Prose, Poetry, and Pictures

The following is a story sketch I wrote up in response to a writing prompt I got out of the book 642 Things to Write About. I wrote the whole first draft in two hours and spent only enough time editing and cleaning up to make it readable. I don’t want to present these sketches…

Yesterday, after taking a break from Christmas shopping for my wife, I stopped to grab a bite at a Mexican food restaurant. After, I wrote down the following story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This isn’t a story sketch so much as a recording of this event so I can reference it for future stories. I do…

I like to write down themes in my writing journal so I can refer to them later when working on a new story. The following are some themes I wrote down yesterday along with a brief note on thought. Themes to write on: The role of the teacher Tolerance as an intellectual covering for intolerance Division…

I will be going into whether Character is an essential element of story or not in a followup entry on “What Is a Story?” but for now, since I know for sure that all of the stories I will be writing will contain characters, I have started working on a “character web” which allows me…

When trying to define something, one is categorizing it, taking a set of elements which are present in one or more things and grouping them with a label. So in order to define what a story is, I must uncover the set of elements which are present in all stories, from the daily stories we tell…

The following is an observation I jotted down in my Evernote after witnessing an intriguing family at the grocery store. This entry is direct from my personal journal.

Today I would like to build on my investigation into what a word is by trying to answer another deceptively simple question: What is a sentence? If you remember, I observed, through my own investigation, that words are learned identifiers that point to groups of ideas stored in my memory. If this is true about…

The following is a story sketch I wrote for my daughter who loves dinosaurs. In the end, I felt that the story was too long and perhaps a little too dark for a four-year-old, but it was good story practice and good fun to write. I hope you get a kick out of it.

Starting a new story can be difficult, especially if you have no idea who or what you want to write about. Sometimes, to get the creative juices flowing, I use the technique of starting an impromptu conversation with myself. The idea is to snatch up some attitude or characteristic, then like a snow ball, roll…

Today I want to investigate a deceptively simple question: What is a word? In a previous entry, I explored why we tell stories, and I will continue that investigation in future entries. For now, I wanted to change tracks from story investigation to language investigation, because in order to tell a story, one must understand how…