1/24/16

Weekend Triple Threat: Title, Five Random Constraints, Inspired by

Since it's Sunday here are three options for today's exercise. Choose one, choose them all, just be sure to produce something.

Title Mania (use the following title and write a piece to somehow fit it.)

Lifting Off


Five Random Constraints (About today's writing prompt genre: This is an exercise to make your brain work within a confined space. There will be a few constraints pressed upon your writing, some meant to help drive narrative, some meant to slow the process of the ever-flowing feed of words that stream through the mind. The purpose of this is to make you meditate on specific word choices and sentence structure and elements not necessarily the most important plot points or character traits which should allow the piece to unfold in a way that it would not have otherwise..)

1) Include at three sentences that are three words or fewer.
2) The story or poem must be no more than 250 words.
3) At least four sentences/lines must end in the letter K.
4) The following words must appear at least once: Turf, Germane, Fletch, Elevate, Spike.
5) At least three sentences/lines must use three or more long /E/ sounds (we, see, beach etc).


Inspired by (take at least one element from the following short piece and utilize it in your own piece. Think of your piece as the pearl that is formed around that one element, or the snowman base that comes from the little snowball you discovered. This can be a single word, a place, a time of day, an object or image or even just the voice/tone of the piece.)

Acorn Truths by Lauri Rose in Microfiction Monday 41st edition (the piece in question is the fourth piece in the issue/post)

The extended metaphor of deer feeding serves this piece extremely well, and a vast amount of meaning is conveyed over a very small of words (in this case, 96). There are a lot of great bits you can snag and use to serve as the basis for your own piece. The movement is pretty classic for a short story despite its short length, and acorns are so rich (pardon the pun) in imagery that there are so many ways to take this I don't even know where to begin.