Make a wish

This was posted by "Lucena Taven" in this year's NaNoWriMo Adopt-a-Plot folder.

#16: The main character (I always envisioned a man approaching middle age) is a hardened cynic, and tends to view the world with an angry, pessimistic light. One day, he's taking a walk in the park when he sees a little boy throwing pennies into the fountain, trying to get the "lady" in the fountain to catch one of the pennies in her hand, telling the man that if she catches one his wish will come true. The man, wishing to play along with the boy, throws one in, but doesn't make a wish. So, in lieu of granting his wish, the spirit of the fountain (who comes in the form of the lady statue) blesses/curses him by allowing him to see magic. Imagine waking up in the morning and seeing everything: household spirits, imaginary friends, vampires, angels...

"Normal people can produce extraordinary things ..."

Food, glorious food

One great technique for upping the all important word count for NaNoWriMo is writing about food.

In NaNo, there are no lattés. But there are no whip, one pump, double shot, 120 degree, pumpkin spice venti lattés with organic soy milk. (16 words!)

In NaNo, there isn't even roast goat, but there is organic Canadian maple roasted goat's meat topped with cloves, festive green maraschino cherries, and organic Canadian pineapple rings all drenched in a delightful cane sugar and organic Canadian clover honey sauce. (31 words!)

(Remember, anything can be organic and everything can be from Canada. And dash mark's come later in revising. honey-roasted=1 word. honey roasted=2 words.)

So, write about a feast or just a piece of (nine grain organic spelt sourdough) toast but be as florid as you can possibly be.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Heaven for sale

This was posted by "Lucena Taven" in this year's NaNoWriMo Adopt a Plot folder. If the exact description doesn't excite you, let it be a spark to fire up any idea for a story :-)

#16: Heaven and Hell are two large companies, but in recent years Heaven has declined and Hell has risen in power faster than Google. In order to keep the company from going out of business, the CEOs of Heaven sell it to Hell and retire to Greener Pastures. To keep their jobs, the angels of Heaven submit to their new masters; those who resist are "cast down to earth" in a manner ironically like the fall of Satan.

One of the main characters goes outside to see a meteor shower, and one of them falls into the sea nearby (I'm thinking this is a small coastal city, boardwalk, beach, etc.). So he/she goes out to see what happened, and they find a soggy and irate angel.

"The biggest thing separating people from their artistic ambitions ..."

Limyaael's Rants

This is  a huge collection of rants (and essays) on fantasy writing, or, as one person put it, "long posts full of tips on how to not suck at fantasy writing."

Her full collection is at Limyaael's LiveJournal "Arin i Asolde" where there's a brief intro and a link to each post.

A more compact list of her older rants (pre-2006) by date is a Limyaael's Rants: Master List.

(Note: there is occasional language beyond PG-13.)

A sampling:

• Dragons
  
• Writing Non-Humans
  
• Death and Weapons
  
• Building Fantasy Worlds
  
• Creating Breathing Characters
  
• Female Protagonists Who Do Not Suck
  
• Clichéd Fantasy

Here’s the headings for her piece on Names.

1. Don’t base the name too closely on your own.
   
2. Don’t make the name too long or too alien.
   
3. Avoid unfortunate coincidences as much as possible. [That is, check to see if the name means something unintended in another language.]
   
4. Make sure your character names fit the tone of the story.
   
5. Don’t make nicknames cutesy.
   
6. Adapt the name to the other names around it.

Double dip

For 10-15 minutes make up ice cream flavors (and add descriptions if it's not obvious from the name.)

Get inspired by movie and song and book titles, cliches, other food, your favorite snacks and fruits, Star Trek, pop stars and pop rocks and pop culture, rhymes and bad puns.

If you come up with any you love, submit them to Ben and Jerry's Suggest a Flavor.

It was a dark and stormy night ...

In honor of the month where the goal is word count rather than greatness, write a really bad opening sentence for one or more of the following categories:

• General fiction
  
• Adventure
  
• Children's literature
  
• Detective fiction
  
• Fantasy fiction
  
• Historical fiction
  
• Purple prose
  
• Romance
  
• Science fiction
  
• Vile puns
  
• Western

and if you wish:

• Salute to Breasts

I didn't make that up! The categories are from the famous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, named after Edward George Bulwer-Lytton who penned the infamous line that Snoopy was so fond of:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)

The challenge of the contest is to come up with the worst opening line. There are examples from the 2006 winners and all the Grand prize winners back to 1983. If you'd like to submit your entry (they take submissions all year long for the final decision in April or June), check out the rules and guidelines for submission.

"The quickest, easiest way to produce something beautiful ..."

Character trading cards

This is flawed but cool. Create Trading cards of your characters.

Answer a series of questions and at the end you can print out both sides on one page. You cut it out and fold the two sides together.

The problem is the print out is about half a page rather than 3.5 x 2.5 card size. (At least on my printer.)

There is a work around if your printer allows you to "print" to a file and you have some image manipulation software like Photoshop or Fireworks. After you click print on the card screen, click OK on the next screen and that might take you to the regular command page for your printer. There might be an option to save as a PDF Postscript file. (You won't be able to edit a regular PDF file.) If so, then you can import it, shrink it (make it 3.5 x 5 since it's both sides of the card), add a picture and print :-)

(There are several more games and activities at Read Write Think, some a bit schooly.)

