Dragon Writing Prompts

Write a story in just seven sentences. But not just any seven sentences! Each sentence will play a specific role.

This idea is from author Jim Van Pelt who created it for a creative fiction writing class as an exercise in plot:

We talked about plot having several components: an inciting moment, rising action, a climax and a denouement. One way to see how a plot can work is to build a plot skeleton, a very short story, stripped of everything except the plot.

To write this kind of story, you are limited to only seven sentences. Each sentence has a specific role.

1. Introduce what the main character wants and the first action he/she takes to accomplish the goal.
2. The results of the action the character takes from sentence 1 has to make the situation worse. The character should be farther from the goal now.
3. Based on the new situation, the character takes a second action to accomplish the goal.
4. The results of the second action the character takes from sentence 3 is to make the situation worse. The character should be even farther from the goal now.
5. Based on the new situation, the character takes a third and final action to accomplish the goal.
6. This third action either accomplishes the character’s goal, fails to accomplish the goal, or there is an unusual but oddly satisfying different result of the last action.
7. The denouement. This sentence wraps the story up. It could tell the reader how the character felt about the results, or provide a moral, or tell how the character’s life continued on.

After his class had a great deal of fun with this, he held a contest. When you’re done, you can check out the entries.

A constrained writing prompt landed in my mail box today in Anu Garg’s Wordsmith.org’s Word A Day. And it’s a contest too.

We’ve done lipograms where you’re forbidden to use a letter or letters in each word and anti-lipograms where you must use a letter or letters. (Click Constrained writing over on the right for more.)

A univocalic is a piece of writing that uses only one of the vowels, an example for e is: “Help the peerless letter e perfect sentences.”

CONTEST: Imagine you are a headline writer for a newspaper back in the days when metal type was used. You have run out of all but one of the vowels in the large type size that is used for the headline. What univocalic can you come up with?

If you get stumped for substitute words, try the thesaurus at The Free Dictionary.

Email your univocalic news headlines (real or made-up) to (words at wordsmith.org). Selected entries will be featured in the weekly compilation AWADmail and the best entry will win an autographed copy of Anu Garg’s latest book The Dord, the Diglot, and an Avocado or Two: The Hidden Lives and Strange Origins of Common and Not-So-Common Words.

Deadline is Friday Oct 17.

“Most notably, [Christian Bök’s] 2001 Eunoia , seven years in the making, became Canada’s bestselling poetry book ever — an incredible feat for such explicitly experimental writing. No comforting fluff here; in the main portion, each chapter employs but a single vowel (e.g., “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech”), a univocalic constraint.” — Ed Park; Crystal Method; Village Voice (New York); Dec 16, 2003.

Use only the following words to write with. Cut them up, shuffle them around and see what you come up with.

a
and
and
as
at
back
behind
but
doll’s
expected
eyes
eyes
face
face
fear
filled
flowed
he
his
his
his
his
his
I
in
into
it
life
look
lovely
me
moved
no
on
shock
skin
staring
still
surprise
the
there
there
there
underneath
unreadable
until
was
was
was
was
was
wasn’t
what
worry

(The words came from a paragraph in a novel. If, when you’re done, you want to see what the author came up with, check the comments)

Write a 26 sentence story. Start the first sentence with a word beginning with A, the second sentence with a word beginning with B all the way to the last sentence that begins with Z.

Dialog will probably help you out of a lot of problems since it’s easier to have someone say something beginning with odd letters than to start sentences with them! But it’s also a challenge to begin sentences with a variety of words. I know I fall into the trap of beginning sentences with pronouns (He impaled the vampire … She ripped the motherboard from the robot …)

Take the sentences you generated last week for Alphabetical dragons and, while trying to capture the same idea, rewrite using only words that don’t contain that letter of the alphabet. (You can read more about Lipograms and Anti-lipograms.)

Here’s the W example I gave last week:

Wini the Worm, wriggled wearily westward toward the Wailing Wood, wreathed in white wisps and wrapped in remnants of war.

And I’ll try to write it without Ws:

Fredi the Firedrake, jiggled tiredly anti-easterly in the direction of the Crying Forest, surrounded by pale tendrils and cloaked in remnants of battle.

