Dragon Writing Prompts

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“Ghost wars … Not happening on my watch.”

Take it from there.

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In The Book of Qualities, J. Ruth Gendler has personified 76 qualities and written mini-character sketches of them. (I copied a few of the shorter ones below.)

Give it a try. Think of the good and bad of each quality, the inappropriate reactions (I’m thinking of how envy can cause people to hate beauty, for instance), and how qualities interact. With some fleshing out, the mini-bio could form the basis of a character :-)

The generator at the Blogspot post randomly chooses a quality from Ruth Gendler’s list. (Or click on comments below for the full list.) There are also lists of qualities, emotions and characteristics in previous prompts: Character traits, Seven virtues and Freewriting to character building.

Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled at mathematics and poetry. Beauty doesn’t anger easily, but she was annoyed with the journalist who kept asking her about her favorites — as if she could have one favorite color or one favorite flower. She does not mind questions though, and she is fond of riddles. Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.

Confidence ignores “No Trespassing” signs. It is as if he doesn’t see them. He is an explorer committed to following his own direction. He studied mathematics in France and still views his life as a series of experiments. The only limits he respects are his own. He is honest and humble and very funny. After all these years, his sister doesn’t understand why he still ice skates with Doubt.

Devotion lights candles at dusk. She braids her grandmother’s hair with an antique comb. She works as an ecologist at the university. She wears long flowing tunics with bright cotton pants. She has never taken a dance class, but she moves with an unstudied grace, sensitive to the edge where her body meets the air.

Devotion balances periods of great stillness with times of movement and exuberance. She has prayed in many temples and seen evidence of God in unlikely places. She keeps a postcard of Saint Francis above her desk. A Yemenite amulet hangs in her window. Always she remembers to honor the Mother.

I have lived with uncertainty for a long time. I had thought ours would have been a much briefer affair. I had no idea how intimate we’d become until you showed up.

And now you are asking me to leave him, and there are a few things I need to know. Who are you? What are your motives? Can I trust you? Is it really me you want to spend more time with or Uncertainty you yearn to visit?

Power made me a coat. For a long time I kept it in the back of my closet. I didn’t like to wear it much, but I always took good care of it. When I first started wearing it again, it smelled like mothballs. As I wore it more, it started fitting better, and stopped smelling like mothballs.

I was afraid if I wore the coat too much someone would want to take it or else I would accidentally leave it in the dojo dressing room. But it has my name on the label now, and it doesn’t really fit anyone else. When people ask me where I found such a becoming garment, I tell them about the tailor, Power, who knows how to make coats that you grow into. First, you much find the courage to approach him and ask him to make your coat. Then, you must find patience inside yourself to wear the coat until it fits.

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“If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.” — Woody Allen

So, what *is* his or her or its excuse?

You’re an investigative reporter — here, in the future, in the afterworld? — and you’ve tracked down Earth’s god. Was creation of the Earth a cosmic joke? Was it a child’s experiment? Was it a project the creator forgot about? Or can love and war and compassion and tragedy all be logically explained (though perhaps not exactly in a way the denizens of Earth might appreciate!)?

Did the project turn out as God expected? What surprised him or her and why?

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Sleep talking. No one could make this stuff up. And you don’t need to! The Sleep Talkin’ Man’s wife’s is taping what he says each night and transcribing the good parts. (There are a few sound bites too.)

I’ll let you take it where you will. Some of the lines could make for a very forthright character ;-) Some of the more cryptic lines might be prophetic. Or perhaps he’s a spy and he wants to tell his wife what’s going on but his spy training only allows it to come out coded in his sleep. Or …?

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One more! (I think ;-)

You’re a detective in the world that inspired fairy tales. Whether you preserve the medieval elements of the society or modernize it or cartoonize it is up to you. Dragons can be dragons or dictators and pigs could be anthropomorphic pigs or kids of local politicians ;-)

Pick a fairy tale and investigate the happenings: at the beginning as they unfold, in the middle or after the fact. Maybe the situation is nothing like was depicted in the fairy tale. Maybe Cinderella was the wicked one. Maybe Rapunzel was mad and locked away for everyone’s safety. Maybe Snow White was a seductress who was kicked out of the castle but the royals want that kept hush hush.

The fairy tale list (and links to other lists) is at Fairy Tales, and a random picker at Tale of Two Tales.