Spamalicious

Usually the text spammers send to fool the spam catchers sounds like it *almost* makes sense. But this month's spam promoting a particular stock included sort of Mad-Lib or Jabberwocky like paragraphs where all the tenses matched. I think there were several sentence templates and a confined set of words (since how often does one encounter the word mitochondrial?) But however it was done, it was well done :-)

If you want to see them in context, the text is at Best of Spam for October 2006.

Here's (way too many ;-) spam characters and situations to use as a writing prompt. There are several that work together (like some turkeys to gear up for Thanksgiving ;-) and some girl scouts.)

• a stoic turkey reads a magazine
  
• A turkey daydreams
  
• Most people believe that a turkey completely secretly admires a stoic blood clot
  
• a mean-spirited jersey cow eagerly trades baseball cards with the briar patch
  
• a blithe spirit panics
  
• The mysterious skyscraper writes a love letter to another turn signal.
  
• a carelessly mitochondrial wedding dress
  
• a somewhat mitochondrial fairy flies into a rage
  
• a somewhat cantankerous fruit cake
  
• When you see the chess board, it means that the insurance agent self-flagellates.
  
• If a non-chalantly incinerated insurance agent plays pinochle with an often fat tornado, then a scythe inside a dolphin gets stinking drunk.
  
• it takes a real pit viper to ridiculously bestow great honor upon a mastodon
  
• A girl scout buys an expensive gift for an earring.
  
• Another girl scout related to a photon starts reminiscing about lost glory
  
• When a green girl scout starts reminiscing about lost glory, the parking lot beyond another ball bearing starts reminiscing about lost glory.
  
• A spider over the cashier organizes the girl scout.
  
• the flatulent avocado pit lazily recognizes a vaporized cowboy
  
• an inexorably surly skyscraper gets stinking drunk
  
• a cosmopolitan grain of sand prays
  
• the parking lot hesitantly tries to seduce another tornado living with the ocean
  
• A rattlesnake defined by a freight train recognizes the cab driver inside the avocado pit.
  
• A fractured briar patch beams with joy
  
• Some pickup truck inside the grand piano procrastinates
  
• Most people believe that the gentle umbrella often satiates a football team of another ocean
  
• If the cheese wheel sanitizes a spider, then an umbrella daydreams.
  
• The highly paid hydrogen atom
  
• A sheriff related to the minivan
  
• An usually fashionable crank case

The talismans are swallowing him!

For NaNoWriMo last year I created a couple of my favorite character by beginning a scene with a random line from manga. Pick one of the following to use as a writing prompt:

• "The talismans are swallowing him!"
  
• "I never thought the kid could be this powerful!"
  
• "Sometimes in order to help someone you need to help yourself."
  
• "You've wasted enough time. Kill them and I mean that."
  
• "He certainly is good with small animals."
  
• "It's rude to challenge someone when you're not sure what you believe."
  
• "Calling them a pair of idiots isn't much of a stretch."
  
• "Simply put, I go around beating up bad guys."
  
• "But we're being all stealthy and everything."
  
• "This is what happens when you mess with people who wear one glove!"
  
• "Today is the day men give a single rose to the woman they love."
  
• "I've got to watch out for his eyes. It feels like they can see right through me."
  
• "One slip and the whole village will know everything about you -- and it'll be all wrong!"
  
• "Why'd she text you. She could have just yelled through the window."

"Writing can be more fun ..."

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

Every fantasy cliche that you include at your own peril. ;-)

(Comments? Direct them to the author at Rinkworks.)

The Fantasy Novelist's Exam

By David J. Parker
Additional Material By Samuel Stoddard

Ever since J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis created the worlds of Middle Earth and Narnia, it seems like every windbag off the street thinks he can write great, original fantasy, too. The problem is that most of this "great, original fantasy" is actually poor, derivative fantasy. Frankly, we're sick of it, so we've compiled a list of rip-off tip-offs in the form of an exam. We think anybody considering writing a fantasy novel should be required to take this exam first. Answering "yes" to any one question results in failure and means that the prospective novel should be abandoned at once.

The Exam

1. Does nothing happen in the first fifty pages?
   
2. Is your main character a young farmhand with mysterious parentage?
   
3. Is your main character the heir to the throne but doesn't know it?
   
4. Is your story about a young character who comes of age, gains great power, and defeats the supreme badguy?
   
5. Is your story about a quest for a magical artifact that will save the world?
   
6. How about one that will destroy it?
   
7. Does your story revolve around an ancient prophecy about "The One" who will save the world and everybody and all the forces of good?
   
8. Does your novel contain a character whose sole purpose is to show up at random plot points and dispense information?
   
9. Does your novel contain a character that is really a god in disguise?
   
10. Is the evil supreme badguy secretly the father of your main character?
    
11. Is the king of your world a kindly king duped by an evil magician?
    
12. Does "a forgetful wizard" describe any of the characters in your novel?
    
13. How about "a powerful but slow and kind-hearted warrior"?
    
14. How about "a wise, mystical sage who refuses to give away plot details for his own personal, mysterious reasons"?
    
15. Do the female characters in your novel spend a lot of time worrying about how they look, especially when the male main character is around?
    
16. Do any of your female characters exist solely to be captured and rescued?
    
17. Do any of your female characters exist solely to embody feminist ideals?
    
18. Would "a clumsy cooking wench more comfortable with a frying pan than a sword" aptly describe any of your female characters?
    
