The 2021 Writing Series is a series of daily writing exercises for both prose writers and poets to keep their creative mind stretched and ready to go—fresh for your other writing endeavors. The writing prompts take the impetus—that initial crystal of creation—out of your hands (for the most part) and changes your writing creation into creative problem solving. Instead of being preoccupied with the question "What do I write" you are instead pondering "How do I make this work?" And in the process you are producing new writing.
This is not a standard writing session. This is pure production—to keep your brain thinking about using language to solve simple or complex problems. The worst thing you can do is sit there inactive. It's like taking a 5 minute breather in the middle of a spin class—the point is to push, to produce something, however imperfect. If you don't overthink it, you will be able to complete all of the exercises in under 30 minutes.
For today's writing exercise you will write a few micro-poems or micro-fictions. These will be either poems under 12 lines or stories under 100 words.
For inspiration go read some micro or hint fiction in this Buzzfeed article, at Microfiction Monday, Alba, Molecule, 50 Word Stories and Nanoism. Or also this Barnstorm blog post "How Microfiction Could Transform Social Media".
Read the full prompt twice before you start writing, because you're looking to keep it minimal, so have ideas. If your first draft is longer don't fret. Hone it down. And the piece will be what it is. I've started out with a goal of 100 words but hit on something and had to cull the end result from 1350 to 1200 for a contest because I loved the result. So each story will be its own beast, but we're ideally aiming for 12 lines or 100-200 words with these.
Micro Exercise 1: Road Trip Incident. Someone on a road trip made a small mistake which could 'snowball' and result in a life-altering incident. Whether that is not changing the car's oil, not getting gas, angering another driver, driving over a pothole instead of going around it etc. Begin the piece with that mistake (not explaining what goes wrong), then list 3 things which could have 'gone wrong' but which hadn't. Whether that's like a meteorite striking, traffic accident, whether it's ridiculous or plausible, write them in a way that tells the reader that the first thing that did happen was important, similarly to those things that didn't happen. When the list is done, give us a snapshot of the character in the aftermath of the incident, the details should be sparse but still clue us into what happened at least to some extent. End on a positive note even if it is a dark one.
Micro Exercise 2: Orange. Make a list of at least ten items which are orange. Write a micro piece which uses at least seven of the items you listed, but does not (at least not conspicuously) draw the reader's attention to the items all being orange. That's not to say they can't be described, not at all, but it can't say "and another orange thing is..." if that makes sense.
Micro Exercise 3: Orange Duck. Write a micro which uses at least three of the items not used in Micro #2, as well as melting chocolate and the image of two ducks floating on a pond. If that is too open-ended, try to impart upon the reader the theme of beauty being fleeting/temporal.
Micro Exercise 4: The Long Random Stairway. Pick two interesting words from this Random Word Generator. One of those should be in your first sentence and one should be in your last sentence. The narrative of this piece should be someone walking up a very large set of stairs (perhaps absurdly large), with something on their mind. Do they pass someone on the stairway? Is it a dark and foggy night lit by 'streetlights' or perhaps in a building or out of a subway tunnel. You pick, but keep it brief and make sure your details work both toward the actual narrative and the theme/subtext, whatever you decide that is.
Micro Exercise 5: Nicknames and Hobbies. Write a piece that entirely a list of nicknames a character has as they age. Include some childish, some mean, at least a couple hyphenates that were likely not nicknames so much as insults that the character heard a few times (Tim-who-can't-put-the-toilet-seat-down-Jones, etc). Give the character a hobby that they are occasionally picked on throughout their life for, but while it's mean when they're young it becomes affectionate or impressed-with later, implying that they had something which they loved that they excelled in eventually. Yeah, that's nice.
