If only

Place the word "only" anywhere in this sentence:

She told him that she loved him.

More of a plaything than a writing prompt. But if you're so inspired, did one of them stir up characters, scenarios and idea for a story? Or you could write a micro fiction (100 word story, 1000 word story, 14 word story or whatever constraints you wish) for each. Can you come up with other sentences you can drop a word into anywhere?

Quadrival Quandary

At Quadrival Quandary you're given four unusual words and challenged to use them not just in a sentence but in one illustrative sentence. As the guidelines at the site state, "Your sentence should do more than use the words in a grammatically acceptable way, it should show what they mean. If someone didn't know the meaning of a word, could they make a good guess from how it's used in the sentence?"

The definitions are given on the page for each new day's set of words. If you dig into the archives or the randomizer (which digs further back to when the site was contributed to regularly), the sentences others crafted are there to inspire you.

From February 13, 2012:

• promethean
• ventripotent
• mutt
• exoteric

"Dr Atkins decided to confront the elephant in the Obesity Task Force conference room by asking, 'If it’s already a promethean task to convince people that their ventripotent mutts need more exercise and less food, how will we ever mount an effective exoteric awareness campaign for their masters to change their ways as well?'" (by wordgirl)

Snowballing

A Snowball is a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. If you're metrophobic, try writing a sentence. Though poetry might be easier since it doesn't need to make as much sense ;-)

I
go
now
into
under
ground
tunnels
carrying
bodacious
starstruck
jackrabbits
backflipping

Two sites that list words by length are Your Dictionary and Best Word Lists.

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If you would like to see a prolific snowballer in action, check out Snowball Poetry on Twitter. (The beginning of mine came from one there.)

Snowball was created by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature). They gather together to create constrained writing challenges. It's also called a chaterism which Wikipedia defines as "where the length of words in a phrase or sentence increases or decreases in a uniform, mathematical way." (I'm guessing since snowballs get bigger when rolled, the word originally referred to poems with words that increased. Chaterism is a broader concept.)

There is a Snowball Poetry Generator for Windows.

Tweebio

In 160 characters or fewer, write your favorite characters' Twitter biographies. The characters can be yours or not.

Try juxtaposing your hero and your antagonist's bios. Have them write up bios for each other in response. Have your secondary characters write bios for themselves and the main characters.

A handy tool is Characters Counter that keeps a running count as you type. (If that disappears, Google "160 character counter". Yes, apparently bios get 160 characters. Tweets are limited to 140. But wouldn't that mean a long bio would get truncated if retweeted? Hmm.)

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Of course people are collecting best Twitter bios! 20 of the World's Most Clever Twitter Bios is a good start with links to several other collections.

Here's a sampling:

• I was named after a mythological being ... how would you feel?
• A man of mystery and power, whose power is exceeded only by his mystery.
• Marc is a man with a dream. A very simple dream, mostly involving nachos and beer, but a dream nonetheless.
• Currently starring in my own reality show titled, A Modern Cinderella; One Girl’s Search for Love and Shoes.
• I’m Kail, I was given a girl’s name when I was a baby because my parents are idiots.
• Former military guy & cop.  Leprechauns freak me out.
• I have been called a PollyAnna, sugar-coated idealist. I like to think of myself as more optimistic than that
• Darth Vader: Community Manager for Sith Lord but tweets are my own. Asthmatic. Dad to two rambunctious Jedis. Love scrapbooking, Beyonce, and galactic domination.
• Hillary Clinton: Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD ...
• Tome Hanks: I’m that actor in some of the movies you liked and some you didn’t. Sometimes I’m in pretty good shape, other times I’m not. Hey, you gotta live, you know?
• Weird Al: You know... the Eat It guy.
• Anna Kendrick: Pale, awkward and very very small. Form an orderly queue, gents. Location: probably by the food.
• Lucy Hale: I drink too much coffee. And laugh too loud.

When you're done, have fun with the Twitter bio generator.

A murder in six words

These are all from Six Word Stories. Two possibilities: Expand on them. Or come up with your own six word story. (Or both of course!)

Spirit detective solves his own murder.

She was lovely. Then things changed.

Finding them entwined, Malcom shot both.
(What if what he sees isn't two lovers?)