(You can use your word processor search feature to search for the letter to see if one snuck into the middle of a word.)

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If you need synonym help the Free Dictionary has a pretty good thesaurus.

Wiktionary, in addition to definitions, has foreign words and synonyms for some words. It was good for dragon (and forest) but just gave me a definition for wriggle.

And the Visual Thesaurus is cool :-). It’s a program/subscription but you can try it out a limited number of times for free. After you type in a word you can click on any of the words in the map and it will put that at the center with related words around it.

Good writing combines ideas in novel ways. Try using the following combinations in sentences that give insight into why the odd combinations fittingly describe what’s going on.

• festive tyrant
• fabulous poverty
• thoughtful depression
• blissful zombie
• tasty plague
• beautiful monster
• fabulous crisis
• putrid wealth
• foul loyalty
• impoverished beauty
• shameful miracle
• miserable courage
• tyranical perfection
• depressing optimism

These were generated at WritingFix’s Serendipitous Oxymoron Creator.

Write sentences that contain all 7 of the words on each line. Feel free to change some of the word endings, eg, change crooked to crook or crooks.

1. spotless blizzard disease dramatic protest flipped deny
2. whimpered mystery rare raced uglier accident candle
3. crooked frightened horse instantly excited flames circular
4. shiver horrible blood secret return distant cavern
5. squashed slowest private billion sharp ignorance shiver
6. dangerous bounce rainy jokes overgrown furry explore
7. fatal roam frightened wise slobbered bubbly traveler
8. slippery chewed priest return drooled waterfall fairy
9. altered bumpy foggy journey deny skull dragon
10. ice outstanding waterfall future toe modified forest

Constrained writing is like confining yourself to a very specific box which can, ironically, be freeing since it forces you out of the familiar boxes you may generally be writing in. I’ve posted several prompts based on constrained writing: lipograms (forbidding certain letters), anti-lippograms (requiring certain letters), drabble (100 word story). (Click on the Constrained writing category to the right to see them.)

Constrained.org is “a community site for short stories that adhere to various literary constraints, ranging from the well-known (anagrams, acrostics, palindromes) to the obscure and arbitrary”. They put up a new constraint each week.

You can see a Random Story from a random challenge. They also have a page listing their current Constraint Challenges. Here’s a sample of what may be over a hundred of them. (I wish the page had full descriptions, but each challenge links to a full description.):

• Lipogram (thirteen stories) (Your lipogrammatic submissions should avoid a symbol that I will playfully signal by noting that it…)
• The extreme opposite (seven stories) (Compose stories wherein every verb, adjective etc. possesses the letter ‘e’.)
• Fossil record (nine stories) (No formal constraints this time (although you may, of course, devise your own). Instead your stories…)
• Monosyllabic stories (fifteen stories) (Your task, should you choose it, is to weave taut yarns in which each word is but one voiced part.)

Write a paragraph (or one really really long sentence) using only words that begin with the letters in the alphabet in order.

Such as “A blustering caribou ….”

Anagrams are formed by rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to form a new word or words.

At Anagram type in your name and click “Get anagrams”.

Pick 5 or more series of words. The first ones may all start with the same words so keep scrolling down until you get lists with a variety of words or words that intrigue you. (You’ll probably see the same words popping up again and again but there will be some surprising combinations.

Set the timer for 10-15 minutes and write sentences the contain all the words on one line.

Using JOYCE FETTEROLL I get 4163. Using JOYCE ANN KURTAK FETTEROLL I get 43,480! (If you click on the “advanced” option you can tell it to include numbers before its lists if you’re curious how many there are.) With the first nearly 30,000 that start with “A ACE” so I have to scroll way down to get to the next list. Here are some — way more than 5! — that came from my name:

A CAREFREE JUNK KNOTTY TOLL
A RACKETEER FLUNK JOLT TONY
A CRENELLATE OFT JUNK OK TRY
A TERCENTENARY FOLK JOLT UK
A RECREATE FLUNKY JOLT KNOT
A ETCETERA FORT JUNKY KNOLL
A FLATULENCE JOKER KNOT TRY
A REFACE JUNKET KNOT TROLLY
A REFACE JET LURK KNOTT ONLY
A REFACE KNELT JOLTY TURK ON
A NACELLE TREK FOOT JUNK TRY
A CLEANER LEFT JUNK TOOK TRY
A CLEANER TOKEN FLY JOT TURK
A CLEANER KEY FONT JOLT KURT
A LAURENCE JERK LOFT KNOTTY
A CERULEAN ELK FRY JOT KNOTT
A TENTACLE ELF JUNK ROOK TRY
A TENTACLE JOKER FOLK RUNTY
A RELOCATE KNELT FORTY JUNK
A CEREAL ELF JUNKY KNOT TROT
A CEREAL KNELT FUN JOT OK TRY
A CEREAL TOKEN FLUNK JOT TRY
A CEREAL OTTER FLY JUNK TONK
A ELECTRA TEFLON JUNK OK TRY
A ELECTRA FERN JUT YOLK KNOT
A TREACLE FERN JOLTY KNOT UK
A TREACLE FEY JOT KNURL KNOT

Choose an author whose writing you admire — or at least would like to imitate for this exercise! Then pick five sentences or so — it can be the first lines, or from a favorite scene or any that strike you.

Use the sentences as a template to write about your own character, setting and situation. If you need an idea, try writing fan fiction: take your favorite characters from books or TV or movies and put them in a new situation.

Now use the pattern of your author’s sentences to write about the subject you chose. Use a noun or verb or preposition where the author did. You don’t need to keep any of the words the same, just their type.

You may not need a timer for this one since it’s already limited by only having 5 sentences.

Sang sent this idea in inspired by a local rock band who rewrote (and attempted to sing!) Three Blind Mice using as many synonyms as possible.

Give it a try. A word processor with a thesaurus could be helpful as you start running out of your own ideas for substitute words. Here’s the original.

Three blind mice.
Three blind mice.
See how they run.
See how they run.
They all ran after the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails with a carving knife.
Did you ever see such a sight in your life
As three blind mice.

Here’s one of the band’s versions:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:
:

A trio of visually handicapped rodents
A trio of visually handicapped rodents
Observe how they motivate
Observe how they motivate
The group scurried toward the spouse of the agriculturist
Who removed their rear appendage with a meat cleaver
Have you ever observed such a presentation in your existence
As a trio of visually handicapped rodents

(Though Sang wasn’t sure about the “farmer’s wife” part since they have to sing it really fast!)

Use the following words that are in other words in sentences:

star in startle
lever in clever
turn in turnip
grin in grind
sigh in sight
urge in splurge
icky in picky/tricky
love in slovenly
harm in pharmacy
can in candor
hut in shuttle
cue in rescue
cry in crystal
want in wanton
age in language
ugh in laughter
laughter in slaughter
bit in ambition
red in credit
hop in shop

These are from Words in words.

Write a 7 sentence story for a set of 7 nouns. The trick this time is the words need to be in the order listed. Pick one set or do as many as you want.

• stripes
  lizard
  boulder
  teeth
  rain
  horse
  blizzard

• valley
  slime
  salt
  emperor
  frost
  dictator
  rust

• disease
  stranger
  tongue
  toe
  skull
  warrior
  guard

• ears
  ooze
  creature
  journey
  fairy
  cavern
  silver

Inspired by Story Chains at Telling Tales.

Write the alphabet down the side of the page. Write an alliterative phrase — like wistful wishes — that has to do with the holiday season for each letter.

.
.
.
.

Another game for over the holiday season, this is a writing game for a group.

What you need:

• a group of people
• writing implement for each person
• a sheet of paper for each person

How to:

Write down the side of each paper.

• Article (traditionally a, an, the, but also: some, all, every, one, …)
• Adjective
• Noun
• Adverb
• Verb
• Article
• Adjective
• Noun

The first person fills in an article and passes the paper to the right. The second person fills in an adjective and folds the paper over to hide the article before passing the paper to the right. The third person fills in a noun and folds the paper over to hide the adjective before passing the paper to the right. So each time the paper is passed, the person accepting the paper will only be able to see the most recently added word.

