Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Topic 40 Writer Prompts




Greetings,

It's been awhile since I signed off of this blog, but last night I decided to try posting whenever I have a chance. A year ago last fall I joined a new writers group that meets once a week in the town we moved to. It's the fourth one I've belonged to since I started to write in 1995. Since I joined this group of writers, ranging in age from 95 to 52, we've gained three new members. Being a group made up of people from different walks of life and having different takes on things we see and do makes our meetings truly interesting.

Two months ago some people in our group suggested we use writer prompts to get our juices flowing, especially those with writer's block. A prompt is a word, sentence, or photo assigned to the group to write a story around. At first, we ended our gathering with fifteen minutes of writing that revolved around the prompt and asked for volunteers to read theirs. Now, we take our assignment home with us and read it at our next meeting. All I can say is the writers in this group have great imaginations. The prompts have been beneficial to all of us. A few writers have gotten terrific ideas from the  prompts and have spun them into a fresh, new novel or to embellish the ones they're working on.

Here are a few of the prompts we've used-leaving, kidnapped, made from Scratch, and the sound was faint, but it was definitely there.  You can find more prompt ideas out on the Internet. One such place is Creative Writing Prompts found at Writer's Digest.com

I had fun writing the "Made from Scratch" prompt. I hope you enjoy reading it.
                             Made from Scratch-- written by Marlene Chabot

Every piece of writing I do is made from scratch. Why I even jot down certain ideas percolating in my head on scratch paper.  But my words aren’t from scratch for that would be lying. They can be found in the Webster Dictionary easily enough. This author only borrows the words to paint new pictures for the reader. Words that I discard while pulling the piece together become scratch paper for future needs.

When family members peek at the rough drafts I’ve done in pen or pencil, they tell me my words look like hen scratches, in other words illegible. But their comments don’t embarrass me, I’m creating something new from scratch on scratch paper and soon will be recording it on a gizmo that's keys are slowly getting scratched out of existence.

By the way, I've got good news to share. Two of my short stories have come out this fall in anthologies. The Minnesota Anthology,  Cooked to Death-Lying on a Plate Volume 2
contains recipes as well as mysteries. The other Anthology from Florida is Marco Island Writers Stories and Poems Vol. IV. Next June, you can find a short story of mine in the Twin
Cities Sisters in Crime second anthology, Dark Side of the Loon, which incorporated history dealing with Minnesota.

Until Next Time
This is Marlene Chabot
Mystery Author

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