Top 10 Tabloid Headlines for April 2008
April is National Play with Words Month!
Actually it’s National Poetry Month but to keep the prompts relatively short and encourage people who cringe at the word poetry, it’s a whole lot more about playing with words.
Last year I introduced Kenneth Koch’s poetry warm up exercises. (You can see them all here by clicking on Poetry Warm Ups over on the right.) They’re a way of playing with words to get stuff flowing :-)
No actual poetry will be produced, though you may come up with an intriguing line that leads to a poem or a story.
For today, use the structure of the first tabloid headline and generate similar lines of the form:
Food — Noun — -ed verb
Cucumber Killer Captured
Bean Bomber Bamboozled
Anchovy Anarchist Annihilated
Top 10 Tabloid Headlines from APRIL 1998
- CUCUMBER KILLER CAPTURED! — WWN
- BEN FRANKLIN SHOCKER!He was a Founding Father, a signer of the Declaration of Independence — AND A SERIAL KILLER! — WWN
- Teens ordered to clean toilets after peeing on theater seats! — WWN
- 10 GIRAFFES HAVE HEADS TORN OFF — when zoo truck passes under low bridge — WWN
- Kitten drowned by a giant goldfish! Cat dips paw in tank & fish pulls him in! — WWN
- Exploding grapefruits kill hundreds in Argentina! — WWN
- DEAD HUBBY BURIED WITH WINNING LOTTO TICKET IN HIS POCKET Anxious wife digs up 103 corpses looking for him! — WWN
- FARMER DEVELOPS THE ELVIS CHICKEN! New birds sport slick hairdos & swivel their hips when they walk! — WWN
- Gun-totin’ Texan shoots baby kitten. . . THEN CLAIMS SELF-DEFENSE! — WWN
- VENGEFUL OLDSTER SUES DAUGHTER FOR DEAD WIFE’S ASHES . . . SO HE CAN FLUSH THEM DOWN THE TOILET! — WWN
Create a bestiary. Use each of the following words in the name of the beast or one sentence description of the beast.
Print out the following words in a largish font, cut them up, shuffle them around to create fantasy tabloid headlines like:
Curses and spells come in many flavors: love, money, revenge, protection, healing, curse removal, luck, happiness.
Cut up the following words and put them in a bowl. For NaNo writers, when you get stuck, pull out one of the words and use that in the next sentence you write. If they don’t make sense, edit them out later. :-) The point is to get your thoughts moving. (Though it’s really cool when a random word sparks a neat idea.)
For each set of 7 words, generate a sentence. To make it extra challenging, use them in order. (Feel free to change tenses and word forms.)
Twenty real weird words. Use each in a sentence, making up your own meanings. (When you’re done, if you want to see the real meanings, click on Comments.)
While conflict makes the story run, before conflict your character needs a passionate yearning to be conflicted about.
Come up with ship and boat names for each letter of the alphabet. The ships can be anything: land or water or air or space craft, from dinghies to cruisers.
Come up with names for the following businesses that would work in fantasy or science fiction stories. 
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.
Describe each of the following with something you’d find in a kitchen. For example:
“All the life’s wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie.” — Anu Garg
Turn the following common proverbs into obfuscated polysyllabic philosophies.
At 
What is the smell of:
Write your memoir in 6 words and submit it to 
This is from an exercise in Unjournaling. Write 10 sentences that say no without using the word “no”. Or, come up with a scenario where one character must repeatedly say no — but doesn’t use the word no — to the other character.
A rhyming couplet is two lines that rhyme with each other.
Come up with a list of news releases or reports for April Fool’s Day that sound believable enough to be true. Some examples:
For each letter of the alphabet (or as far as you can get in 10-15 minutes!) come up with a spell (like light) and then play around with the sounds that make up that word to create another word or words that sound good with it to complete the name of the spell. *Avoid* starting your other words with the same letter as your initial word. If you want, tell what the spell does if it’s not obvious.
Cut out the following words. Shuffle them about to form colorful combinations. Use your favorites in a writing piece (prose or poetry).
Write a paragraph that has something to do with each of the following words. Have the first sentence begin with the first letter, the second sentence begin with the second letter. But don’t use the word in the paragraph! Do as many as 10-15 minutes allows.