19. Would "a fearless warrioress more comfortable with a sword than a frying pan" aptly describe any of your female characters?
    
20. Is any character in your novel best described as "a dour dwarf"?
    
21. How about "a half-elf torn between his human and elven heritage"?
    
22. Did you make the elves and the dwarves great friends, just to be different?
    
23. Does everybody under four feet tall exist solely for comic relief?
    
24. Do you think that the only two uses for ships are fishing and piracy?
    
25. Do you not know when the hay baler was invented?
    
26. Did you draw a map for your novel which includes places named things like "The Blasted Lands" or "The Forest of Fear" or "The Desert of Desolation" or absolutely anything "of Doom"?
    
27. Does your novel contain a prologue that is impossible to understand until you've read the entire book, if even then?
    
28. Is this the first book in a planned trilogy?
    
29. How about a quintet or a decalogue?
    
30. Is your novel thicker than a New York City phone book?
    
31. Did absolutely nothing happen in the previous book you wrote, yet you figure you're still many sequels away from finishing your "story"?
    
32. Are you writing prequels to your as-yet-unfinished series of books?
    
33. Is your name Robert Jordan and you lied like a dog to get this far?
    
34. Is your novel based on the adventures of your role-playing group?
    
35. Does your novel contain characters transported from the real world to a fantasy realm?
    
36. Do any of your main characters have apostrophes or dashes in their names?
    
37. Do any of your main characters have names longer than three syllables?
    
38. Do you see nothing wrong with having two characters from the same small isolated village being named "Tim Umber" and "Belthusalanthalus al'Grinsok"?
    
39. Does your novel contain orcs, elves, dwarves, or halflings?
    
40. How about "orken" or "dwerrows"?
    
41. Do you have a race prefixed by "half-"?
    
42. At any point in your novel, do the main characters take a shortcut through ancient dwarven mines?
    
43. Do you write your battle scenes by playing them out in your favorite RPG?
    
44. Have you done up game statistics for all of your main characters in your favorite RPG?
    
45. Are you writing a work-for-hire for Wizards of the Coast?
    
46. Do inns in your book exist solely so your main characters can have brawls?
    
47. Do you think you know how feudalism worked but really don't?
    
48. Do your characters spend an inordinate amount of time journeying from place to place?
    
49. Could one of your main characters tell the other characters something that would really help them in their quest but refuses to do so just so it won't break the plot?
    
50. Do any of the magic users in your novel cast spells easily identifiable as "fireball" or "lightning bolt"?
    
51. Do you ever use the term "mana" in your novel?
    
52. Do you ever use the term "plate mail" in your novel?
    
53. Heaven help you, do you ever use the term "hit points" in your novel?
    
54. Do you not realize how much gold actually weighs?
    
55. Do you think horses can gallop all day long without rest?
    
56. Does anybody in your novel fight for two hours straight in full plate armor, then ride a horse for four hours, then delicately make love to a willing barmaid all in the same day?
    
57. Does your main character have a magic axe, hammer, spear, or other weapon that returns to him when he throws it?
    
58. Does anybody in your novel ever stab anybody with a scimitar?
    
59. Does anybody in your novel stab anybody straight through plate armor?
    
60. Do you think swords weigh ten pounds or more? [info]
    
61. Does your hero fall in love with an unattainable woman, whom he later attains?
    
62. Does a large portion of the humor in your novel consist of puns?
    
63. Is your hero able to withstand multiple blows from the fantasy equivalent of a ten pound sledge but is still threatened by a small woman with a dagger?
    
64. Do you really think it frequently takes more than one arrow in the chest to kill a man?
    
65. Do you not realize it takes hours to make a good stew, making it a poor choice for an "on the road" meal?
    
66. Do you have nomadic barbarians living on the tundra and consuming barrels and barrels of mead?
    
67. Do you think that "mead" is just a fancy name for "beer"?
    
68. Does your story involve a number of different races, each of which has exactly one country, one ruler, and one religion?
    
69. Is the best organized and most numerous group of people in your world the thieves' guild?
    
70. Does your main villain punish insignificant mistakes with death?
    
71. Is your story about a crack team of warriors that take along a bard who is useless in a fight, though he plays a mean lute?
    
72. Is "common" the official language of your world?
    
73. Is the countryside in your novel littered with tombs and gravesites filled with ancient magical loot that nobody thought to steal centuries before?
    
74. Is your book basically a rip-off of The Lord of the Rings?
    
75. Read that question again and answer truthfully.

Comments about the list? Go here and you can write to the author :-) -- who is not me.

Abandon beat chocolate

I used this list of words to drive the second scene in my NaNo novel this month. (I'm up to "incense" so far. I'll post what I come up with at the end of the day.) (Yes, there are 2 s's and no x.) Though not important, it's weird that I don't know where the list came from. It was tacked onto the bottom of a bunch of characters Kat and I came up with back in September. The mind is failing!

Use them in a story or write individual sentences for each.

abandon
beat
chocolate
demonic
examine
fix
garnet
habit
incense
jealousy
knife
liar
mew
necklace
ooze
pearl
quit
ransom
scavenger
smuggle
teacher
uneven
vicious/viscous (Pick one. I had written down viscious which is an amalgamation of the two ;-)
whitewash
year
zeal

Top Ten Tabloid Headlines for November 2006

From The City Newsstand's (a newsstand/bookstore in Chicago) monthly MAGBAG -- Top 10 Tabloid Headlines. (Mostly from Weekly World News (WWN) and the SUN.)

