Prompts
Cleaning The Freezer
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise — Make a list yourself of things that are done in small units of time. Here are several suggestions: Naming a pet or a child, breaking up with someone, playing a game such as Risk or Monopoly, washing a car, stealing something, waiting or standing in line for something, packing to go somewhere, cleaning the refrigerator, having a birthday party, etc. Now write a four-to-seven-page story staying within the confines of a particular time unit. For example, a birthday party story would probably last only a few hours, or an afternoon or evening; naming a pet might span a longer period of time but will still be focused on one activity. The Objective - To recognize the enormous number of shaped time units in our lives. These units can provide a natural substructure and shape for a story and make the writing of a story seem less daunting.
By Denise E Lindquist21 days ago in Writers
Laaster and the Language of the Digital Future
In the digital era, names are no longer just labels. They are identities. They shape perception before a user ever opens an app, visits a website, or interacts with a platform. In a world where first impressions are increasingly formed on screens rather than in person, language has become one of the most powerful tools of modern design.
By Abbasi Publisher21 days ago in Writers
Family Is The Best
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise —Stay away from the following word packages. They signal to the smart reader that you lack freshness and are an uninteresting writer. Better than ever For some curious reason A number of... As everybody knows She didn't know where she was Things were getting out of hand It came as no surprise It was beyond him Needless to say Without thinking He lived in the moment Well in advance An emotional roller coaster Little did I know The Objective - To purge yourself forever of stale and/or imprecise language.
By Denise E Lindquist23 days ago in Writers
Restating Fiction Paragraphs
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise — Read the following passages to see how the writers convey information while shaping our attitudes and emotions. In Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises an obscure character is killed by a bull being taken to the bullring in a Spanish town. The first brief sentences deliver the objective facts almost as coolly as a newspaper obit. The final two sentences are longer and have a more complex structure (why?), and the string of ten short prepositional phrases that ends the passage not only mimics the rhythm of the train wheels but creates a poetic, lulling, hypnotic effect, suggestive of a chant. The Objective - To shape sentences to do your bidding. Sentences aren't just snowshoes to get you from the beginning to the end of your story. They are powerful tools with which to carve a story that wasn't there until you decided to create it.
By Denise E Lindquist25 days ago in Writers
Bringing Abstractions To Life
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise — Make several of the following abstractions come to life by rendering them in concrete specific details or images. racism, injustice, ambition, growing old, salvation, poverty, growing up, sexual deceit, wealth, evil The Objective - To learn to think, always, in concrete terms. To realize that the concrete is more persuasive than any high-flown rhetoric full of fancy words and abstractions.
By Denise E Lindquist29 days ago in Writers
It's Winter . Top Story - January 2026.
Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What If? Writing Exercise for Fiction Writers prompts The Exercise —Write a scene involving two characters. Have the point-of-view character presume something entirely different about the situation from what the other character's overt behavior seems to imply. For example, a landlord comes to visit, and the tenant suspects that it isn't a visit but an inspection. Make up several situations in which one character can fantasize or project or suspect or even fear what another character is thinking. The Objective - To show how your characters can use their imaginations to interpret the behavior and dialogue of other characters.
By Denise E Lindquistabout a month ago in Writers
The Honest Truth: Out of the five online side gigs I tried, only one was successful.
The Honest Truth: Out of the five online side gigs I tried, only one was successful. I sought independence, adaptability, and additional revenue. Instead, I discovered disappointment, broken promises, and one unanticipated victory.
By Farida Kabirabout a month ago in Writers
My Own Big Toe, Object Study
Object Study 1 I shudder to think of the fetishists watching in the bushes who see this and find themselves spellbound: a toe is a toe, and a big toe is simply the biggest of the toes on a given foot. At the topside, a thick toenail flattened after years of stubbing and dropping books and tools on it. It’s mangled, just a little bit, by a lifetime of ill-timed and ill-fated clippings. The right end of it juts out a little farther than the left, which is thicker, a little ingrown, bleeds whenever the nail-clippers come down on it without mercy and without finesse. Beyond that, a tuft of hair—Hobbit-hair, as mother called it growing up. It’s lighter than I imagined it to be, lighter, the shade of my beard after a summer in the brunt of sunlight, the shade of half-dried sand on the precipice between dry land and less dry sea, the shade of the hair on my grandmother’s head before it turned white with age and then to ash.
By Steven Christopher McKnightabout a month ago in Writers
