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: Death at a Party. Tell the story of a friend's death at a party by telling about what four other people were doing when the person died, without ever explicitly saying what happened, only hinting at the incident by the details you give about what the person was doing. As in, if the person fell from a balcony/building/height, someone could drop their keys and realized they were too drunk to drive, another person could be waiting for their favorite song's bass drop, something could tumble or whatever, give hints and keep it subtle.
Micro Exercise 2: Blue. Make a list of at least ten items which are a bright blue color. 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 blue. That's not to say they can't be described, not at all, but it can't say "and another blue thing is..." if that makes sense.
Micro Exercise 3: Blue Paint. Write a micro which uses at least three of the items not used in Micro #2, as well as someone writing graffiti and a human must swallow something. If that is too open-ended, try to impart upon the reader the theme of rebirth/renewal.
Micro Exercise 4: The Random Riptide. 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 involve a riptide. If you're not familiar with riptides, watch this short video first and then either literally have a riptide in the piece, or use it as a metaphor.
Micro Exercise 5: The Family Recipe. Write a piece that describes a 'secret family recipe', which includes the basic ingredients for a simple dish, but also implies that there are additional steps/ingredients or that the person teaching the narrator the recipe (or who had taught them in the past, or wrote it down) was not telling the whole truth or was leaving out steps. Make it a piece that touches on family mythology while including legit recipe ingredients or steps mixed in with those bits of family and narrative.
