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 as finished pieces, but as they are: rough sketches done for practice. I hope you enjoy the sketch. If you like...
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 this whenever something happens to me that sticks in my head...
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 as conflict: as long as there is a division between observer and observed, there is 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 to determine the basic attributes of any character I write about. This character web, or...
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 ourselves and others to professional stories. Like songs, stories are easier to recognize than to define...
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 words, my investigation into sentences should reflect and support this idea.
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 it around for a while and see if you can't start to build a complete snow man — er...
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 language works. I will attempt these investigations without the aid...