1. KIM JONG IL NUKES HIS OWN PALACE! — SUN
   
2. DOCTORS SUCCESSFULLY REMOVE BANJO FROM ALABAMA MAN'S KNEE! — WWN
   
3. Taco vendor turns tiny visitors' abandoned spacecraft into an . . . ALIEN SOMBRERO! — WWN
   
4. OMAHA BIN LADEN Osama's brother rides the range as a cowboy — WWN
   
5. Giant Mexican monster skull proves... OGOPOGO IS ALIVE! — SUN
   
6. Dust bunnies breed like rabbits — WWN
   
7. MULTIPLE PERSONALITY MAN CHARGED TRIPLE ROOM RATE! — WWN
   
8. Beer beats prostate cancer — SUN
   
9. WOMAN DELIVERS OWN BABY WHILE SKYDIVING! — WWN
   
10. ALIEN MUMMY GOES ON RAMPAGE! Trick-or-treaters terrorized by undead E.T. — WWN

What did you say?

Little late this week as I'm battling a cold and trying to finish projects before NaNoWriMo starts .... today!

Come up with the basis of a scene where the following will make perfect sense. Try to come up with several scenes for each and then use your favorite as a writing prompt.

"Why are those flowers acting like turnips."

"I *thought* it was a *potato*."

"Is that a robot head?"

"Why does the sky turn into a potato chip sometimes?"

"I found my friends in my head ..."

"I found God in a paint bucket."

"The key to NaNoWriMo success is ..."

The root of all evil is eall yfel

Here are 3 online games based on word origins:

Etymologic
"The toughest word game on the web"
Guess the language and root word for a set of 10 words. (It took me a bit to notice the answer and scores displayed at the top of the page after you click submit.)

Daily BuzzWord
Click on Daily Buzzword. For more words click Archive.
You're given the definition and how it's used and then have to answer a question that might be about the origin, or a synonym or ...

FakeOut!
Guess the real definition from a list. There aren't many words (click on More Words to access the archive) and you have to click on Fake Out link at the bottom of the page to move to the next word, but the words are challenging. (I'm not sure what inspired the grade ranges on the words. I think most adults would find them challenging.)

Captain Underpants

Find your Professor Poopypants name at Professor Poopypants' Name Change-o-Rama 2000

Choose names for a hero, a sidekick, a villain, a villain's underling and perhaps another who prompts the story (is he or she good pretending to be bad, bad pretending to be good, one who wants to defeat the bad guy to take over the world for himself or herself?) Write an adventure for them.

Here's a sample of Professor Poopypants names:

Poopsie Barfbrain
Falafel Chucklebuns
Buttercup Diaperjuice
Fluffy Toiletsniffer
Stinky Gigglesquirt
Lumpy Bubblekisser

Seasoned manatee

Use each set of 4 words in a sentence.

• seasoned
  manatee
  expose
  doom
  
• seek
  self-mocking
  tittle
  artist
  
• tradition
  bless
  intended fear
  blind drive ahead
  
• wildflower wind
  gossamer
  quarrel
  arcana
  
• liar
  gluttony
  interstellar
  cannibal
  
• juniper
  gorgeous
  magnify
  canopy

"The average pencil is seven inches long"

National Novel Writing Month is almost here!

Next month is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! It's a challenge started by Chris Baty to produce a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days, starting November 1 and ending midnight November 30.

Yes, it's insane and yes, it's a lot of fun :-)

My daughter, Kat (15), and I have done it for the past 2 years.

The great part about NaNoWriMo is that when the goal is to produce words rather than "good writing" then amazingly creative things flow out. Well, a lot of junk too! But when you turn off your inner editor, that little voice that says "No, that's no good, that won't work," you free yourself up to be more creative.

You can plan -- think up a basic story outline -- but no writing until Nov 1. (That's in 2 Wednesdays.)

I've done it with no plan 2 years in a row and it's worked out great. Even had a few hours to spare. ;-) Considering that the novel I've been picking at for the last 20 years hasn't gotten beyond (it's embarrassing to say ;-) 100,000 words of notes, actually finishing something and seeing the ideas flow without being planned was enlightening to say the least :-)

(When you're done you upload your work to the Nanowrimo word counter and it automatically counts your words. It's very generous about what it considers a word. No one reads it. It's just shear number of words.)

The first year we did it we set our goal at 1700 words per day (which would be 51,000) but some days the writing doesn't flow as well and some days get very busy (there's Thanksgiving and preparation in there!) so last year we set our daily goal as 2000 which gave us some generous padding.

Someone asked me last year how much time it takes and I was hesitant to say because for us it's a lot. But I read Chris Baty's book, No Plot, No Problem, and he said it takes 1.5 to 2 hours a day on average. Most people doing it also have jobs or go to school so that's all the time they can give it. So the answer to how much time will it take is that it will take us much time as you give it, basically! If you give it all day, it takes all day. If you only have 2 hours, it takes 2 hours.

Alien mail

Write a letter to a being living on another planet. At the moment the process is text only the way the internet used to be ;-) so you'll need to describe everything: what humans look like, cars, family structure, fast food, television, trees, houses ...