Lost my wallet, found my desires.

Court denies their marriage. Robots riot.

Woken from my coma… by robots!

Best friends. Circumstances change. Worst enemies.

Cannibal cook ruins dinner. Now dinner.

He loved her. She loved Jesus. (Or other deity of course.)

Best friends. Get amnesia. New lovers.

She laughed. He remembered it always.

Always waking up beside her ghost.

Match, made in heaven

These are all from Six Word Stories. Two possibilities: Expand on them. Or come up with your own six word story. (Or both of course!)

Match, made in heaven, ignited hell.

Lonely man. Artificial intelligence. Lonely machine.

My wedding invitations. My hit list.

Human slaves. Robot slaves. Human slaves.

Two wives, one funeral, no tears.

Right place. Right time. Wrong dimension.

Head cheerleader, star quarterback: produce nerd.

Man builds computer. Computer builds man.

Past deadline, reporter finds the story.

Time traveler kills himself. Ruled homicide.

Loved her enough to pretend otherwise.

Lonely scientist grows his own women!
Or, less cliché, Lonely scientist grows her own man.

Twitfic

Catherine McEver has more
"never worn" baby shoes at her blog.

You have 140 characters (Twitter's limit) to write a complete story. That includes a character or characters, a problem and a satisfying stopping point. You may find it useful to do a lot of implying, using objects or stereotypes that encapsulate a lot of meaning in a word of two!

Ernest Hemingway (supposedly) wrote the quintessential micro-fiction with: "For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn." And that's only 33 characters!

I suspect key to the dramatic impact of those six words are two things: "baby shoes" supplies not just characters (father, mother and baby) with strong, easily grasped relationships but also an impending event; and "for sale" suggests that's the end of the story.

N.E. Lily likens the structure of Twitter fiction to jokes where there's the "set up" and the "climax". And many of them do read that way. Many others read like setups to a story rather than a complete story. And some actually do feel like a full story (in pill form perhaps ;-)

If you'd like to browse some to get a feel for what people have done with the form so far, there are links below.

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Arjun Basu (arjunbasu), William Brazill (InstantFiction), Geoff Meeker (AStoryIn140) are all currently tweeting stories.

Thaumatrope has a collection of science fiction, fantasy and horror Stories and Serials. (Click on Read More after any of the serials to see all the tweets.) They stopped compiling Sept 3, 2010 but there's almost 2 years worth to page back through.

Nanoism and Picfic are both still collection conventional Twitter fiction.

Clown funeral

I'll never forget the day my mom turned to me out of the blue and informed me, "When I die, I want everyone to dress as clowns at my funeral."

Take it from there. It could be about the funeral. Or what prompted her to say that at that moment. Perhaps a mysterious past? An agreement made? A way to prevent a curse?

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From One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence.

Short and to the point

Tell a true story ... in one sentence. No cheating with run ons ;-) Tell the essence and keep it succinct.

This is trickier than it seems! A story should have at least one character, an obstacle or slice of life and a resolution. A lot to pack into a sentence :-)

When you're done, you can submit it to: One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence.

There are loads of stories at the site (though you may want to wait until after Thursday to read deeply into the archives since one story is coming up next prompt :-)

(Some past posts that involved one sentence: One sentence review and One sentence plot.)

Four of a kind

Write four lines (or sentences for prose writers) of four four-letter words each.

(For prose writers, can you tell a whole story in just 16 words?)

Need a starting point?

4-letter word

Words are from Really cool four letter words and Slightly less cool four letter words. Please forgive the lack of definitions! If you visit the pages, there are handy links to the definitions.

Rhopalic

In a rhopalic creation each successive word is longer by a letter or a syllable. It can be a sentence, a poem, a dialog, a headline ...

Dmitri Borgmann wrote a rhopalic sentence up to 20 letters: "I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalises intercommunications' incomprehensibleness."

If you'd like to try your hand at writing a rhopalic headline, Anu Garg of A Word a Day is running a contest that ends this Friday. The headlines submitted can be real or imaginary, can be increasing or decreasing word lengths.

Anu Garg has posted the best entries at his website: Rhopalic headline contest.

