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

Word of the Week: Coffee

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 use this week’s word of the week as inspiration for a piece of flash fiction or a poem.

Word of the Week: Mourning

Write a story or poem using the location in the photograph as your setting. You can click on the photo to see a larger version of it. If you’re curious about where this was taken check below the cut — but I recommend writing first so that you don’t limit or influence your imagination with reality

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

Today’s Word of the Week: Return

I am out of town (and offline) all of next week, and while Word Press would let me schedule posts ahead of time, there are issues with cross-posting them to LJ via my plugin. So, I won’t be posting any exercises next week. Just so you know.

See you when I get back

This Friday I challenge you to write a book review for a book you recently finished, or the one you’re currently reading.

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

Today’s Word of the Week: Canada