The subject of creative writing from a select assortment of words arose earlier tonight as a bit of a tangential topic in a thread about using last two letters of the previous word to form a new word.
The local creative writing group I'm in meets Saturdays and we usually do a 15 to 20 minute timed writing exercise to some manner of prompt.
Prompts can be concepts, questions, words, groups of words, phrases, and so forth.
Varying levels of adherence apply; sometimes a sentence must be used as is, some nouns and verb tenses have to be used as is or can change singular/plural and/or verb tense.
Here's one of mine from earlier this year.
As best I can remember the prompt was to use one entry, or two, from each of 4 or 5 short lists.
The ones I chose and used were; red, flower stenciled chair, corrugated metal roofing, back room of an oceanfront bar.
Salvage may or may not have been on a list.
And of course, curveball!
Okay, here we go:
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"Well pup, what are we going to do today?"
Curveball looked up from where he had been snoozing in the old flower stenciled chair. Its overall coat of red paint had long been worn off the seat and parts of the back, the thing must have been at least seventy years old when it had been salvaged from the back room of an oceanfront bar.
His mother had been my long time companion when we salvaged interesting and useful things from the building before it was knocked down to make room for a new amusement center. The garage workshop we were presently seated in was in fact roofed with some of the salvaged corrugated metal roofing.
Curveball got his name from the curveball his now deceased mother threw us: we'd had no idea, zero idea, she was pregnant or when she'd had the chance to get that way. Also unknown without some genetic testing which wasn't really in the budget was what breed he'd inherited his rough red coat from. Well, whatever his ancestry he was clearly a purebred mongrel just like Brandy his golden haired mom.
Back to his name, even at this young age he did in fact excel at predicting where to run to catch curve balls. Also noteworthy was that his run was more like a gallop, low on ballet-level grace but overflowing with enthusiasm.
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The local creative writing group I'm in meets Saturdays and we usually do a 15 to 20 minute timed writing exercise to some manner of prompt.
Prompts can be concepts, questions, words, groups of words, phrases, and so forth.
Varying levels of adherence apply; sometimes a sentence must be used as is, some nouns and verb tenses have to be used as is or can change singular/plural and/or verb tense.
Here's one of mine from earlier this year.
As best I can remember the prompt was to use one entry, or two, from each of 4 or 5 short lists.
The ones I chose and used were; red, flower stenciled chair, corrugated metal roofing, back room of an oceanfront bar.
Salvage may or may not have been on a list.
And of course, curveball!
Okay, here we go:
-------------------------------------------------------
"Well pup, what are we going to do today?"
Curveball looked up from where he had been snoozing in the old flower stenciled chair. Its overall coat of red paint had long been worn off the seat and parts of the back, the thing must have been at least seventy years old when it had been salvaged from the back room of an oceanfront bar.
His mother had been my long time companion when we salvaged interesting and useful things from the building before it was knocked down to make room for a new amusement center. The garage workshop we were presently seated in was in fact roofed with some of the salvaged corrugated metal roofing.
Curveball got his name from the curveball his now deceased mother threw us: we'd had no idea, zero idea, she was pregnant or when she'd had the chance to get that way. Also unknown without some genetic testing which wasn't really in the budget was what breed he'd inherited his rough red coat from. Well, whatever his ancestry he was clearly a purebred mongrel just like Brandy his golden haired mom.
Back to his name, even at this young age he did in fact excel at predicting where to run to catch curve balls. Also noteworthy was that his run was more like a gallop, low on ballet-level grace but overflowing with enthusiasm.
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