Alternatively, how far can you get on a rhopalic alliterative alphabet before going nuts? ;-)

Flash fiction and Plot generators

Whether you're gearing up for NaNo or want to try your hand at flash fiction, NaNo liaisons have passed on Plot Generator for the beginning of your story and Plot Twists.

Flash fiction are stories less than a 1000 words and come in many varieties with sometimes very specific rules. Some other names are: short-short stories, sudden, postcard, minute, furious, fast, quick, and skinny fiction. Many have websites where you can share the torture of confining your writing by word count:

365 Tomorrows posts a new flash fiction everyday. You may submit your (science fiction based) stories for consideration.

Camille Renshaw provides a good overview of the craft in The Essentials of Micro-Fiction.

Here are a few types of flash fiction with specific limitations:

• pinhead stories (50 words or fewer)
• nanofiction (less than 50)
• 55 word (55 or fewer but must include a setting, character or characters, conflict, resolution, so it's not, for example, a slice of life piece.) You can read the 2008 winners of the 55-word contest run by New Times magazine for inspiration.
• 69er, 88er, 99er
• microfiction (under 100)
• drabble (100 exactly and its spinoffs: dribble - exactly 50 words, droubble - exactly 200 words) The Drabble Project has some examples from drabble's beginnings.
• ficleys (64-1024 words but you can continue someone else's story).

Just seven

Write a story in just seven sentences. But not just any seven sentences! Each sentence will play a specific role

This idea is from author Jim Van Pelt who created it for a creative fiction writing class as an exercise in plot:

An Exercise in Plotting: The Seven Sentence Story by Jim Van Pelt

We talked about plot having several components: an inciting moment, rising action, a climax and a denouement. One way to see how a plot can work is to build a plot skeleton, a very short story, stripped of everything except the plot.

To write this kind of story, you are limited to only seven sentences. Each sentence has a specific role.

1. Introduce what the main character wants and the first action he/she takes to accomplish the goal.
2. The results of the action the character takes from sentence 1 has to make the situation worse. The character should be farther from the goal now.
3. Based on the new situation, the character takes a second action to accomplish the goal.
4. The results of the second action the character takes from sentence 3 is to make the situation worse. The character should be even farther from the goal now.
5. Based on the new situation, the character takes a third and final action to accomplish the goal.
6. This third action either accomplishes the character’s goal, fails to accomplish the goal, or there is an unusual but oddly satisfying different result of the last action.
7. The denouement. This sentence wraps the story up. It could tell the reader how the character felt about the results, or provide a moral, or tell how the character’s life continued on.

After his class had a great deal of fun with this, he held a contest. When you're done, you can check out the entries.

"Help, 've lst t mny vwels!"

A constrained writing prompt landed in my mail box today in Anu Garg's Wordsmith.org's Word A Day. And it's a contest too.

We've done lipograms where you're forbidden to use a letter or letters in each word and anti-lipograms where you must use a letter or letters. (Click Constrained writing over on the right for more.)

A univocalic is a piece of writing that uses only one of the vowels, an example for e is: "Help the peerless letter e perfect sentences."

CONTEST: Imagine you are a headline writer for a newspaper back in the days when metal type was used. You have run out of all but one of the vowels in the large type size that is used for the headline. What univocalic can you come up with?

If you get stumped for substitute words, try the thesaurus at The Free Dictionary.

Email your univocalic news headlines (real or made-up) to (words at wordsmith.org). Selected entries will be featured in the weekly compilation AWADmail and the best entry will win an autographed copy of Anu Garg's latest book The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words.

Deadline is Friday Oct 17.

"Most notably, [Christian Bök's] 2001 Eunoia , seven years in the making, became Canada's bestselling poetry book ever -- an incredible feat for such explicitly experimental writing. No comforting fluff here; in the main portion, each chapter employs but a single vowel (e.g., "Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech"), a univocalic constraint." -- Ed Park; Crystal Method; Village Voice (New York); Dec 16, 2003.

