Dragon Writing Prompts

What conversation do you overhear around this event? Is the child the only one talking? Or are the bears contributing?

“But what in the world do they want a trumpet for?”

It’s the last line of a movie. But use it as your first line (of a story, poem, play, movie, dialogue …)

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Hippocrates believed moods and behaviors were caused by the balance of four bodily fluids (called humors): blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare and other authors based characters on the four humors or temperaments. It’s good to have a balance in real life, but for characters it’s good to be unbalanced :-)

Come up with some characters based on the four humors. Set them in a situation together and see what happens.

Sanguine (blood, cheerful)

A sanguine person is generally light-hearted, fun-loving, a people person, loves to entertain, spontaneous, leadership abilities, and confident. However they can be arrogant, cocky, and indulgent. They can be day-dreamy and off-task to the point of not accomplishing anything and can be impulsive, possibly acting on whims in an unpredictable fashion.

The temperament is associated with the season of spring, the qualities of warm and moist, the element of air. Various modern equivalents are: artisan, improvisor, artistic, innovative, changeable.

Synonyms: cheerful, confident, optimistic, assured, hopeful, buoyant, in good heart

Choleric (yellow bile, enthusiastic)

A choleric person is a doer. They have a lot of ambition, energy, and passion, and try to instill it in others. They can dominate people of other temperaments, especially phlegmatic types. Many great charismatic military and political figures were cholerics. On the negative side, they are easily angered, bad-tempered, mean-spirited, suspicious and angry.

The temperament is associated with the season of summer, the qualities of warm and dry, and the element of fire. Various modern equivalents are: idealist, catalyst, religious, doctrinaire, inspired.

Synonyms: irate, testy, hot-tempered, fiery, irritable, quarrelsome

Melancholic (black bile, somber)

A melancholic person is a thoughtful ponderer. Often very kind and considerate, melancholics can be highly creative – as in poetry and art - but can become overly pre-occupied with the tragedy and cruelty in the world, thus becoming depressed. A melancholic is also often a perfectionist. This often results in being unsatisfied with one’s own artistic or creative works and always pointing out to themselves what could and should be improved.

The temperament is associated with the season of autumn, the qualities of cold and dry, and the element of earth. Various modern equivalents are: guardian, stabilizer, economic, traditional, industrious.

Synonyms: languid, spiritless, gloomy

Phlegmatic (phlegm, calm)

A phlegmatic person is calm and unemotional. While phlegmatics are generally self-content and kind, their shy personality can often inhibit enthusiasm in others and make themselves lazy and resistant to change. They are very consistent, relaxed, rational, curious, and observant, making them good administrators and diplomats. Like the sanguine personality, the phlegmatic has many friends. However the phlegmatic is more reliable and compassionate; these characteristics typically make the phlegmatic a more dependable friend.

The temperament is associated with the season of winter, the qualities of cold and moist, and the element of water. Various modern equivalents are: rational, theorist, theoretic, skeptical, curious.

Synonyms: unemotional, indifferent, cold, heavy, dull, sluggish, matter-of-fact, placid, stoical, lethargic, bovine, apathetic, frigid, lymphatic, listless, impassive, stolid, unfeeling, undemonstrative

There’s a chart that categorizes the traits and strengths and weaknesses of each:

If you’d like to see the mixture of humors in your character (or yourself) there’s a personality test.

The Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson is about a world where people are isolated into quarters by personality type. I’m seeing some inherent conflict there in a land filled with leaders but no followers and thinkers but no doers.

Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org sent out a week of words that have multiple and varied meanings. Growler had 5 definitions:

1. One that growls.
2. A container brought by a customer to fetch beer.
3. Small iceberg pieces less than 5 meters at the waterline get their name from the sound they make when they plunge down into the water when oscillating in sea swells.
4. A four-wheeled cab.
5. An electromagnetic device for testing short-circuited coils.

Use all the meanings in a single writing piece.

