My wish for you is that you would come away from these prompts with the seeds for new short works of prose or poetry (or both). The combination of the prompt + a new work you haven’t thought about previously + a time limitation really seems to help kickstart creativity. These should be thought of as creative nuggets that you may wish to polish or continue with later. They won’t be perfect! And that’s fine.
How to do this: You’ll need some form of timer. Try to be strict with yourself about this—when you are, it really seems to boost your ability to dive into the prompt and come up with something unexpected.
Set your timer for ten minutes. Read
through the prompt first, then start the timer. Write for ten minutes. Then
stop! See what you came up with. It might indeed be something you want to
continue working on right now before you lose your train of thought. If so, I
suggest treating it as a new prompt session and giving yourself ten more
minutes to finish getting your thoughts down.
Today’s prompts are all mystery-oriented.
1. Write a short scene from the point of view of a household pet who is witnessing or has witnessed a crime. The pet might belong to the victim, the sleuth, or the murderer. Does the pet try to help the victim or sleuth? Or act like an accomplice to the villain?
2. What if your murderer had superpowers? What if your sleuth could use magic? From any aspect of the paranormal, supernatural, or fantasy and science fiction spectrum, pick one power for each and write a short confrontational scene in which the sleuth saves someone, but the murderer gets away—for now. The characters don't necessarily have to wield their powers—there could be a standoff here. Or what if they did wield their powers, to humorous effect?
3. If you are writing a cozy mystery, plant your sleuth in the middle of a hardboiled detective story or noir novel. If you are writing hardboiled or noir, have your detective suddenly appear in the middle of a cozy world. You can play it straight by rewriting a scene you have in mind from this opposite perspective, as if that had been the tale all along. Or it could be quite funny, in a fish-out-of-water way.
4. Think about the characters in a mystery series you enjoy. There may be some special quirk or motif that recurs in a way that delights the reader, such as when Spenser recites poetry, Holmes deduces amazing things about a stranger, or Archie Goodwin drinks a glass of milk in preference to alcohol. Now think about your work in progress. Brainstorm some interesting quirks or motifs that might help to make it unique or cause the reader delight when they recognize them.
5. Inspired by Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing: This is a two-part exercise.
Part 1: 3 minutes. Make a list of things that scare you or that you find eerie, mysterious, or fascinating. Keep writing for three minutes—don't let your pen leave the page until the timer goes off.
Part 2: 10 minutes. Select one of the words on the list and just start writing about it. See what comes out!
If you’d like more prompts, here are some earlier installments in this series:
----------------------
Max Gardner (he/they) is a fiction writer & award-winning poet published under a variety of bylines, including Max Jason Peterson and Adele Gardner. A poetry collection, Halloween Hearts, is available from Jackanapes Press, while over 500 stories, poems, art, and articles appear in Analog, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Daily Science Fiction, and more. Gardner serves as literary executor for father and mentor Delbert R. Gardner; Muse Mansion, a collection of poems by both father and firstborn, will be released soon by San Francisco Bay Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment