I have a video bird feeder open in my browser. It is 4:45 a.m. and still dark, but I’m hoping to see a deer or an opossum. Birds won’t show up until after 7:00 a.m.

I’m having a lungo, an espresso-based drink. So, I’m wired even though I didn’t sleep well. I am sleepy and buzzed. It’s an odd feeling.

I’m streaming music on Spotify, but I can’t decide between my playlist “High Energy ’80s and Beyond” and some Perry Como.

Oh, wait. Michael Sembello’s song, “Maniac” (from Flashdance) is on. I have the lyrics window open, “Cold, kinetic heat.” Huh. I always thought it was coconetic key, which I never understood. Totally makes sense now.

Read more

When I write speeches, I write for the ear as well as the mind. I tell people I write theater, not speeches. After all, the speaker is not reading a white paper. T…

Read more

Dr. Zaius had allowed them to escape down the coastline into the unknown. An average writer would have just allowed Taylor and Nova to proverbially ride off into the sunset onto some new adventure. They would be Adam and Eve-type characters rebuilding human society, like at the end of Anthem by Ayn Rand. Or not. That’s the thing with the unknown. You just don’t know. Well, if you don’t count the four sequels.

The writer, however, chooses to give it a serious twist.

421 THE STRANGE FORMATION - AS SEEN BY TAYLOR

An immense column juts from the beach at a thirty-degree angle. We can now see that it is not rock, but metal. Green metallic tints show through its gray salt-stained surface. As we draw closer, the object takes on the appearance of a massive arm, its top shaped like a hand holding a torch.

If you’ve seen the movie, there’s no surprise in what they’re seeing. For the audience, however, it was an unexpected visual. That audience could only understand things frame-by-frame, in step with Taylor and Nova.

In fact, Nova had no idea what the Statue of Liberty was all about. Taylor knew it by sight and by name, as well as its significance. It wasn’t part of her history. Those days were long forgotten generations long ago.

422 REVERSE ANGLE - FAVORING TAYLOR

Frowning with consternation. His horse proceeds at a slow walk.

423 TRACKING WITH TAYLOR - WHAT HE SEES:

Near the base of the column, where the shore and water meet, are a row

of metal spikes. From this angle they look like tank traps.

Taylor is trying to process what he’s seeing. He’s not predicting what will be implausible yet possible. He’s trying to predict the plausible.

What is plausible?

The entire movie was about him adjusting to being thrown into a time two millennia after the one he was born in. Everything that wasn’t plausible was true: apes ran society, humans were caged, and all of human history was essentially forgotten.

A-423 CLOSER - TAYLOR

Dumbfounded, he slides from his saddle, approaches the spikes. Nova dismounts and follows him.

TAYLOR

(a cry of agony)

My God!

He falls to his knees, buries his head in his hands. CAMERA SLOWLY DRAWS BACK AND UP to a HIGH ANGLE SHOT disclosing what Taylor has found. Half-buried in the sand and washed by the waves is the Statue of Liberty.

The big reveal. Who expected the Statue of Liberty? Nobody in the theaters thought that in 1968, that’s for sure. I certainly didn’t when I was 7 years old watching it on Channel 2 in Chicago. As a second grader, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the scene. The Statue of Liberty represents so many things that it was the perfect choice for the writer. Taylor and Nova could have gone with some other iconic landmark that is close or en route to the ocean, like the Empire State Building or the Golden Gate Bridge. None of them carries the symbolic weight, however, that the Statue of Liberty does.

For Taylor, there were some added components to the symbolism. It represented freedom from the apes, but he was still trapped in this time. Freedom is complicated.

Visually, it’s a fairly simple scene. In the greater context of the movie, the audience is surprised.

Spaceships were relatively new to us then. Comic books talked about them, but we wouldn’t actually walk on the moon until 1969. We didn’t know what really happens when someone goes into space and we certainly didn’t know what going into space under the context that the 4 astronauts did at the beginning of the movie.

It’s more than deus ex machina. Literally translated as “god from the machine,” the phrase refers to a plot device where a seemingly unsolvable problem is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. That’s not what happened in Planet of the Apes.

The world the astronauts left in 1972 was the same one you know (more or less, as this is a fictionalized version). When they landed, humans were subjugated and dominated in 3978. A lot had happened in 2,006 years.

When we think about the plausibility of the scene, we know that the astronauts landed in the water somewhere. The specifics are left a mystery by the writer in order to set up for the big ending. However, whatever happened that led to the current circumstances must have been catastrophic. Moreover, whatever was left of the human civilization had fallen into archeological ruin. We already know Cornelius had archeological remains of a non-ape civilization.

That Taylor and Nova would find this was implausible but not impossible.

My favorite books and movies are the ones in which I cannot predict what is happening. I want to be surprised. I want the writer to feel challenged not to have taken the predictable route, riding off into the sunset, but to show me something that fits better.

I don’t mean stories that rely on red herrings or those where the writer intentionally fools me. I mean where the writer creates an impossible situation that seems to have no resolution, but then the writer creates the perfect resolution where all things come together not in a ridiculous way, but a satisfying one.

Books

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie — Christie’s masterpiece. She expertly navigates many whodunnits, but this one takes it to another level. It remains satisfying because it adheres strictly to the "fair play" rule of detective fiction—all the clues are present, yet the identity of the killer remains elusive until the epilogue.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier — While it begins as a traditional Gothic romance, the narrative shifts when the truth about the title character, the deceased Rebecca, is revealed. It upends the “haunted by a saint” trope in favor of a much darker reality.

Movies

Psycho — Alfred Hitchcock famously mandated that no one be let into the theater after the movie started. Why? To take them somewhere other than expected. It kills off its “main” character (the decoy protagonist) only 47 minutes into the film, forcing the audience to restart the story with a new lead.

The Sixth Sense — Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment in prime form. Once the truth about Malcolm Crowe (Willis) is revealed, the satisfaction comes from realizing that every previous scene was carefully constructed to hide the truth in plain sight. M. Night Shyamalan brilliantly wrote himself into a situation that seemed to have no resolution.

What Now?

Take the risk. Create a story in which the characters don’t seem to have a fix to their problem… then, fix it in a way no one expects.

It has to be unexpected, but not impossible.

Four Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward into writing yourself out of a corner.

A research expedition discovers a perfectly preserved, 18th-century clockwork automaton buried in a layer of Antarctic ice that has been sealed for 30 million years. Upon being thawed, the machine begins ticking and uses its internal brass cylinders to accurately transcribe the private thoughts of the lead scientist in real-time. The protagonist realizes the machine is not recording his mind, but is actually a physical manifestation of the script the scientist is currently trapped within. To stop the machine from revealing a fatal secret in the next sentence, he must find a way to break the internal gears without using any action that a writer could describe in text.

A Not Funny Joke

Two chimpanzees were sitting in a clearing, hunched over a well-worn copy of War and Peace.

One chimpanzee turned to the other and asked, “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”

The second chimpanzee looked up from the page and replied, “It’s a tragedy. He hasn’t mentioned a single banana in 1,200 pages.”

Is that you?

Or are you the parent who tries to squeeze in 30-minutes of writing after the kids have gone to bed and your spouse has come back from the grocery store.

Writers have a distinct freedom all other art forms do not: We only need a computer. Sure, you could be like Legal Pad Scooby. Or like the accountant who has a fantasy novel in her. Or the high school baseball coach who has a great novel idea about a dance troupe.

Check out these writers who worked completely outside of that of a professional writer and are now part of the canon. I’m listing more than a token few because I want you to see the range of writers and their jobs. You could be on this list, no matter what you do for a living.

• Agatha Christie, pharmacy assistant and nurse

• Anne Rice, insurance claims examiner

• Bram Stoker, business manager for a theater

• Charles Bukowski, postal clerk

• Charlotte Brontë, governess and teacher

• Franz Kafka, insurance officer

• Harper Lee, airline reservation agent

• Herman Melville, customs inspector

• Lewis Carroll, mathematics lecturer

• Louisa May Alcott, civil war nurse, laundress, seamstress

• Margaret Atwood, barista

• Maya Angelou, streetcar conductor, cook, dancer

• Octavia Butler, potato chip inspector, dishwasher, telemarketer

• T.S. Eliot, banker

• Wallace Stevens, insurance executive

• William Carlos Williams, pediatrician

• Zora Neale Hurston, anthropologist

I said that all we need is a computer. That’s not true. We also need that idea that needs to be written. We need time and a willingness to use that time to write.

