Julie Duffy's Blog, page 169
April 28, 2014
April 22, 2014
[Writing Prompt] Naked!
Next Tuesday is Release Day for a new picture book illustrated by our friend, the lovely and talented Debbie Ridpath Ohi. The book is called “Naked!” and was written by Michael Ian Black. (The two previously collaborated on the hilarious “I’m Bored“.)
It’s such a good title, that we’re going to steal it today.
The Prompt
Tips
Use the term literally or figuratively to put your characters in an interesting/awkward/trying situation.
You can start the story with the moment of ‘being naked’ or you can end up there.
Consider the fact that physical nudity means different things in different cultures. Perhaps this is your chance to explore the naturist community or invent a futuristic colony in which clothes are considered vulgar.
GO!
How Naked! did you go? Leave a comment, below, about how you handled this prompt (or a link to your story online, if you posted it anywhere).
Big News and New Things
Celebrity Guest PromptersFirstly — and I have to put this first because otherwise my head will explode — our first Guest Prompter for the month of May is none other than rock star author NEIL GAIMAN!!!
He’s providing the writing prompt for May 1, so don’t be late! (You can sign up to getPrompts By Email, if you haven’t already).
There are lots of other published authors and writing teachers lined up to share writing prompts during this Fifth Anniversary StoryADay May, so don’t miss out.
A Month Of Prompts…Today!
New this year, I’m offering you the chance to plan ahead, with the brand new Month Of Writing Prompts ebook for 2014!
The idea of sitting down to write a new story everyday, cold, is pretty terrifying. But it’s less terrifying with a bit of forward planning.
For the past few StoryADay challenges, participants have told me that it’s really useful to be able to peek ahead at the upcoming writing prompts. Last May and September I supplied a week’s worth of prompts at a time to people on thePrompt By Email list.
This time, however, you can get the whole month worth of prompts today. Use them this coming May, or at any time in future.
(If you don’t have a Kindle, you can get a free reading app for your favorite gadget, here. Also, the ebook will not have the celebrity guest prompts, only the 31 written by yours truly. You’ll have to come to the site for the guest prompts.)
To celebrate the launch of this new ebook, it’s going on sale today at $0.99. The price will slowly creep back up to its list price of $6.99 by April 30, (this is an Amazon Countdown Deal, if you’re interested in that kind of thing), so get your copy sooner rather than later.
Are You Ready?
Now, before you let your nerves get the better of you, remember that YOU SET THE RULES for yourself. If you think five days a week, or one story a week is what you can manage, that’s fine. Come along for the ride anyway. Take advantage of the community (I’ll open up the site for new registrations on April 25. Mark your calendars!) and tell your friends, because peer pressure is a wonderful thing!
Don’t forget to grab your graphics to let people know you’re taking part and browse the resource section for inspiration.
Need to Warm Up?
If you’ve bought the Warm Up Course Home Study version before, now’s the time to dust off your copy. Or if you’d like your own copy, there is a 10-day accelerated version too, perfect for warming up before May 2014. I’ve opened a new group in the community for anyone who wants to go through the course now. Let me know if you need access and don’t have a username yet (julie@storyaday.org).
Here’s what the course does for you:
Start writing in small, manageable chunks that will boost your confidence,
Generate 45 Story Sparks that you can turn into short stories,
Learn to carve out time for your writing, and break through your fear and block, by writing straight away,
When the course is over you will have:
10 completed stories,
More story ideas than you can use during the StoryADay challenge, so you never sit down to a blank page,
The confidence to know you can make writing an on-going part of your life,
Practice and discovery of your best working habits.
Get access now
In the mean time, I apologize for the extreme fan-girling at the start of this email (but I’d do it again) and:
Keep writing,
Julie
P.S. Remember that all these tools (including the daily prompts) are optional. Access to the site and the community remain free, forever. StoryADay May exists to encourage you to give yourself permission to tell your stories! 
[Reading Room] Victory Lap by George Saunders
OK, so everyone’s been raving about this collection, The Tenth of December by George Saunders.
I’m such a skeptic about hype that it was with some trepidation that I plunked down my money and opened the book.
But: wow. If the first story is anything to go on, this is going to be one fabulous collection.
Victory Lap is a supreme example of ‘show, don’t tell’. If you’ve ever wondered what that piece of well-worn advice means, run to your bookshelf and grab this (you probably bought it when people were first raving about it instead of, like me, pretending to be too cool).
The story starts in the voice of a fourteen year old girl who is coming down the stairs in her house, consumed with her own, fourteen-year-old fantasies of herself: still childlike but on the verge of adult-issues. It so thoroughly captures the inner voice of a teenage girl that it is disorienting, but you adjust quite quickly.
Just as you’re getting comfortable with this voice, it switches into the head of the boy next door, who our hero has spotted through the window, just before the inciting incident of the story.
The boy next door is equally well-realized, equally complex and oh, so painfully awkward. Told only in his inner thoughts, the author builds up a picture of his home-life: the only child of extremely protective, ambitious and unbearable parents; a good boy whose parents are (perhaps unwittingly) perverting that goodness.
I defy you to read this story and not root for the two kids; not have your blood run cold at the thought of what might happen if things don’t go the way you fervently hope they will. Aargh!
Not only does Saunders get right inside the heads of these kids, he brings you along, shows so much without once ‘telling’, and makes you empathize to the point that you’re thinking dark thoughts about what you’ll do to the author if things don’t turn out ‘right’ (or was that just me?).
