Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Prompt: Write about the meeting of an imagianry creature and an ordinary citizen

Well folks, I meant to start this blog out right, by posting the Young Writer's Guild writing with the first prompt. But guess what? None of them came yesterday! We are on our own today...

Here is my piece.
(shuffling, growing red, starting to sweat...)


I had heard stories about the Mill Pond Shark. Everyone had. And stories about the boogie man too. My brother was the one who had made them seem most real with his descriptions of teeth and scales and dead staring eyes. But I had stopped believing in them even before I stopped being afraid of the dark. Less plausible than the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot. So that sunny afternoon when I first saw it with my own eyes I assumed I had fallen asleep on the park bench.
It was warm and bright and I was tired. I had just run up and down the hills behind the pond practicing for a track meet. I sat on the bench and stretched out my legs enjoying the spring sunshine and the afternoon warmth. The park at the pond was quiet. ...



Now it is your turn!

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Evening at the Author's table

Long ago, my mother made up a game. It was designed to help my younger siblings have better table manners and it was called Evening At The Author's Table. We would set the table with all the best china and silverware. We would use our best manners and our most polite words. When dinner was over and cleaned up Mum would pass out paper and pencils, give us a writing prompt and set the timer.

And we would write.

When the time was up we would take turns reading our writing out loud.



Twenty years later.



I have children who love to write, long to write, need to write. This did not come from me. In an attempt to quench the thirst for writing I thought I would play Mum's game (sans dinner) at the middle school with other children too.

And they wrote. And were good!

But the strangest part was I wrote! Not a lot. Not great. Not even very good. But that wasn't the point. The point was to start writing. And that I did. And it was fun. Not only that, but I read my writing out loud! That was harder than the writing. Who would think that I would be terrified to read my story to a bunch of children who I have known since they started kindergarten?

It got even stranger: when the sweat had dried off my brow I felt empowered! That stunned me even more than the fear. I am addicted to empowerment. I have a tendancy to do again what rewarded me once. But I don't want to wait for the next Young Writer's Guild at the Middle School.

Will you play with me?

I will post a prompt and my 10 minutes worth of writing. (That is very brave of me.) Will you set your timer and write for 10 minutes too? Then you can post your writing in the comments section. It can be a story, a paragraph, a sentance, a list, a thought, several thoughts, a poem, a song, a tweet. Whatever comes out of your pen, or pencil, or keyboard, or phone. What you do with it is entirely up to you.