When William Carlos Williams wrote poetry, he treated neighborhood children as a pediatrician. “The Red Wheelbarrow” only has 16 words and no punctuation, and yet, it nails how important a humble farm tool is.

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white chickens 

You might say, “Sure, Williams started as a doctor, but he wrote full time after that.” Nope. He stayed a doctor. Maybe that's because being a pediatrician paid better than being a poet. To paraphrase Steve Martin, “Nobody ever says, ‘Look, there goes the poet in his new Lamborghini!’”

Or he loved helping children. That’s good too.

The poem was published in 1923 as part of his collection Spring and All. In 1924, he became the chief of pediatrics at Passaic General Hospital. That’s about as real of a job as it gets. He worked hard. He retired in 1951 only because of the result of a stroke.

Persona

It’s not just about the job. It’s also about persona. Legal Pad Scooby projects a neo-bohemian affectation. He represents the stereotype of a coffeehouse poet.

I once exchanged several emails with Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, and had a net worth of $60 million when she died in 2021. Nothing in her email said, “I’m a rich, famous, and occasional controversial writer.” She came off as a human being, authentic, and modestly confident. She even had at least one typo. I’m sure she knew receiving emails from her was a thrill for another writer, but she never showed it.

No Just About New York

It used to be if you wanted to publish The Great American Novel, Your book needed to find its way to New York City. This is because the publishers were there and with the publishers, the agents. Publishers did exist in other major cities, but NYC was for authors what Hollywood is for actors (though Atlanta and Mumbai have nicked heavily into that).

It’s true that New York is still a key place for publishers, but someone living in Ankeny, Iowa can still be published without ever leaving home.

The" “Big Five” publishers: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan—they are all in New York. You need find an agent who can live anywhere in the world. The traditional gatekeeping has leveled out. You do need find them, but there a combination of online and print resources they can send you in the right direction.

If you find that agent, it’s just a matter either emailing them or uploading your file to their website.

Sourcebooks, a strong outlier publisher, is based in a suburb just outside of Chicago. And like the rest, you can reach them through an agent.

That’s just six publishers. There are another 10 to 15 major publishers out there. Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and W.W. Norton & Company, just for starters.

Break it down to the next level, and there are 400-600 mid sized publishers in the US. It depends how you count. If you are a reader, you’ve got their books on your shelf. Graywolf Press, Chronicle Books, Grove Atlantic, Algonquin Books, and Milkweed Edition, and so on. Add in micro-presses, and you can and maybe another 100,000. Yowza!

But wait! There’s more!

You’ve got the small presses as well. Well over 3,000 of those. That’s not counting the small presses which are functionally self publishing entities, like my own Tree Fort Books. Which brings us to…

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing used to be the realm of vanity publishing. It still can be, but it’s also become a legitimate part of the publishing world. They account for over two million new titles annually. And that’s just the ones with ISBNs. When you use Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), You can add in another couple of million titles.

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to best practices, but you can easily publishing using KDP.

How easy? Got Microsoft Word? That easy.

All you need to do is upload the file, and fill out a form. You’ll need a cover for your book, but that's easy enough to manage as well.

Making it excellent is not as easy, and convincing other people to buy it is a lot more work than some people realize. Be sure to do your homework to understand the pros and cons of self-pubbing. You want to look into the real costs, like editors, designers, and marketing.

But it is available to you and plenty of people have made careers out of publishing their own books.

So What?

The so what is that no matter who you are, you can write. Whatever you do for a living, whether you wear skinny jeans or a sun dress or a double breasted suit, whether you drink coffee, tea, or milk, whether you live in New York City or tiny town USA, whether you are making $20,000 or $200,000 a year, whether you are someone famous or someone unknown, whether you… whether anything. You can do it.

Two Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward.

A single mother balances her shifts at the diner and the warehouse while scribbling plot points on the backs of discarded receipts. She discovers that the stories she writes in the breakroom begin to appear as headline news the very next morning.