Keep going until all the words are filled in. Then open them up and look at the sentences created.

(You can use any structure of sentence. The above is the structure of the original game that prompted its name.)

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It’s speculated the name came from one of the first keepers “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.”

If you would like to contribute to an online Exquisite Corpse Poem go to Exquisite Corpse Poetry. Click on Game (up at the top in the gray bar)

The circles show how many words have been added to a line. (If the last one’s blinking only one more word is needed and you can complete a line.) Click on a verse and it will tell you what type of word is needed. Type in your word and then submit.

Click on Verse (again up in the gray bar) to see lines that have been completed. If you change the month you can see the top vote getters. They can be used as writing prompts.

There’s also a longer ongoing poem at An Exquisite Corpse Poem. This displays the most recently submitted line of the poem. You supply the next. When you click “Activate” (which submits your line) you can see the poem so far.

This may be more fun without the timer. From last week, a lipogram is a type of constrained writing, done by forbidding words that have a particular letter or particular letters. An anti-lipogram on the other hand requires words to have a particular letter or letters

Rewrite Mary Had a Little Lamb using only words containing e. (Obviously you’ll have to change her name!) Also try anti-lipograms with t and a.

Here’s the original:

Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow;
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day,
which was against the rule;
it made the children laugh and play,
to see a lamb at school.

(If you need help with the rhymes Rhymezone has a rhyming dictionary.)

Even harder is to write using only one vowel. That’s called univocalic prose.

Here’s Mary Had a Little Lamb using words that don’t have any vowels except “e”. I’ll put it down below so you don’t see it until you’re done with yours. Scroll down when you’re done:

*
*
*
*
*

*
*
*
*
*

*
*
*
*
*

Meg kept the wee sheep.
The sheep’s fleece resembled sleet.
Then, whenever Meg went,
The sheep went there next…

This may be more fun without the timer. A lipogram is a type of constrained writing, done by forbidding words that have a particular letter or particular letters.

Rewrite Mary Had a Little Lamb without using the letter s. Try also eliminating a, e, h and t. (And anything else you’d like to try.)

Here’s the original:

Mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow;
and everywhere that Mary went,
the lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day,
which was against the rule;
it made the children laugh and play,
to see a lamb at school.

(If you need help Rhymezone has an online rhyming dictionary.)

When you’re done, Ross Eckler has come up with several constrained versions of Mary Had a Little Lamb.

If you think that was hard, people have written entire novels under various restraints:

11 Incredible Lipograms

Lipogrammatic Works of Fiction

And a new book that even gets very good reviews. It’s a satire on censorship.

Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters

From Amazon: Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

Write sentences that contain all 5 of the words on each line. Feel free to change some of the word endings, eg, change jokes to joked or joking.

1. guest thief horns stripes jokes
2. spiked mossy meadow liver dancer
3. explore unbelievable jokes seasons embarrassed
4. million master spiral eyeball cavern
5. squealed baboon traveler curved drench
6. disease crooked hobbled monk squashed
7. ooze frost wings roam checkered
8. dangerous meadow baboon chameleon entertainment
9. hobbled invent scorpion return strange
10. screech acrobat unusual crackling sharp
11. demon unfriendly moldy million flipped
12. stranger rage curved mystery valley
13. shy crumbling sweat brain amazing
14. private entertainment hunger shy eyeball
15. shy miniscule complain fantastic gigantic
16. whimpered deep unusual guard fuzzy
17. fatal enjoyable overgrown reward book
18. shiver tongue creature penalty misty
19. past coward whimpered horrible dragon
20. priest dangerous protest frightened guest

This was inspired by the game Baffle-Gab. I haven’t played the game but it does look fun. (Though from the examples shown at the website the nouns look like present day stuff like astronauts and so on.)

If you’re clever with spreadsheets, you can generate more sets of 5 random words like above.

