1. Pick a number between 1 and 180.

2. Pick another number between 1 and 180.

3. Now pick north or south.

4. Now east or west.

5. Combine your answers from 1 and 3.

6. Combine your answers from 2 and 4.

This gives you the lattitude and longitude for a very specific point on the map. Find out where that location is (google is your friend) and write a story or a poem with that as the setting.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take this week’s word of the week and use it as inspiration for a piece of flash fiction or a poem.

Today’s WotW: Justice

Use the above picture, courtesy of IStockPhoto.com to inspire you to write something

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take this week’s word of the week and use it as the inspiration for a poem or piece of flash fiction.

Today’s WotW: Weed

Amber Stults recently talked about using playlists while you’re writing on her blog. That entry reminded me of a writing exercise I wanted to try, so here goes

Below you will find links to two different music files. Today’s exercise is to listen to them and then use one to inspire a piece of writing.

~ E-Ride courtesy of Danica Parrish and Lane Arndt (mp3 format) ~

~ Spirit courtesy of IStockPhoto.com (wav format) ~

Your challenge, should you chose to accept it, is to take this week’s word of the week and use it as the inspiration for a piece of flash fiction or a poem.

Today’s WotW: Anomaly

For this exercise set yourself a time limit. Make it short. Make it 20 minutes if you write flash, maybe an hour if you write short stories. Pick something that will give you enough time to write a piece, but not enough to think about it. You hear me? No thinking allowed.

After you’ve set your time, set a timer.

As soon as you are ready to write, click on the cut below — no peeking before. None. Seriously, don’t even think about it or your Inner Editor will win. You will see two pictures. Pick one to write about. Give yourself a couple seconds. Seriously, seconds, not minutes. Give yourself a couple seconds to look at it and think about the story you want to tell inspired by it, then turn your timer on and go.

Start writing and don’t stop until you reach the end of the story or your timer goes off. Did you tell a whole story? Did you make it to the end before the buzzer? If not, don’t worry, we’ll do a few more of these before November to get better at the speed-writing thing. The thing is, if you set yourself a time limit you won’t have time to listen to your editor if you want to get the story done, which is what NaNo is all about, isn’t it?

Don’t revise your story. Put it away for a few weeks then, when you’ve put some distance between it and yourself you can go back to it and polish it up. For now though, it’s all about beating your Inner Editor — and quantity over quality.

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Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to take this week’s word of the week and use it to inspire you to write a piece of flash fiction or a poem.

This weeks WotW is: Sanguine