From: Writing Exercises.

Mouse potatoes

Below is sampling of new words being added to the Merriam Webster's dictionary during 2006. I must admit I only know about three quarters of them! (Which is better than my spell checker which is questioning 10 of them ;-) Use them as a writing prompt. Try to get as many into a story as 10-15 minutes allows. If you want to really push it, try incorporating one of the words into each sentence. (If you want the definitions they're linked at New Words.)

Technology and Computers

• mouse potato
  
• ringtone
  
• spyware

Science and Medicine

• avian influenza
  
• biodiesel
  
• gastric bypass

Pop Culture

• soul patch
  
• supersize

Entertainment and Leisure

• labelmate
  
• ollie
  
• wave pool

The Human Condition

• drama queen
  
• unibrow

International

• manga
  
• qigong

Business and Industry

• agritourism
  
• big-box

Nature

• aquascape
  
• coqui

Miscellaneous

• polyamory
  
• sandwich generation

Google image labeler

Google Image Labeler

Is it a game? I think so! At any rate it certainly challenges your ability to come up with words.

The object is to come up with keywords for a random image found by Google. You're playing with a partner (some random, anonymous person Google chooses for you). The object is for both of you to come up with the same word to describe an image. The trick is that you can't see the words your partner is coming up with.

You have 1.5 minutes to try to label as many images as you can but you can't move onto the next image until you've both found a word for the current image.

It can be quite addictive!

Thesaurus trails

Begin with a word and follow a trail of words through the thesaurus.

This is easiest with a thesaurus on your computer but it will work with an old fashioned hardcopy too. (There's an online Thesaurus a The Free Dictionary. Click the Word/Article radio button. The thesaurus words will be below the dictionary definitions.)

Start with any word: a word that has meaning for you, a new favorite, one chosen at random, one with a definition that might touch on a lot of things or something common place.

Write the word down then look it up in the thesaurus. Jot down one or more words that intrigue you. (It can be fun to deliberately choose a word that means something very different than the meaning you had in mind.) Then look up the new words. Keep going, looking up the words you've found until a trail comes to a dead end that offers no new words. You can then go back and choose one of the other words you chose from the thesaurus and follow that.

Keep following trails for 10-15 minutes or as long as you're having fun :-)

If you're only going to choose one or two words each time, you can write them down in a simple list. If you're going to choose several words each time you might want to make a cluster diagram by writing your original word in the center and then writing the words you chose from the thesaurus around it. (There's an example of a cluster diagram at Clustering characters.)

When you're done, look over the patterns and connections in the trails.

Pick one trail and use that as a writing prompt for 10-15 minutes.

(Inspired by Thesaurus Maze at About Teen Writing.)

Here's a few simple trails I created:

• animal -- crude -- earthy -- dusty -- cold -- passionless -- cold -- black -- swarthy -- dark
  
• beauty -- charmer -- necromancer -- prophet -- haruspex -- augur -- imply -- hint -- fantasy
  
• demon -- evil spirit -- bogey -- aircraft -- flyover -- overpass -- span -- straddle -- perspective -- futurism

Just wanted to let you know ...

In honor of my sister's visit, from the point of view of a bad guy's sister, write home to Mom about the bad sibling's activities. Assume Mom thinks he or she is a paragon so the goal is to break it to her gently. (It can be a bad guy someone else created or your own invention.)

"There's no excuse not to dream."

Seven virtues

This expands on the idea from last Saturday to help you get to know a character you've created better or flesh out one that seems a bit wishy-washy.

What would your character's list of 7 Virtues be? They don't have to be virtues he or she possesses, but ones he or she thinks are most admirable -- in others perhaps! While he goes off and does the total opposite ;-)

Then do a free write on a different one for 15 minutes each day about your character's thoughts and feelings on and experiences with the virtue. People he's known who've had it and the good and bad he's seen of it. Times he's seen it put into action. Just let the words flow nonstop for 15 minutes.

Try making up your own list of virtues first. Then, if you want, you can look through this list compiled from various places around the internet to see if there are any your character might move to the top of his or her list.

acceptance
acknowledgment
assertiveness
beauty
bravery
caring
charity
cheerfulness
clarity
cleanliness
commitment
compassion
competence
confidence
consideration
contentment
cooperation
courage
courtesy
craft
creativity
curiosity
detachment
determination
devotion
diligence
discernment
efficiency
empathy
energy
enthusiasm
excellence
fairness
faith
faithfulness
flexibility
forgiveness
fortitude
friendliness
generosity
gentleness
grace
gratitude
helpfulness
honesty
honor
hope
humility
humor
idealism
insight
integrity
joyfulness
justice
kindness
love
loyalty
mercy
mindfulness
moderation
modesty
obedience
open mindedness
order
orderliness
passion
patience
peace
peacefulness
perseverance
perspective
playfulness
prayerfulness
pride
principled
productivity
prudence
purity
purposefulness
rationality
reliability
resilience
respect
responsibility
reverence
righteousness
sacrifice
self confidence
self discipline
self possession
self restraint
service
silence
steadfastness
stillness
tact
temperance
thankfulness
thrift
tolerance
trust
trustworthiness
truthfulness
understanding
unity
wisdom
wonder

Lost in translation

Copy a paragraph of text from the internet, a poem, something you've written into the translator at Babel Fish Translation or Free Translation

Select a language to translate it into. (Only the European ones seem to work for Babel Fish. Or maybe it's just my browser.) Click Translate.