Use the following homophones in a sentence or phrase. (The -s means the plurals are also homophones.)

pride, pried
tea, tee, ti [”do, re”], [T]
toad, toed, towed
udder (-s), utter (-s)
worst, wurst
aerie, airy
ate, eight
bazaar, bizarre
braid, brayed
dewed, dude
ewes, use, yews
friar, fryer
its, it’s
lightening, lightning
loan, lone
miner, minor
pi, pie
prince, prints
rose, rows
tacked, tact
taper (-s), tapir (-s)
thyme, time
waist (-s), waste (-s)
whose, who’s
yore, your, you’re
you’ll, yule

When you’re done, Dittograms has some funny (and punny) homophones.

A drabble is a 100 word story. Exactly 100 words. Hyphenated words are debated so it’s up to you. You can have up to 15 words for a title.

This is a challenge in brevity! And in choosing words that will do multiple duties.

Set the timer for 10-15 minutes, become friends with the word counter on your word processor, and have at it.

BTW, There’s a good history of drabbles at The Drabble Project

PS: If you need a plot:

Here are a few plots from The Big List of RPG Plots by S. John Ross that might lend themselves to beginning, middle and end rather than the prompts written here that just get you started. There are many more plots there with lots of twists and themes. That site is overkill for this exercise but might be useful for ideas for stories.

Any Old Port in a Storm
The characters are seeking shelter from the elements or some other threat, and come across a place to hole up. They find that they have stumbled across something dangerous, secret, or supernatural, and must then deal with it in order to enjoy a little rest.

Better Late Than Never
Some bad guys have arrived and done some bad guy things. The characters were none the wiser. The bad guys have now made good their escape, and the characters have caught wind of it in time to chase them down before they make it back to their lair, their home nation, behind enemy lines, etc.

Blackmail
An antagonist has something to hold over the heads of the characters and make them jump. This could be any kind of threat from physical to social, but it depends on the villain having something - even if it’s information - that others don’t have. Now, he is pulling the strings of the characters, telling them to do things they don’t want to. The characters must end the cycle of blackmail, deprive the villain of his edge, and keep him temporarily satisfied while doing it.

Breaking and Entering
Mission objective: enter the dangerous place, and retrieve the vital dingus or valuable person. Overcome the area’s defenses to do so.

Capture the Flag
The characters must secure a military target for the good guys. There are bad guys there that prefer not to be secured. The fundamental tactical scenario.

Clearing The Hex
There is a place where bad things live. The characters must make it safe for nice people, systematically clearing it of danger.

Delver’s Delight
The characters are treasure-hunters, who have caught wind of a treasure-laden ruin. They go to explore it, and must deal with its supernatural denizens to win the treasure and get out alive.

Don’t Eat The Purple Ones
The characters are stranded in a strange place, and must survive by finding food and shelter, and then worry about getting back home.

Escort Service
The characters have a valuable object or person, which needs to be taken to a safe place or to its rightful owner, etc. They must undertake a dangerous journey in which one or more factions (and chance and misfortune) try to deprive them of the thing in their care.

Help is on the Way
A person (church group, nation, galaxy) is in a hazardous situation they can’t survive without rescue. The characters are on the job. In some scenarios, the hook is as simple as a distant yell or crackly distress signal.

Hidden Base
The characters, while traveling or exploring, come across a hornet’s nest of bad guys, preparing for Big Badness. They must either find some way to get word to the good guys, or sneak in and disable the place themselves, or a combination of both.

Link one word to the next until you have a sentence. Pick a word to begin a sentence. The next word in the sentence should start with the ending letter of the previous word. For example if the first word is Good you might come up with:

• Good dogs shouldn’t tell lies.

And if the first word is Twenty you might come up with something like:

• Twenty yellow waterlillies skunked Donald Duck’s snake.

Here’s some initial words if you need them. Use whatever random words pop into your head for more.

Cat
Stupidly
Fire
Wings
Pinned

Do something with

quackly
vale
simper
fling
cranberry
kiosk
winsome
prey

Can you get them all in a story? In a paragraph? In a sentence?

Write a sentence. Any sentence.

Take the last word and use that as the first word of your next sentence.

Keep on going!

The sentences don’t need to connect. Just random sentences to get creativity flowing.

If you want take one of the sentences and use it as a writing prompt.