Writing prompt: Half-human, all humanity

1. Start with an animal you dislike. Maybe it's ugly, or seems to have no purpose, or it's only ever been a nuisance to you. Whatever animal (or insect) that is, hold that image in your head.
2. Pick out one or two physical characteristics of that unliked animal and give them to your otherwise human character. Your protagonist, then, is part-human, part ugly-pointless-hated-nuisance animal.
3. Place this protagonist in a world in which his or her mutations are unique and rare but not uncommon enough to be noteworthy. These types of mutations are as rare as, say, Crohn's Disease or Type 1 Diabetes.
4. Send your protagonist on a job interview.

Rewriting prompt: Indulge in grandiloquence

In today's rewriting prompt, I ask you to do the opposite of good editing.

Start with about 300 or 400 words — fiction or essay, it doesn't matter. Rewrite it using the most multisyllabic, sesquipedalian verbiage you can muster. Stretch both the language and yourself.

"Out for what do you need that gun?"

The Last Man On Earth premiered this Sunday, and I congratulate the show's writers for how they started this new series. [Warning: There be spoilers ahead.]

Writing prompt: What's On Your Mind

Create a character who is doing something that ought to require a great deal of concentration, but have her distracted by thoughts of something completely unconnected. This will of necessity need to be written in first person (or, I suppose, second person) as you jump from the character's outer world to her inner world.

Rewriting prompt: A Moody Rewrite

Find a scene or story that has a strong mood to it and rewrite it to give it an opposite mood. Make a somber scene light-hearted, or a scary scene funny. Or at least fun.

Speed Reading as a Sales Tactic?

I'm not a speed reader myself. When the writing is good, I like to savor it.  (When the writing is bad, I find something better to read.) So I never really gave much though to how quickly I could actually read.

Writing prompt: Communication Breakdown

Pick your favorite disaster — earthquake, alien attack, sharknado, whatever. In the midst of this disaster, place two people who will need to rely on each other if they are to survive. Problem is, they don't speak the same language. How do they communicate with each other in order to make it out alive?

Rewriting prompt: Not to Be

In a blog editing tip way back in September 2013, I wrote that "No word in the English language is as insidious as is is." What I meant is that the forms of to be, whether as helping verbs or linking verbs, can become like table salt: you can use it with almost anything, but too much of it can make the whole thing unpalatable.

That might be a bad metaphor.

Writing Prompt: Chatter Chatter Chatter

Write a scene involving two characters that consists only of dialogue. No description. No "he said" or "she whispered" or "they expostulated." Only dialogue. And because it's only dialogue, you don't even need to waste time using quotation marks; just start a new paragraph whenever the other person starts talking.

It'll make you feel like Cormac McCarthy.

Rewriting Prompt: Trying These Times

You've seen this done countless times by well-known authors. You've even seen it done and not known that you've seen it. It's been done to entire novels, but for now, maybe just focus on a scene.