If five isn’t enough for you, here are some informal definitions sent by readers of the Word A Day newsletter:

• A student who can’t sing in tune.
• The sound box put inside “talking bears.”
• A Victorian-era slang word for a sausage (at least so says James P. Blaylock in his novel Homonculus)
• A slang term for a pork pie (in Yorkshire, in the North of England).
• A very large clam (at least it is in Phillip Craig’s mystery series set on Martha’s Vineyard (an island off the coast of Massachusetts)).
• A station to station telephone that employs a small hand crank to produce a growling noise at the called station (US Navy).
• A large-mouthed black bass.
• A diesel locomotive.
• Translucent messages and icons that appear on a computer screen for a short time.
• Pre-fabricated burgers once served at the student cafeteria at Memorial University of Newfoundland; for their obvious effect once ingested.
• A heavy, fast food meat pie in Northern England that can cause quite severe indigestion.
• Portable electric toilets used by wilderness guides in areas such as the Grand Canyon.
• A slang meaning I’ve often heard for this word is ‘outhouse’. Also portable toilets.
• A bathroom.

When you’re done “Dave from Maryland” illustrated the five meanings at Word A Day.

What are these guys thinking? Write a caption or a bit of dialogue.

A friend passed on some spam with words that caught my eye.

phasma symphonizing
vertebration riddled

I like the sounds of phasma and vertebration. Each sounds like it is several concepts bundled up snugly together.

Play with those. Let the sounds of phasma and vertebration and the combinations take you where where they will in free form writing for 10 minutes or so.

When you feel the ideas fading, check out the real definitions (and I thought they were made up words!) for a recharge for a few more minutes.

When you’re done, go back and circle your favorite phrases. See if you can arrange them into a poemish creation.

What does your character …

… fear?
… dread?
… want?
… want to avoid losing?
… want to avoid gaining?
… love?
… desire?
… need?
… crave?
… hate?
… loathe?
… have a passion for?

If your character doesn’t want something badly, there isn’t much reason to read about them.

While in real life happiness is a great thing, it’s boring in a character ;-) Their desire needn’t be a huge thing like saving the world. It can be simple personal quest like recreating Mom’s lost recipe for cherry pie or a war on the invading bedbugs.

This can work for a current character, a dropped character you were fond of but couldn’t make work, a brand new character.

Come up with a new deck of cards for current times, a fantasy world, a future world, for your own or someone else’s world. J.K. Rowling showed us wizarding chess. What do their cards look like? Who or what is on them? What do Goth cards look like? Klingon? Robot? (They all probably exist! ;-)

You can stick with the standard 52+Joker deck of 4 suits or not. (Not to be practical on you or anything ;-), but I suspect a number close to 52 is easy to shuffle. The 65 cards in Five Crowns is tough! So maybe your characters have larger hands if you decide to have more cards or they have some technique to get around that.)

So, what suits have meaning for your world? Will you use something other than numbers? Do you have a set corresponding to the royals?

From Caffeine for the Creative Mind: 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield

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Did you know?

The kings in the French decks represent actual kings? King David (spades), Charlemagne or Charles IV (hearts), Julius Ceasar (diamonds), Alexander the Great (clubs). So do the queens and jacks (knaves).

The Ace of Spades picture is usually much larger for a reason? The cards in Europe were taxed and that’s the card chosen for the tax stamp.

That the ace, which used to be the lowest card, trumps the king probably came about during the French Revolution when the peasants revolted against the king?

There’s way more than you thought to question about playing cards :-)

Turn Little Red Riding Hood into a zombie story. Is she the zombie? Is she a zombie fighter? Who represents the wolf? And who the grandma?

An old prompt to turn Jack and the Beanstalk into a vampire story inspired this and I wasn’t even thinking of the mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! but it looks very cool!

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Did you stumble across this? Or were you directed here?

Was the picture taken before entering, or just after, facing back where you came?

Does the archway lead where it seems to, or is it a portal?

If you enjoy abandoned places, Web Urbanist has a massive collection of photos grouped by type.

I overheard, “Analen’s getting married.”

And my whole life changed.

Take it from there.

Or, alternately, take it many places from there. See how many beginnings you can come up with.

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On slips of paper, write down a dozen occupations that fit with your preferred writing genre. If you’re expanding beyond contemporary, you don’t need to stick with firefighter and doctor so you can throw in zombie hunter or holodeck author. But, even on Mars, they’ll have fires and someone needs to fight them. :-)

On another set of slips write down personality quirks (like kleptomaniac, no sense of humor, or superstitious).

Draw one from each set and use the combination as the inspiration of a character or three. Match them up and see what happens.

Brainstorm on the quirks for a bit. You’ll be surprised what starts coming out once you allow yourself to loosen up.

If you want to add in some quirks from someone else’s brain: 100 character quirks you can steal from me and 100 character traits you can totally steal from me part II. And a phobia list with a bit of story to set them up.