Unreadable underneath

Use only the following words to write with. Cut them up, shuffle them around and see what you come up with.

a
and
and
as
at
back
behind
but
doll's
expected
eyes
eyes
face
face
fear
filled
flowed
he
his
his
his
his
his
I
in
into
it
life
look
lovely
me
moved
no
on
shock
skin
staring
still
surprise
the
there
there
there
underneath
unreadable
until
was
was
was
was
was
wasn't
what
worry

(The words came from a paragraph in a novel. If, when you're done, you want to see what the author came up with, check the comments)

Aardvarks to zebras

Write a 26 sentence story. Start the first sentence with a word beginning with A, the second sentence with a word beginning with B all the way to the last sentence that begins with Z.

Dialog will probably help you out of a lot of problems since it's easier to have someone say something beginning with odd letters than to start sentences with them! But it's also a challenge to begin sentences with a variety of words. I know I fall into the trap of beginning sentences with pronouns (He impaled the vampire ... She ripped the motherboard from the robot ...)

Anti-lipogrammatic dragons

Take the sentences you generated last week for Alphabetical dragons and, while trying to capture the same idea, rewrite using only words that don't contain that letter of the alphabet. (You can read more about Lipograms and Anti-lipograms.)

Here's the W example I gave last week:

Wini the Worm, wriggled wearily westward toward the Wailing Wood, wreathed in white wisps and wrapped in remnants of war.

And I'll try to write it without Ws:

Fredi the Firedrake, jiggled tiredly anti-easterly in the direction of the Crying Forest, surrounded by pale tendrils and cloaked in remnants of battle.

(You can use your word processor search feature to search for the letter to see if one snuck into the middle of a word.)

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If you need synonym help the Free Dictionary has a pretty good thesaurus.

Wiktionary, in addition to definitions, has foreign words and synonyms for some words. It was good for dragon (and forest) but just gave me a definition for wriggle.

And the Visual Thesaurus is cool :-). It's a program/subscription but you can try it out a limited number of times for free. After you type in a word you can click on any of the words in the map and it will put that at the center with related words around it.

Oxymorons

Good writing combines ideas in novel ways. Try using the following combinations in sentences that give insight into why the odd combinations fittingly describe what's going on.

• festive tyrant
• fabulous poverty
• thoughtful depression
• blissful zombie
• tasty plague
• beautiful monster
• fabulous crisis
  
• putrid wealth
• foul loyalty
• impoverished beauty
• shameful miracle
• miserable courage
• tyranical perfection
• depressing optimism

These were generated at WritingFix's Serendipitous Oxymoron Creator.

Seven random words: A spotless blizzard

Write sentences that contain all 7 of the words on each line. Feel free to change some of the word endings, eg, change crooked to crook or crooks.

1. spotless blizzard disease dramatic protest flipped deny
   
2. whimpered mystery rare raced uglier accident candle
   
3. crooked frightened horse instantly excited flames circular
   
4. shiver horrible blood secret return distant cavern
   
5. squashed slowest private billion sharp ignorance shiver
   
6. dangerous bounce rainy jokes overgrown furry explore
   
7. fatal roam frightened wise slobbered bubbly traveler
   
8. slippery chewed priest return drooled waterfall fairy
   
9. altered bumpy foggy journey deny skull dragon
   
10. ice outstanding waterfall future toe modified forest

Constrained writing

Constrained writing is like confining yourself to a very specific box which can, ironically, be freeing since it forces you out of the familiar boxes you may generally be writing in. I've posted several prompts based on constrained writing: lipograms (forbidding certain letters), anti-lippograms (requiring certain letters), drabble (100 word story). (Click on the Constrained writing category to the right to see them.)

Constrained.org is "a community site for short stories that adhere to various literary constraints, ranging from the well-known (anagrams, acrostics, palindromes) to the obscure and arbitrary". They put up a new constraint each week.

You can see a Random Story from a random challenge. They also have a page listing their current Constraint Challenges. Here's a sample of what may be over a hundred of them. (I wish the page had full descriptions, but each challenge links to a full description.):

• Lipogram (thirteen stories) (Your lipogrammatic submissions should avoid a symbol that I will playfully signal by noting that it...)
  
• The extreme opposite (seven stories) (Compose stories wherein every verb, adjective etc. possesses the letter 'e'.)
  
• Fossil record (nine stories) (No formal constraints this time (although you may, of course, devise your own). Instead your stories...)
  
• Monosyllabic stories (fifteen stories) (Your task, should you choose it, is to weave taut yarns in which each word is but one voiced part.)