On the next page copy the translated text at the top and paste it into the box at the bottom. Choose another language to translate it into. (Note: Dutch is listed below English.)

Repeat for as long as you find this amusing :-)

Use the final output as a writing prompt.

Some hints:

• At times it leaves a foreign word untranslated and those will persist. If foreign words creeping in bothers you, translate it to English fairly regularly and replace them. (To see what the words used to be -- it probably has altered from the original -- you can click the back button despite the dire warning about resending the form. It works just fine.)
  
• Less frequently typos creep in -- ex, "if" became "if f" -- You may want to keep an eye out for those also if it bothers you.

Here's one that I did. If you want to see the original, click the Comments.

Maria had small paralyzed. To be excessively and the rag to float was the target eats of the snow. Everybody, where one became paralyzed to this Maria that must go away stops towards has been correct. As - it walk yet to teach to a day that is contradicts the norms to him. It provided for that the children and, laugh of the games to see paralyzed in the school.

The Devil and his publicist

Choose one of the following as a 10-15 minute writing prompt.

• Depict an allergy gone haywire.
  
• Pen the monologue of a nostalgic vampire.
  
• Script a dialogue between the Devil and his publicist.

From Michael Arnzen's THE GORELETTER. A bi-monthly email newsletter of the bizarre. Michael Arnzen is an author of horror novels and poetry.

Top Ten Tabloid Headlines for October 2006

From The City Newsstand's (a newsstand/bookstore in Chicago) monthly MAGBAG -- Top 10 Tabloid Headlines. (Mostly from Weekly World News (WWN) and the SUN.)

1. FATAL FARTS! — WWN
   
2. GRANNY SCARES OFF ROBBERS BY PULLING A BIGGER KNIFE! — SUN
   
3. SATAN CAPTURED BY GIs IN IRAQ! — WWN
   
4. VAMPIRES ATTACK U.S. TROOPS Army of undead taking over mountains of Afghanistan! — WWN
   
5. VEGAN VAMPIRE ATTACKS TREES — WWN
   
6. Sherriff serves up a bowl of his own blood as bait to capture... VAMPIRE CAT! — WWN
   
7. Mystery of the floating coffin — SUN
   
8. SCIENTISTS END TERROR OF THE WALKING MUMMY! — SUN
   
9. AMERICA'S LATEST ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS — VAMPIRES — SUN
   
10. JUDGE WHO BARRED WITCHES FROM ADOPTING CHILDREN TURNED INTO GUINEA PIG! — WWN

Freewriting to character building

Use free writing to build characters.

Make a list of emotions. Each day free write for 15 minutes -- that is write without pausing, push the ideas out -- about what your character thinks about the emotion, what emotions it elicits for him, experiences he's had with it in himself and in others. Anything and everything that flows out nonstop for 15 minutes.

There are several lists of emotions on the internet. The one here is from Basic emotions - list of emotions.

Wikipedia also has a list of Emotions.

And at Burning Void: Passion (though some seem more akin to characteristics).

(From an idea posted by Sesselja on the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) forums.

love
compassion
sentimentality
lust
passion
infatuation
longing
joy
satisfaction
ecstasy
enthusiasm
zeal
thrill
contentment
pleasure
pride
triumph
optimism
rapture
relief
amazement
aggravation
frustration
anger
hostility
hate
scorn
vengefulness
resentment
disgust
jealousy
torment
suffering
depression
sadness
grief
disappointment
guilt
shame
remorse
alienation
loneliness
insecurity
embarrassment
humiliation
insult
pity
sympathy
shock
fear
panic
anxiety
dread

Words of the Year

Only three months away from this year's list but I just came across this: Merriam-Webster OnLine posted a list of top searched words of 2005.

(There are links to definitions there. But feel free to make up your own definitions.)

Use them as a 10-15 minute writing prompt (story or poem).

integrity
refugee
contempt
filibuster
insipid
tsunami
pandemic
conclave
levee
inept

Wanted!

Create a Wanted poster for a notorious criminal. Make up an evil person, use your favorite evil character, or write the Wanted poster the bad guys would put up for a pesky good guy they want eliminated.

If you need some inspiration, there are some real wanted posters at FBI's Most Wanted. They are, of course, not nice people being very not nice currently so not for the faint of heart.

There are some Wanted posters from the old west at Outlaws of the American West. Who were also not nice people but at least they're long dead.

One at Wikipedia for John Wilkes Boothe. (A longer version of the picture at right.) There's also a bigger version that you can read the smallest print if you don't mind waiting for it to load.

And some Wanted posters for bugs at Bug Mugs :-)

Dragon Writing sticks

Here's the list of words that I used for the writing prompt -- though more of a game really! -- in the Dragon Writing fun shop at the Live and Learn Conference. (Click on Comments at the bottom of the post for a list of the words.)

For those who weren't there, I had a whole bunch (maybe 300) colored popsicle sticks with words written on both sides. We drew a bunch of sticks and tried to come up with fantasy tabloid headlines.

The only instruction I gave was to choose 2 sticks of each color. That just gives you a good mixture of word types to start working with. You don't need to use them all. You don't need to use each color. You can throw back and redraw any that aren't working and draw whatever color. Whatever helps!

