is excellent with little kids.

Then there is the chair where all the transit barbers come and go. This chair has had a very ugly woman barber, a guy with tattoos all over him, did erratic motions and seemed to be a dope addict (who I was afraid of especially when he had that razor in his hand), an 80 year old ex-electrician with terrible halitosis and palsy, Jorge, a real BS artist and know-it-all as well as being a crappy barber and presently a young lady who lives in Austin who did a terrible job of cutting hair when she first started but has improved to be almost acceptable. I may be wrong but I think she's a lesbian.

Lastly, we have Ken at the first chair. He is an excellent barber and is pretty smart. He doesn't have any unpleasant personal hygiene problems or character hang-ups. When possible, I like to have Ken cut my hair. He fills me in on some of the local news like road construction, where good hardware stores are located and how to do a compost bin. Our little bi-weekly paper often has cartoons quoting something Ken said about how screwed up things are sometimes in the City of Georgetown. He would probably make a good mayor.

What prompted me to write about the City Barber Shop is what I observed down there today. I got there at 8:00 AM and fortunately I got in Ken's chair. Manual had just finished this little old dried up looking guy who was at least 80 years old. This guy went hobbling past me, went out the door walking like little old men do, bowlegged, hunched over, with a wide space between his legs in the crotch area. He was headed for a big, expensive motorcycle parked across the street and I said to Ken, "don't tell me that little old fart is going to get on that motorcycle". Ken said , "Yep, he rides that damn thing down here every time he gets his haircut". Ken said that he was 83 years old. That guy got on that huge motorcycle and away he went. As Dr. Phil would say, "I was stupefied!"

The clientele in this shop are eclectic and interesting. We have very, very, very old people who need help in and out of the chair. One time one of these people went to sleep in the chair and some of us thought he had passed away while getting his hair cut. Since Metropolis is the County seat of Massac County, we have lots of lawyers, judges, politicians and even criminals who are being tried in the nearby courthouse. The old ranchers, cotton farmers and grain growers from nearby come in and bitch about the weather and talk about how bad the farming and ranching business is. We have the Sun City people who are retired from the big cities around the US of A, many of whom are retired oil company people who are pretty well off. We have professors from the university, preachers from the many churches and shmucks like me.

It is really sort of a treat for me to get my haircut at the City Barber Shop because I know I'm going to run into some interesting characters and often friends who I know as well as picking up pertinent information about ranching, farming, weather, compost bins, religion, law, politics, road construction, aging, personal hygiene and you name it.

I hope my adventures at the City Barber Shop has not bored you to tears but if you haven’t been there, you just don't know what you're missing.

Good luck!!

GHOSTS PROMPT

Like Nancy, I love Brian Kiteley's book "The Three A.M. Epiphany", so with that in mind, this week's (and next's) prompt comes from this source.

Prompt #101: Ghosts

Write a story about a ghost who is bored by the immensities of time and timelessness. Or write a story about a ghost who is embarrassed by the intimacies she is able to achieve with perfect strangers over and over again (without actually being intimate with them). Start your fragment of fiction with a phrase something like "After I was dead"...

Try to be matter-of-fact about the ghost(s). Make your ghost the central sympathetic character in the narrative you unfold, not the mechanism for exciting our interest in the living characters. This should be a straightforward piece of narration, something that takes for granted the idea of ghosts.(700 words.)

Please post your response to this prompt by Thursday, April 13 OR on Thursday, April 20, between 12:01 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. EST. If you post a response to the prompt, be sure to comment on the posts of others who do likewise—whether they posted the Thursday before or after you did. Keep comments brief and general. (Thanks, Nancy! Borrowed that from you--hope you don't mind!