Set Writing Prompts?

[chomiji]

So I've noticed that people sometimes do fic writing that uses writing prompts that seem like writing exercises, albeit enjoyable ones ... "50 Things" is one such.

Where does one find these prompts?

Comments

[sanada.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of LJ communities for writing prompts, but I think the best known (and possibly the original English one) one is 30_kisses. Sometimes they're translated from similar prompts on Japanese websites. If 30 is too many there are ones with 10 or less... 7_snogs is the only one I can think of though. ^_^; You usually have to claim a specific series/pairing and join the community, but for the Japanese ones you can just write or draw without claiming anything (although the work is usually restricted to one pairing).

[chomiji]

I'll check those out at home - a little afraid of what I might find here ... . Tonight's a good night for it, with nothing but a haircut scheduled before noon tomorrow!

[chomiji]

Clearly I stayed up too late - it took me ages to find where the 30 themes were!

I'll have to think about that one - no one's doing SDK at the moment, so they're all free.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Or one creates a community and makes them up. :)

(Or one goes to the random art prompt generator and chooses the "simple" option, as many of the one-word options I stole from various writing prompts I found online. XD Well, I tended to choose synonyms, rather than the exact prompts, but still.)

[chomiji]

Never fear, I haven't forgotten your prompt generator! But I like the idea of the discipline of doing the large number of set prompts. This week at work, I finally got my manager to basically list out specific tasks by priority - it's what I needed at this rather turbulent moment in my life. Similarly, there are times when I think my creativity might need the exercise of some very specific and small assignments.

(And I haven't forgotten the ransom idea, either - I need to download the original story at home and start putting some bits into a file. I've already been hashing through "what would be different" and "what would be close to the same" while washing dishes, which is a great time to think ... cooking uses too much brainpower to work that way.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've got a list of 100 prompts from a Japanese art prompts translation somewhere...here we go here and here. I'm sure they could be turned to drabbles and short-shorts just as easily as artworks.

[chomiji]

Hmmm ... I like those. Maybe I'll play with them!

There's less pressure that way than being in another community.

[chomiji]

(And the other thing is, the art prompts aren't all pairing-oriented ... I love my romantic smut, but there really is more to life ... .)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :) My only problem with that list is that the prompts tend to be .... er, the only word coming to mind is "airy-fairy" and that's not really it. They're a bit more on the side of attempting to be beautiful or profound, which is nice in its way, but often it's the non-beautiful and non-profound things that tell us more.

I think the best way to say it is to relate a story from the Anglo-Welsh Literature class I took when I spent a semester in Wales in undergrad. We read a poem by a woman who wrote this silent, still scene set in a small cottage, where the viewpoint narrator of the poem came in, in the darkness, sat down in front of the fire, and had a mug of tea, and mused a bit on the cottage. The prof asked "So, what is this poem about?"

One of the other students - who was an English major back in the States - said, "I think it's about death."

The prof blinked at her a couple of times and said, "I think it's about a cottage."

Which illustrates more-or-less what I'm seeing as the intent of most of those prompts - they're trying to reach for profound reflections on something-or-other, or trying to sketch a beautiful scene, when sometimes I's just like to write something about a cottage. XD

(But I will stress again that I like that list of prompts much better than any other I've come across.)

[chomiji]

XD

Yeah, airy-fairy does it. Someone was just saying on another post (f-locked on someone else's LJ) that to try to get over a writer's block, you could describe a character of your choice doing something terribly mundane, in as straightforward and descriptive fashion as possible, just to get some text down on paper (or in a file). And I'm also remembering the scene in in MacAvoy's Tea with the Black Dragon, about Mr. Long and Martha and the rose ... (if you haven't read it, I won't spoil it - but it's relevant to your cottage story).

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've read it, but it was 20 or more years ago, and I don't remember a thing about it. XD

[chomiji]

Heh, I seem to bat 1.000 with you on those things, don't I? Basically, Mr. Long (who is, if you recall, a dragon who is stuck in human form) finds a rose dropped in the street. He holds it out to Martha MacNamara, the Irish fiddler whose search for her missing daughteer is what launched the entire story, and starts declaiming pompously on the symbolism of the rose. When he leaves off and Martha takes the rose from him, she basically says "Oh yeah? All that? This is a rose."

[telophase.livejournal.com]

:D Or it's that I've read a prodigious number of books, but have the memory of a wossname, leaky thing with holes in,* so I get to enjoy the pleasure of reading them again for the first time. XD

I did remember about Mr. Long, though.

(That same student mentioned above had Problems with our final for that class, where we were to be quoted a verse of poetry and had to ID the poet, the century, and be able to blather a bit about the poem. She was all "We have to memorize every single line of every single poem?" I had zero sympathy for her - an English major! - as my Brit Lit intro class final only quoted two lines of each poem, and we had to nail the decade, and we had 1800 years of poetry to choose from, instead of 1000.)


* Except for Pratchett quotes.

[chomiji]

I wish that "pleasure of reading them all over again" thing worked for me ... I usually start remembering fairly quickly!

I can't just sit down and bam! - memorize something (the Mr. can ... ) but if I've read something several times, I have a good chance of remembering it when prompted. How fair did your teacher play with the quotes? Memorable bits, or obscure bits?