I used two packs of colored popsicle sticks and put words on each side. I can't remember how many were in each pack. (150 maybe?)

Plain - Conjunctions and Prepositions. These are the only ones that have 4 to a stick. Katelyn came up with this idea in the headlines she sent to the list and it seemed to make them more interesting. I went through the newspaper and kept track of the prepositions that were most common. There are multiple copies of each set. Katelyn needed an "on" a couple of times so I made one but it's all by its lonesome at the moment. There's a list of prepositions at Test Magic. Way more than the newspaper headlines ever use! ;-)

Green - Places and Objects. Probably the least useful category but interesting to have.

Red - Verbs. There are more words than I had sticks for so I colored some plain sticks with a red marker.

Blue and Purple - People and Creatures. Probably the most useful category since the nouns can often do double duty as adjectives: vampire astrologist for instance.

Yellow and Orange - Adjectives. If I were doing it again, I would change what adjectives I could to nouns, like "baby" for instance. (Especially since I had extra blue and purple and ran short of yellow and orange so had to make some.)

Using colored sticks isn't important. It's just less annoying. My daughter and I have another set of just plain sticks with random words on it originally intended to generate manga-ish story ideas. They've expanded beyond that (a recent one had something to do with a local radio personality and sparkly pants ;-) But since they're all the same color, it's annoyingly easy to pull out a whole series of nouns as you search for a verb.

I don't know if it makes a difference but, as I was writing them, I had the words printed in two columns (4 columns for the adjectives) and chose the word for one side of a stick from column A and the other side of the stick from column B so all the "a"s, for instance, weren't clustered onto the same sticks. As I said I'm not sure if it makes a difference but it seemed to make sense at the time!

Killing ways

Write 35 (or more!) *ways* for a character to murder another. Again, push it even if they start sounding wacky. Try doing one or more for each letter of the alphabet. It might knock some more ideas loose!

Aliens ate my antenna

Write an alliterative (tabloid if you wish) headline for each letter of the alphabet.

Hack your way out of writer's block

Hack Your Way Out of Writer's Block

by Merlin Mann
I recently had occasion to do some…errr…research on writer’s block. Yeah, research. That’s what I was doing. Like a scientist.

I found lots of great ideas to get unstuck and wrote the best ones on index cards to create an Oblique Strategies-like deck. Swipe, share, and add you own in comments.

• Talk to a monkey - Explain what you’re really trying to say to a stuffed animal or cardboard cutout.
  
  [Joyce: This is a variation of the classic "What Am I Really Trying To Say?" Sometimes we get so lost in the details of the trees that we can't see the forest we're trying to write about. You can also try explaining your story to a friend in an email. (You don't need to send it.)]
  
  
• Do something important that’s very easy - Is there a small part of your project you could finish quickly that would move things forward?
  
  [Joyce: In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamont suggests looking at a project one piece at a time. "Bird by bird" as her father suggested to her brother when he had to write a report about birds. A novel can be intimidating but you've "assigned" yourself just to write a description of the main character, that seems more doable.]
  
  
• Try freewriting - Sit down and write anything for an arbitrary period of time—say, 10 minutes to start. Don’t stop, no matter what. Cover the monitor with a manila folder if you have to. Keep writing, even if you know what you’re typing is gibberish, full of misspellings, and grammatically psychopathic. Get your hand moving and your brain will think it’s writing. Which it is. See?
  
  
• Take a walk - Get out of your writing brain for 10 minutes. Think about bunnies. Breathe.
  
  
• Take a shower; change clothes - Give yourself a truly clean start.
  
  
• Write from a persona - Lend your voice to a writing personality who isn’t you. Doesn’t have to be a pirate or anything—just try seeing your topic from someone else’s perspective, style, and interest.
  
  
• Get away from the computer; Write someplace new - If you’ve been staring at the screen and nothing is happening, walk away. Shut down the computer. Take one pen and one notebook, and go somewhere new.
  
  
• Quit beating yourself up - You can’t create when you feel ass-whipped. Stop visualizing catastrophes, and focus on positive outcomes.
  
  
• Stretch - Maybe try vacuuming your lungs too.
  
  
• Add one ritual behavior - Get a glass of water exactly every 20 minutes. Do pushups. Eat a Tootsie Roll every paragraph. Add physical structure.
  
  
• Listen to new music - Try something instrumental and rhythmic that you’ve never heard before. Put it on repeat, then stop fiddling with iTunes until your draft is done.
  
  
• Write crap - Accept that your first draft will suck, and just go with it. Finish something.
  
  [Joyce: Pretty much the idea behind National Novel Writing Month. When the goal is to write 2000 words a day then what you write becomes less important than just getting words down on the page. And it's amazing the stuff that comes out when the inner editor is on vacation.]
  
  
• Unplug the router - Metafilter and Boing Boing aren’t helping you right now. Turn off the Interweb and close every application you don’t need. Consider creating a new user account on your computer with none of your familiar apps or configurations.
  
  
• Write the middle - Stop whining over a perfect lead, and write the next part or the part after that. Write your favorite part. Write the cover letter or email you’ll send when it’s done.
  
  [Joyce: Another idea is to write something outside of the story: background of a character, a letter from one character to another.]
  
  
• Do one chore - Sweep the floor or take out the recycling. Try something lightly physical to remind you that you know how to do things.
  
