Your Story Prompt on Writer's Digest

Need a writing prompt--one that may also land you in an issue of Writer's Digest? WD does a Your Story Competition every other month, and the latest prompt is:

Begin your story (must be 750 words or fewer) with the following line of dialogue: “I’ve got to get out of these clothes—fast.”

And here are the other details from their site:

"Every other month, Writer’s Digest presents a creative challenge for fun and prizes. We’ll provide a short, open-ended prompt. In turn, you’ll submit a short story based on that prompt. The winner will receive publication in an upcoming issue of Writer’s Digest.

The Rules:

Judging criteria are inventiveness, creativity and—where appropriate—humor.

One entry per person.

WD retains first-time rights to run the winner (and finalists) in the magazine and/or on our website, after which all rights return to the author.

WD editors will select the top five entries and post them on our Writer’s Forum.

Readers will vote on their favorite to determine the winner. (Remember, you must be a registered member of the Writer’s Digest forum to read and vote in this competition.)

The decisions of its editors are final.

Winners will be published in a future issue of Writer’s Digest and on the Your Story winners page at WritersDigest.com."

Good luck if you enter! I could see having some fun writing a story with that prompt . . .

Road Trip Wednesday--Unmentionables

YA Highway and friends are at it again for Road Trip Wednesday.

Road Trip Wednesday is a "Blog Carnival," where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question and answer it on our own blogs. You can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

This week's topic comes from a prompt at SCBWI:
What does your character hide in their underwear drawer - or other secret location?


Isabelle from my YA historical/paranormal novel, Those Lost at Sea and Drowned, moves around a lot (the U.S. to Spain, to Jamaica, to Antigua, to Rhode Island, to the spirit world) so she doesn't have anything as permanent as a drawer for her linens.

She always manages to keep a book with her, though, and among its pages you will find a hair from the tail of a white stallion and a scrap of black lace from a fine Spanish mantilla

Point of View

I start my creative writing certificate this weekend with an intensive course on dialogue and point of view. I feel fairly confident about my dialogue (I used to think dialogue was my weakness, so I worked on it) but I have a confession about POV: I nearly always write in first-person for fiction.

First-person has even crept into my articles occasionally, but only if the magazine's guidelines state they have a conversational or folksy style. Gardening magazines seem to like first person, for that "chatting over the fence" feel.

Anyway, one of our assignments is to bring in 250 words of our own writing--not a polished piece, but one that we feel we are having trouble with. That will definitely mean one of my third-person pieces (I've never tackled second-person). I'll probably bring in one of my picture books since the sample only needs to be 250 words.

And I'm a little bit nervous, which I haven't felt about my writing in a while. That means I'm being pushed out of my comfort zone, which is a good thing!

Anybody else venture out of their comfort zone, and if so did you discover a talent you didn't know you had?

Inspirational Silliness Explained

Thought this would be a good time to explain the Inspirational Silliness on the sidebar. First, it should be said that some of the content on both the sites is for mature audiences.

The reason why I read them on a near-daily basis is that they are so stimulating to the writing part of my brain. How could you fail to be inspired by such gems as these from Sleeptalkin' Man (I picked some cleaner ones):

Stop the cows! They're licking everything!

Ninjas in stilettos. Fashion assassins! Not so stealthy, but oh so stylish.

Oh, I could be rummaging around in here for ages, I'm never going to find some zebra ears!


And then with Cake Wrecks, some of the cakes are done well but not well thought out. I love to imagine the thought processes of the person that ordered the cakes (0r made them, for that matter). And what kind of conversations would you overhear at a wedding where the bride demands a day-glo Beanie Baby cake like this one ?

Try a writing exercise with the Beanie Baby cake--what does the groom really think of that cake? And what words did the bride use when she was trying to describe her vision to the baker? Was the result exactly what she wanted?