I hated analyzing literature until I took "English Drama to 1642" with former Dean of the College Irby Cauthen. He taught from the point of view of placing the work in its historical and cultural context - ever so much nicer than wanking on about "what the author means"!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It doesn't work for ones I read and reread as a kid and teen. I practically memorized those. :D

I don't remember which ones the prof picked. I IDed all of them, because it's usually fairly easy to remember the vague topic of the poem, and I could go "Hummm....the poet is trying to get his love to sleep with him, must be one of the Cavalier poets." or "Very odd spellings and rhymes, must be Anglo-Saxon." And if I'd got the poets and their dates memorized, not a problem. XD

The prof teaching that course spent TWO WEEKS on TWO BOOKS of Milton. He was a Milton fanboy and argued that Milton had a greater impact on our modern world than Shakespeare.

[chomiji]

30hugs link is giving me an error ... I'll poke around on macavitykitsune's when I'm more awake!

[chomiji]

Does she use her same name at the Pit?

[chomiji]

Yeah, I don't think I have the guts to play at the Pit, although sanada was encouraging me in that direction a while back. The Saiyuki comm was enough of an act of courage for a bit. (It's easier now that I'm starting to get to know some of them - that was a fun talk we were having with kispexi2. Oh, and she's talking about the latest Radio Free Banri post on her LJ now.)

[chomiji]

It just makes me feel all shy and exposed, the idea of putting stuff out there. It gets hosted out there, right? I would have to copy my stuff out to their site?

[chomiji]

Well ... I'll think about it. I looked at EFTW, and it had some fics by authors I like ... maybe I'll put up "Real Adventurer" and "Not for Sale" there in a bit. I feel most confident about those ones.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

I like to do those 50 words, one sentence each prompts, and for those I go to either 1sentence or 1fandom

[chomiji]

Yeah - that's what I was looking for!

Now I have to see how brave I feel.

Thanks!

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome. Who/What are you thinking of writing?

[chomiji]

Well, the obvious one would be these guys ... . Or Kyo/Yukimura from SDK, which is a challenge - I don't want to contradict the actual canon series ending, because I like it, even if it means that's Yukimura's obsession with Kyo goes unrequited. (My other Xmas giftfic, which was that pairing, took place along the road about 1/3 of the way through the series, which is one of the only canon-like places they could plausibly get together.)

You know, I must say, this reinforces some of the complaints that telophase and meganbmoore have had about how hard it is for people looking for genfic to read. Lots of these are based on pairings. That said, I like my romantic smut as well as the next fangirl.

[chomiji]

Yeah, but I don't think I can do those icon 10variations for fiction ... XD ... although it does remind me of the game in "Whose Line Is It Anyway?" where they basically do the same skit over and over, in different contexts ... now it's a disaster movie! Now a 70s porn flick! Now a ... !

I can do some searches - basically, I'm just looking for something more useful to do than play Civ when I can't make myself write on my real story ideas, and I was wondering whether y'all could help out ... that's all.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

*nods* I'm a shipper at heart, but that's only fun when you're in a fandom that likes similar things that you do. When you're all by your lonesome, the lack of gen fic starts getting painful.

[chomiji]

Agreed. And likewise when people insist on shipping things you're absolutely sure shouldn't be shipped ... (My big squick in SDK, for instance, is people writing shota with 12-yr-old Sasuke Sarutobi and his 37-yr-old guardian/patron Yukimura ... and people do it constantly ... . Yeah, I just have to remind myself about that whenever I'm tempted to try to talk up m/m slash to you.)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Thank you so, so much. Because I can assure you, if I was going to like slash, I would have started by now.

[chomiji]

I feel increasingly bad that I ever bothered you about that.

> sigh <

But it's like wanting all your friends to like each other. Sometimes they just won't, and there's no point on throwing them together over and over again. It just makes everyone unhappy.

(I think too much sometimes. And not in a good way.)

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

OH, please don't feel bad - I could just as easily been someone who had never read slash, and a healthy debate is never bad.

Trust me, I often wish I liked slash, especially in Saiyuki - I would come across all these great authors and not be able to enjoy there work because I just couldn't enjoy it.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

No, not I'm probably hyper-sensitive about it, plus I've had SO MANY people explain to me about slash that I'm a little done with that topic, and would rather move on the discussions of things I enjoy more.

[ipperne.livejournal.com]

there's 10 Settings too.
Maybe I get time to do that one eventually^^

[chomiji]

The trouble with that one is it's heavily oriented toward modern settings. I guess I could do it with a Fruits Basket character or something.

[ipperne.livejournal.com]

or a Gravitation character, if you feel for it...

[chomiji]

Trouble is, I don't know if I got inside of any of those characters' heads enough to do that!

[ipperne.livejournal.com]

Hiro isn't too complicated, but maybe that's because he's the only normal person in the story...

[chomiji]

Well, I agree with that, but I still don't think I could write much from his viewpoint. I'll have to think about it.

(Would you like some Gravitation icons? I have some art, and I've thought of a couple to do from it.)

[ipperne.livejournal.com]

Uh! Gravitation icons are always welcome^^ I'd love a Hiro icon so much!! please?

[chomiji]

Fancy either of these?

   

I did some Eiri ones too:

           

You can have one of the Hiro ones for your own ... I'll probably put the rest up in an icon post sometime soon. (Also, I might use the Eiri "Bitch" one myself ... he has such a good crabby expression.)

[ipperne.livejournal.com]

I think... I'll take the "take another look" one. Even though they're both so pretty.
Thank you so much!!

(Eiri always have a crabby expression... except when he's all emo.)

Ah! Gotta go check for Gravitation EX vol 2!!! *runs off*

[chomiji]

Enjoy!