Tell the story of a house from the house’s point of view. What do houses care about? Not the same things as the parasites — er, symbiotic lifeforms living in them ;-)

How have the people through the years used and abused the house. How have they altered it, improved it or let it decay? What invaders (termites, squirrels …) have moved in? What’s it feel like to the house when the roof leaks (and to be helpless to fix it when people ignore it!) Any walls or floor ripped out or basement dug up to hide secrets? Ghosts? Good or bad karma left in the house? What about the surrounding house “friends” who have come and gone? What about the new “kid” on the block?

Ben Shott writes about words for the NY Times with an occasional weekend competition.

This weekend’s competition is to come up with new collective nouns for modern nouns. Collective nouns are the words for groups like pride of lions and murder of crows.

Here’s his description:

Many of the collective nouns with which we are familiar can be found in the “Book of St. Albans,” published in 1486. This curious volume, often attributed to Juliana Berners, contains treatises on hawking, hunting and heraldry, as well as a host of, now famous, nouns of assemblage, including:

An exultation of larks; a parliament of rooks; a murmuration of starlings; a shrewdness of apes; a gaggle of geese; a turmoil of porpoises; a business of ferrets; a spring of teal; and a pride of lions.

This weekend, co-vocabularists are invited to submit novel nouns of assemblage for modern phenomena. A bucket of Wiis? A swamp of blogs? A murder of crowds?

You can add to or just check out the contributions at his blog.

(Not sure if you’ll need to register to read the blog. I know you do for the NY Times articles.)

Use the following homophones in sentences.

toe/tow
pidgin/pigeon
complement/compliment
manner/manor
mane/main
medal/meddle/metal/mettle
principal/principle
vain/vane/vein
pi/pie

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Write 5-10 different scenes of a character waking up. It’s natural to default to amusing grumpiness or just getting up and moving on. But dig deeper and find the quirkiness and different reactions people have to an ordinary experience.

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• Someone is not who they’re pretending to be.
• One is a breeder of cockapoos.
• One of them hates someone in the group.
• The accountant pines to be a cabaret singer.
• There has been a betrayal.
• In one’s wallet is a picture of every cat they’ve ever owned.
• One has been known to photocopy their butt and leave it in the copy tray.
• Two are related but only one knows it. Though one of the others also knows.
• One has on edible underwear but not for the obvious reason.
• There is a love triangle and unrequited love but not the way you might think.
• In the suitcase of one are items from all but one of the others’ suitcases.

(The group is before Al Khazneh in Jordan, the site of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Feel free to use that or ignore it.)

The photographer and the woman in the background to the left may or may not be part of the group.

“Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agitated courts and revolutionized kingdoms; like the moon which, though far removed from the ocean, and shining upon it with a serene and sober light, is the chief cause of all those ebbings and flowings which incessantly disturb that restless world of waters.” — Charles Caleb Colton (1780-1832)

Take that literally (though they can be women too :-).

There are people in the world, but isolated from it, who give their thoughts physical form and somehow those thoughts are changing the world.

It could be a video game. That’s been done. A few thousand times ;-)

Or, better, maybe the gods or the world’s designers have moved onto another project, abandoning the world which is deteriorating. It’s found some have the power to influence the world through writing — or song or art or comics or …? And they’re isolated to fix things. Voluntarily? Involuntarily? God like powers or a quiet whisper than ripples through the world?

What happens hundreds of years later? What kind of mythology is built up around the fixers? What’s their explanation for the meaning behind it all? Are the fixers now a separate society, isolated from the world? Have they forgotten their purpose and don’t realize they’re affecting a real world? Or are people tested and sent off to be fixers, never to see their families again? Or is a fixer a 9-5 job but after work they end up hearing everyone’s problems they want fixed?

I love collections :-) One of Kenneth Koch’s ideas in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams was to sprinkle a poem with Spanish colors (which grew into other words too).

I thought it might be fun to collect color names from many different languages. Try picking one language and not looking at the English color names. (Though some are from familiar roots and you’ll be able to guess :-) Use the colors by sound. Or use the words to mean something else. What does each sound like?

In prose or poetry, create a colorful event: a festival, a holiday, a circus, nightclub, a culture drawn to bright colors. Set it in the future or past or a fantasy world. An interstellar ship trying to keep people’s spirits up during the years long trip with spirited music and colorful decorations. A culture where dyes are rare so they bring out their colorful clothes only once a year in celebration of spring.

