Weeks 1-3 you will answer 3 questions with as many sentences as you can type/write in five minutes. And then you'll rewrite your three favorite sentences over the next four minutes. Done for the week.
In week 4 you'll just need 30 minutes to arrange your sentences into the structure of your story and add in the little bit that's needed to connect the pieces together.
February 2020, Edition 1 of 4
Remember, no dawdling. You want to write as very many sentences as you can.
- Describe a creature/animal/person leaving their home/den etc. Get creative with what's leaving and how, but don't just play the 'thesaurus game'. Be accurate with the type of home they're leaving.
- Think of the first six words or phrases you can think of to describe someone that just got amazing news. Not just "happy" synonyms, either. Now for each of those words/phrases write three sentences that use that word and either one of the animals/creatures from #1, or include a geologic term like mountain, delta, trench etc. No need to dig too deep, you have a bunch of them in your brain.
- (Don't stop until you get at least four descriptions for this scenario, even if you go over the 20 minute total time allotted. Try to get ten, but at very least four.) Imagine sticking your hand in your pocket, trying to grab a quarter and when you pull your hand out some additional change falls out, and you'll have to bend over and pick it up. A small inconvenience, but not, you know, nothing, entirely. Now, imagine what the equivalent of that would be to some of those creatures/people from #1. Maybe it's twigs, undercoat, a McDonald's bag, whatever. It doesn't have to be an exact translation, get creative.
- Take whatever time you have left and go through what you've written today. Pick your three favorite sentences for content/surprise/whatever strikes you. Now write each one of them using at least 4 fewer words, and rewrite each of them in a way in which says very nearly the same thing, but only uses a maximum of three words from the original sentence—including articles like "a" "the" etc.
And finally. You're done writing, but in the time between now and next week's Monday installment, think of reasons which seeing someone which the narrator ('you') know being angry/rude might be really misunderstood without knowing the context. As in, you ask your neighbor if you could get a ball your kid had kicked over the fence and they gruffly say "whatever" and you take that as being they're annoyed that it has happened for a third time this month, but really they're just running late for a meeting and only now found out that it's going to start snowing while they're gone and they hate driving in the snow.... get it? If you get any good ones make note of them in the doc file, but otherwise just kinda think about it once in awhile, try to go through at least four or five just in your head throughout the week.
