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The Art of Description

A few well-chosen words can create a strong sense of place which adds a rich dimension to your story. It draws your reader right in, as if they were in the room with your characters.Choose one of the following places and describe it using ALL of your five senses (touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing). In fiction, you won't usually use all five, but limbering up your storytelling this way will help you show rather than tell the story:

  1. A market in the South of France
  2. A teenage bedroom
  3. A pub
  4. A hairdresser's salon
  5. The souk in Marrakesh
  6. A stately home
  7. A garden

Setting

Grab Your Red Pen

Pick a scene or passage you've written that you feel dissatisfied with. Take a short time - maybe 10 or 20 minutes - to read the passage as though it were someone else's work. Take a red pen and make notes in the margins. If you didn't know anything else about the story, where else could this scene go? Try to get a feel for how malleable the words and the story can be.

Plot Development

The Name Game

Here is your challenge: for the next week, collect fun names. I've collected them for years in a little notebook - from obituaries, news stories, random lists, and spam. Spam is great for funny names.Then go through your notebook, choose a name, and write a short character sketch based off that name. It's amazing how the names make the characters come to life and start moving the story in fun directions you never expected.

Character Development

The Best Day Ever

Take your main character and describe the best day he/she has ever had. This is a prompt that will generate questions like, "Why did the character think that was their best day?"

Character Development

Mad Libs

Close your eyes and write down four adjectives at random. Now write down three nouns. Now write down two verbs. Now write down one adverb. Now open your eyes. Your challenge is to write a 500-word short story based off of these ten words.

Writer's Block

Lost The Plot?

How do you start a story - or get a story back on track? If you're feeling lost or blocked, try templating to get your plot on course.Here's what to do: bullet point your initiating incident, your rising action, your crisis, and your resolution for both your main plot and subplots. Make a table to see events running parallel, remembering subplots exist to enhance, complicate _ ultimately, compliment _ your main action. Listing like this highlights any irrelevancies, keeping your tale on track, and makes all you write intertwined and significant to your protagonist's journey. Plan out using this framework as your reference.

Plot Development

Brainstorming Session

Put a timer on for 20 minutes. Spend the whole time jotting down ideas for a short story or novel. Don't worry if they're coherent _ or even if they're spelled right. From character names and traits, settings, pieces of dialogue, themes, lines of prose - anything that strikes you as being an interesting story element.

Outlining

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