Here’s what a couple of the kids did with the idea in Wishes, Lies and Dreams:

On my planeta named Carambona La Paloma
We have a fiesta called Luna Estrella.
A funny looking hombre comes to our homes.
He has four heads: a leon head, an oso head, a mono head, and a culebra head.
We do a baile named Mar of Nieve.
On this fiesta we eat platos.
That’s how we celebrate Christmas on my planet.

Marion Mackles

The luna is big and clara.
The perro I saw is almost as big as a caballo.
The caballo I saw ate the manzana I had.
The estrella was as clara as the sun.

Valerie Chasse

When I stumbled across this week’s quote, it reminded me of a prompt that provides a structure for a poem (or for a brief story or character sketch).

Write a poem (or sketch) that answers the 5 Ws (+H) reporters are told to include in their stories: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. They can be answered in any order. You can leave off one if it seems to tell too much. (Usually why.)

Here’s some examples from Getting the Knack by Stephen Dunning and William Stafford. (The questions in parentheses aren’t part of the poem.)

Coincidence

(who?)    Our elected representative, Ms. Ludlaw
(what?)   pumping voters’ hands
(how?)    as if they were slot-machine levers
(where?)  outside Faculty Lounge
(when?)   Tuesday, after school.
(why?)    Next month, election.

September

(what?)   Flocking toward Mexico
(when?)   before Winter’s first ka-choooo,
(how?)    thrashing the silver air
(where?)  in Ontario’s gray sky,
(why?)    wanting warm —
(who?)    a blizzard of ducks

If you like to rhyme, skeltonic verse can be fun. The structure is playful and suggests lively movement so is also known as tumbling verse. The lines are short (3-6 words on average) and the rhyme continues as long as you feel it’s working. Then it moves onto the next rhyme. One rhyme may last two lines, another a dozen.

(If you need help with rhymes try Rhymer or Rhymezone.)

Here’s an example from John Skelton who invented the form back in the 16th century:

from Colin Clout

What can it avail
To drive forth a snail,
Or to make a sail
Of an herring’s tail?
To rhyme or to rail
To write or to indict,
Either for delight
Or else for despite?
Or books to compile
Of divers manners style,
Vice to revile
And sin to exile?
To teach or to preach
As reason will reach?

Say this, and say that:
His head is so fat
He wotteth never what
Nor whereof he speaketh;
He crieth and he creaketh,
He prieth and he peeketh,
He chides and he chatters,
He prates and he patters,
He clitters and he clatters,
He meddles and he smatters,
He glozes and he flatters!

Or if he speak plain,
Then he lacketh brain,
He is but a fool;
Let him go to school.
A three-footed stool!
That he may down sit,
For he lacketh wit!
And if that he hit
The nail on the head,
It standeth in no stead;
The devil, they say, is dead,
The devil is dead!

It may well so be,
Or else they would see
Otherwise, and flee
from worldly vanity,
And foul covetousness
And other wretchedness,
Fickle falseness,
Variableness
With unstableness.
And if ye stand in doubt
Who brought this rhyme about,
My name is Colin Clout.

Use the following first and last words from lines of poetry for inspiration. When you’re done, the originals are in the comments. (They’re probably familiar.)

She … from
Yesterday … gone
While … bright
Or … night
No … knows
She … goes

Don’t … free
She’ll … be
She … chained
To … gained
And … lost
At … cost

There’s … say
Catch … away
Dying … time
Lose … dreams
And … mind
Ain’t … unkind

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Finished … mind
people … time
All … satisfy
Think … pacify
Can … brain
I … find
I … blind
Make … cry
Happiness … unreal
And … state
I … late

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So … far
Couldn’t … heart
Forever … are
And … matters

Never … way
Life … way
All … say
And … matters

Trust … you
Every … new
Open … view
And … matters

Never … do
Never … know
But … know

A metaphor turns one thing into another. Start with the statement:

A road is a road for cars.

and see how many roads (and paths and byways) you can come up with that carry something from one place to another.

• An artery is a road for exhausted blood leading back to the heart.
• The internet is a superhighway for spam.
• School is a potholed dull path to college that they’ve been promising to pave for decades.
• A river is snowmelt’s road from mountain to ocean.
• Pretend is a road to anywhere.
• A lecture is a pathway to sleep.