  
• Make a pointless rule - You can’t end sentences with words that begin with a vowel. Or you can’t have more than one word over eight letters in any paragraph. Limits create focus and change your perspective.
  
  
• Work on the title - Quickly make up five distinctly different titles. Meditate on them. What bugs you about the one you like least?
  
  
• Write five words - Literally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.

Time to kill

Write 35 motives for why a character would want to murder another. Push it even if they start sounding wacky.

If you want, take the third-last item you wrote and use that as a writing prompt for 10-15 minute.

From the writing prompts at OnceWritten.com.

The Famous Wombat Specter

Choose a hero and a villain. Set the timer for 10-15 minutes and write their latest encounter.

THE SUPER HEROES

The famous Wombat Specter
Power(s): Dark generation/control, Precognition
Source of powers: Solar
Weapon: Light Derringer
Transportation: Meteor Ornithopter

The fearless Cyberfly
Power(s): Insect control, Super intelligence
Source of powers: Abnormal brain function
Weapon: Ether Throwing Stars
Transportation: Ring Portal

The lucky Dragon Princess
Power(s): Sharp shooting
Source of powers: Electrocution
Weapon: Force Missiles
Transportation: Vibro Forklift

The wondrous Tiger Light
Power(s): Dark generation/control, Prehensile tail
Source of powers: Raised by animals
Weapon: Kryptonite Sword
Transportation: Tomorrow Tractor

THE SUPER VILLAINS

The deadly Ghost Whatsit
Power(s): Super strength, Juggling, Extra-dimensional travel
Source of powers: Radiation
Weapon: Omnithrowing stars
Transportation: Insect Skates

The socio-pathic Fire Warrior
Power(s): Matter consumption, Radiation generation/control
Source of powers: Evolved artificially
Weapon: Silver Bazooka
Transportation: Cosmic Rhino

The maniacal Phantom Weirdo
Power(s): Illusion casting
Source of powers: Soul sold to Devil
Weapon: Foam Tentacles
Transportation: Ant Warhorse

The abhorrent Android Rage
Power(s): Autonomic function control, Super-human weight-guessing accuracy
Source of powers: Demonic
Weapon: Slime Sling
Transportation: Wingwing

These were randomly generated super heroes and super villains at Lee's (Useless) Superhero Generator.

Harvest Moon

It's the harvest moon and she's agreed to pose for a portrait. Who is she?

(Click the image to open a larger one in a new window from Amy Brown's website. Or here if she's moved her pictures again and the link doesn't work.)

Include this sentence

Write a story that contains one of these sentences.

To get started, try writing the sentence down on your page and continuing from it. Then if you find you need to build up to the sentence for the story to make sense, add sentences before it.

• Winds seem horrible even though they are absent.
  
• Families look dim despite the fact that they are old.
  
• Brains will be content wherever anger arises.
  
• Friends appear important as long as they are determined.
  
• Skies could be inefficient until they find contentment.
  
• Enthusiasts feel incompetent when they are doing what must be done.

Sentences generated at Writing Fix's First Sentence Creator: Deep Thoughts.

"To me the greatest pleasure"

100 sentences

I'm going to collect some "writer's block" tips. I don't like the term writer's block. It sounds like a disease that will stay with you until find a cure. Which only turns it into something worse than it is.

Stuck. Stalled. The point is to get moving again, often by doing something different, or off in a different direction rather than sitting there spinning your tires.

This is an idea from 3AM Epiphany, a book of writing exercises by Brian Kiteley.

He suggests writing 100 sentences about a character you're stuck on. Or a place. Or a setting. Or an Idea. Don't lift your fingers from the keyboard through the whole exercise. Let it sit for a day and then revise.

100 *short* -- he lists the exercise as 800 words total -- sentences. (Though 200 or 500 sentences he thinks would be even better but 100 is enough to be useful.) They shouldn't connect. He says just relax and let your mind flow free to find new material. "It is unnerving to have to write so many sentences in a row, and after a certain point the pressure of creating character details overcomes the pressure to tell a story."

Top 10 tabloid headlines for September 2006

From The City Newsstand's (a newsstand/bookstore in Chicago) monthly MAGBAG -- Top 10 Tabloid Headlines. (Mostly from Weekly World News (WWN) and the SUN.) 

1. JACK THE RIPPER WAS A WOMAN! — SUN
   
2. STUDIO BUYS MOVIE SCRIPT FROM A CHIMP! — WWN
   
3. RESEARCHER CALCULATES A SNOWBALL'S CHANCE IN HELL TO BE .000000000134% — WWN
   
4. Michael Jackson wants to live with leprechauns — SUN
   
5. MICROSCOPIC SPACE ALIENS INFESTING CARPETS — WWN
   
6. UFO ALIENS ABDUCTED MY CAT! Now frisky Felix is home safe — and has a gift of ESP, says amazed owner — SUN
   
7. BARBER BLEEDS RED & WHITE STRIPED BLOOD! — WWN
   
8. SPEND IT WHILE YOU CAN! U.S. currency accidentally printed with disappearing ink! — WWN
   
9. ASTRONOMER DISCOVERS PLANET MADE ENTIRELY OF NOODLES — WWN
   
10. CREDIT CARD EXPLODES WHEN GAL GOES OVER LIMIT! — WWN