And that, my friends, is the mark of an excellent story: suck the reader in, make them care, don’t spoon feed them the details, make something happen; make it matter; raise the stakes; write an ending that forces the reader to go on thinking about the ramifications of the events in the story for your characters, long after they’ve finished the story.
Oh, and go and buy a copy of this collection if you haven’t already!
April 19, 2014
A Month Of Writing Prompts – The eBook!
A Month Of Writing Prompts 2014
Writing a story a day for a month is a crazy endeavour, but one that hundreds of writers have signed up for every May since 2010. During month of courageous creativity, writers learn how to write every day (not ‘someday’), how to craft a story, how to write in different forms, how to fail and dust themselves off, and write again.
Are you ready to join them?
The StoryADay Month of Writing Prompts book shares the daily writing prompts for StoryADay May 2014: 31 writing prompts, meditations, lessons and pep talks to accompany on your journey to becoming a more prolific, creative and fulfilled writer.
Use these prompts during the StoryADay challenge, or any time you need a creativity boost.
April 18, 2014
WEDNS Podcast – 1.02 – Pracising Your Writing
Discipline and strength (mental and physical) are just as important to writers as talent and originality. But we’ll also talk about how to become an idea hamster and why Sir Isaac Newton hates you.
Plus a fairy-tale of a writing prompt!
Another new episode of Write Every Day, Not “Some Day”
April 15, 2014
[Write On Wednesday] Third Grade Word List
“Waiting” by José María Pérez Nuñez
My third grader doesn’t bring home his reading book very often, so I don’t get to see the stories he’s working on. Each story, however, comes with a spelling list. That I DO see.
While going through the list of words with him, I got a bit bored while waiting for him to laboriously scribble them out three times each. I started doodling. And made up my own story based on the words he was learning to spell.
And now it’s your turn.
The Prompt
Write a story using the following words:
Wolves
Knives
Men
Children
Women
Sheep
Heroes
Scarves
Mice
Geese
Cuffs
Elves
Banjos
Halves
Loaves
Beliefs
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Tornadoes
(Can you guess what phonetic issues they’re working on this week?)
I do hope the official version of the story was a little less dark than the one I came up with! Here’s mine:
There are wolves at the door and so we are sharpening our knives.
Under our feet the men whimper, holding tight to wide-eyed and silent children. We women have brought in the sheep. (We are heroes in headscarves.)
Down among the rushes on the floor, mice compete for space with the geese that peck and worry at the newly-frayed cuffs of our cowering husbands and brothers. In better days these scions fancied themselves as dandy as the elves of old, plucking on their banjos, drinking flagons of ale — when there was a party to be had, they did nothing by halves.
The howling begins anew. We straighten our backs and brace our shoulders, one hand smoothing a skirt, soothing a ruffled head, the other grasping our blades —formerly only a danger to chicken carcasses and hard brown loaves. We cross ourselves and take comfort in our beliefs, in the dream of a better life after this one, for us and our children.
We advance to the windows and open them just enough to rain a storm of old tomatoes and potatoes on the surprised beasts outside. While they reel in stunned confusion we flung wide the doors and unleash ourselves upon them like metal-toothed tornadoes.
We are tired of waiting for the better life . Today we run out to meet it — or make it.
Your turn! Go!
April 8, 2014
[Write On Wednesday] The Catalogue Of Disasters
Photo by Barry Skeates http://www.flickr.com/photos/barryske...
As I woke up, I reached for my alarm clock and heard rather than felt my hand knock the full glass of water all over my bedside table – home to my iPhone, table and priceless childhood copy of A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six. So it’s fair to say that I wasn’t in the best mood when my 8 year old declared that no, he simply wasn’t getting up or getting dressed or going to school. After that screaming match my head was pounding so I reached for some ibuprofen, only to scoop down my husband’s blood pressure medicine instead – damned blue-topped bottles! I figured I had time to drop the kids off at school before rushing myself to the ER, but of course, I had forgotten about the half inch of ice on my windscreen….
Ever had one of those days? How about your character?
The essence of story is conflict. Conflict doesn’t have to involve a bad guy. Sometimes the antagonist is simply your character’s bad mood, or the universe, or her lack of preparation.
The Prompt
Write a story that features a character going through a catalogue of disasters
Tips
You can start this story at the beginning or the end. They can wake up and start the day off badly, ending up at the wrong end of a loaded gun; or you can start with them strapped into the electric chair, thinking ‘now, how did I get here?’
Likewise, the action can all by mental: you start by offending your cat and end by quitting your job in a blaze of glory, burning bridges as you go.
This story can be humorous or tragic, but make sure your readers are feeling what your character is feeling.
Keep piling on the disasters. Leave us breathless.
Give the reader occasional breaks by pausing for moments of backstory, if you like. See how that feels to you, as a writer. Does it cause the story to slow? Could you, instead, include backstory in conversations or pithy one-line asides.
Make this more immediate by writing in first person.
Or write this in close-third person (no-one else’s thoughts get used, but you’re still writing about your main character as ‘he’ or ‘she’). Remember not to use phrases like “she thought”, “she wondered”, “he looked”. Just tell us a thought. We’re smart enough to figure out that it’s your main character’s thoughts we’re hearing. (e.g. “Well, that wasn’t right” instead of “well, that wasn’t right, she thought”. Much more punch!)
Use this exercise to practice putting action into your stories. It doesn’t have to be ‘running from the law’ action. It can be all psychological (think: Jane Austen), but make sure you can have things happening in your writing at any time.
Go!