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When you’re done, here are some examples of the fairy tale and detective story combinations:

The Fairy Tale Detectives (The Sisters Grimm series) — Grades 4-6

Max Hamm, Fairy Tale Detective - a Golden Book format, but for grades 8 and up

Jack Milton: Fairy Tale Detective — an 18 min short film. (Some PG-13 content.)

Grimm Fairy Tales — Not for kids and not a detective, but they are some dark turns on fairy tales

Once Upon a Crime — Popular mystery writers re-imagine some fairy tales with some twisted results.

Bill Willingham’s Fables series — the legendary folk were forced out of their land and live disguised in New York city in a luxury apartment building. Then Snow White’s party-girl sister, Rose Red, is murdered.

A couple of list thats includes some detective fairy tales (some already mentioned): Graphic Novels and Fairy Tale Detectives.

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Combine two fairy tales. (Yes, I’m on a fairy tale kick :-)

I couldn’t get the generator to work here, but it works fine a Blogspot, Tale of two tales.

Stretch yourself and pick the first pair that you recognize. Or keep clicking until you feel a spark. (The generator uses these 30 Fairy tales which are mostly Western (and ones I am familiar with). There are more extensive lists of tales linked there also.)

There’s a good list of crossover fairy tales at the Sur La Lune board post Fairy tale crossovers?

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List 30 ways to use a chair. (You may use the pictured chair or one or several from your imagination.)

It can be the sweet, funny, unusual purposes a single chair has been used throughout its life. Perhaps a poem?

It can be a brainstorming session of unexpected uses for chairs (altering or destroying them as you wish.)

Or it can be part of one of the collaborative public arts projects where artists are given the exact same statue and painted, sculpted, added to them to come up with 100 unique designs. (Like Pittsburgh’s DinoMite dinosaurs, New Mexico’s Trail of Painted Ponies, other similar city arts projects around the world mentioned in Wikipedia’s CowParade article.)

Write an email or series of emails from one fairy tale character to another after the big event of the story.
For example:

To: Cinderella
From: Your Stepsister
Date: After the Wedding

To: Mom
From: Your Little Pig

To: Little Red Riding Hood
From: Your Mother

To: The Seven Dwarfs
From: Snow White

To: Jack
From: The Giant

There’s a list of familiar Fairy Tales and links to more extensive lists.

The photographs are from the Fallen Princesses series by Dina Goldstein. (It took a while for it to load for me.)

(Idea from Storybook Memos.)

Pick two sets of your favorite characters (your own or other people’s). Put them on Family Feud. Come up with the questions then come up with the answers those characters would give for that category.

Never seen Family Feud? There’s an episode of Celebrity Family Feud on line so you can see the format. (There’s a commercial, but that’s what makes it free :-)

The goal on the show isn’t to guess the right answer but to guess the most popular answers as given by audience poll. For this exercise questions about ordinary life might be the most amusing, like “What is the first thing you do in the morning?” “What’s a child’s favorite toy?” Your characters’ ideas of what ordinary people do will be based on their own ideas of ordinary or their warped idea of what ordinary peons are like ;-)

This would lend itself well to a comic strip or book format (using images from the internet if you’re leery of your drawing skills). You could use Power Point (or the Mac-equivalent Keynote) to create a click from panel to panel comic.

If you enjoy the comics format, there are several commercial and free products to help you create comics.

• Comic Life Deluxe: Comic Strip, Comic Book Creator (Mac) (which can create comics from images) looks really cool. Amazon has some other choices too.
• CNET has several freebies and free trials to download. (I’ve used them a lot over the years. They’re safe and virus free.)
• Googling “make your own comics” brings up a lot of online options like Make Beliefs Comix that was mentioned here a while ago.

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With all the children in the world needing toys on Christmas, the job of Santa’s elf is strained past the breaking point. The hours have expanded, there’s no time to repair the workshop, there hasn’t been a pay raise in years, and the only time off is Christmas Eve when Santa’s away.

Create a help wanted ad for the position of Santa’s elf. Job seekers will want to know about responsibilities, job requirements, hours, compensation, benefits. You need all your creative writing skills to make this sound enticing.

Excellent. But then one of Santa’s disgruntled ex-elves hacks into the ad and inserts commentary …

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Choose one of the following homophone sets and write a microfiction (under 100 words). In this case your microfiction must include a setting, character or characters, conflict (a want blocked by an obstacle), and resolution. (If you want an additional challenge — or to help limit the possibilities — make it about winter or the holiday season.)

bare/bear
chord/cord
peak/peek/pique
rain/reign/rein
pore/pour
faze/phase
wet/whet
flair/flare
plain/plane

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