A Writing Exercise

Today I give you another writing exercise. In fact, it’s a combination of exercise and challenge. When you complete the exercise, you will have five drabbles, that is five stories of one hundred words each. Each story will use one of five unrelated words you chose. It doesn’t matter whether you go to toasted cheese’s calendar of writing prompts, or pick the words from a dictionary.

The rules of this game are easy. All you need to do is write five short stories that use the random words you chose by whatever means you used. You could use a prompt from Toasted Cheese, or you could just pull five words from the air. You could use a book and some dice to choose your words. The book could be the dictionary, a novel, or a text book. That’s up to you. Then, all you have to do then is write a story using one of the chosen words.

If you choose to find your own words, try taking dice and choose a book. Then roll the dice. The first dice is the page number, the second is the word. If you have three, you could choose page, paragraph and word for a more random look. You could even choose the page number by combining dice through addition or just pick a page and roll the dice to give you paragraph and word. It doesn’t matter how you do it, just get your words.

Then choose one of the words and use it in a story of a hundred words. Now that can be harder than it sounds. That part is the most flexible of this exercise. If you get something longer, good for you. If you get something shorter, that’s OK as well. The point is to write.

Your stories can relate to one another, but the words you use should not. That adds complexity to the challenge. Just write some little scenes if that’s all you can think of. It doesn’t matter. It’s better if the stories can stand on their own, but it’s OK, if they can’t. This is practice after all.

About pebblepup

I am not one who is comfortable talking about myself but here goes. I enjoy writing, family history, and reading. I decided to do this blog because I wanted to try something new. I decided to make it a weekly blog because I wasn't sure that I could keep up with a daily one, and monthly seemed like I was writing a magazine. I think I did ok with my choices. You'll notice that there are not a lot of graphics on my site. That's because there are graphics plastered everywhere on the Internet and those sites sometimes take forever to load. This blog is a place where you can kick back, relax and be ready to be amused. At least I hope I willbamuse you. This blog is on a variety of subjects from my ficitional cat agency, the FFL, which is monthly, to instructional blogs to editorials, which are my opinions only. I admit that I don't know everything and could be wrong -- I frequently am. Now, stop reading about me and read what I have to say!