A Not Funny Joke

The Novelist’s Coffee Shop: A writer spent six hours at a local café today. He managed to delete three commas and change a “the” to an “a.” He calls it a highly productive Tuesday.

In writing, hyperbole is a figure of speech that uses intentional and obvious exaggeration to emphasize a point, evoke strong feelings, or create a strong impression. It is not intended to be taken literally by the reader.

That sounds too academic. Let’s try it again.

Think of hyperbole as the “drama queen” of writing. It’s when a writer tells a massive, over-the-top lie to help the reader understand a very simple truth.

That’s about right.

No, It really isn’t the greatest invention the history of mankind. That would be the coffee maker. Anyone who’s had a cup of coffee today knows that is not hyperbole, but absolute truth.

It is a strange thing to say something so clearly untrue for the sake of helping the reader see, in a sense, the opposite.

I use hyperbole in speeches for the same reasons.

Examples

“I have no wind, if you want to know the truth. I’m quite a heavy smoker, for one thing—that is, I used to be. They made me quit. I smoked about five million cigarettes a month.”
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)

“A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.”
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (1876)

“A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County.”
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

"The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums."
Babe: The Gallant Pig by Dick King-Smith (1983)

Why It Works

Hyperbole creates contrast in the midst of a truth. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, smoked in excess, and that’s the truth he’s trying to impart. Did he smoke on average 161,290 cigarettes a day? No one thinks that. How many? That’s where it gets complicated.

When we use hyperbole, we fall into a kind of relativism. The reader imagines what counts as excess. I’m a non-smoker and always have been. I grew up in a home with two smoking parents. I endured a lot of second-hand smoke. For me, what counts as excess is lower than, say, what a pack a day smoker might think. They smoke 20 cigarettes a day for them, their starting point. What counts as excess must be significantly beyond 20 accordingly.

In the case of Holden Caulfield, his life was in extremes.

When the narrator in Babe: The Gallant Pig says, “The constant dripping of the rain... sounded like a million little drums,” It wasn't about extremes. It was about the poetics. The sensory feeling of rain dripping is both a matter of sound and feeling. The reader sense either, but the narrator is leading us to feel so much rain that were soaked and that the dripping so constantly that it’s just a wall of sound.

In both cases, it's about contrast, relativity and sameness.

Through exaggeration we can see how it's different than normal, whatever we define as normal, how same it is compared to our expectations.

Shock Me (and more)

They offer a little shock, causing the reader to think through what’s actually being said.

They also offer a chance to turn a phrase. Mark Twain writes, “A day was twenty-four hours long; but it seemed as if it would never end.” Anyone counting the hours recognizes it's already a long day. Most of us sleep through one third of it. How could be longer? Twain manages to get us to feel that length.

The Beatles sang,

Eight days a week
I love you.
Eight days a week
Is not enough to show I care.

Like Twain, they’ve exaggerated using days. They've added one. Just one. The singer is trying to declare how in love he is. An ordinary full day wasn't enough. As evidenced by the lyrics, eight days was not enough to get the job done either.

I Gotta Be Me

I grew up right next to Chicago. We have a particular way of speaking. Hyperboles are just part of the common parlance. Maybe some of these are used where you live as well.

• "The Kennedy is a parking lot."

• "The Bears haven't had a quarterback in a century."

• "They put a mountain of giardiniera on this."

• "It’s a thousand degrees below zero."

• "I’ve been looking for a parking spot since 1995."

• "I’ve been on the Red Line for an eternity."

When you are trying to write an authentic character, it's important to consider where they are from. Should you include the language the local people speak? It's important to the demographics correctly. People on the South side speak differently than on the north. Different things are important to them. Likewise, what's their socioeconomic status? Are they part of the University of Chicago World, or did they live closer to Marquette Park?

As you do, you'll want to avoid using too many of them so that it sounds like you're making them into a cartoon character like the SNL Superfans.

Be Funny

Humor isn’t always about the wit or one-liner. Colloquial phrasings are a great way to bring this in.

Think about the tall tales. How big was Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox, Babe? It was “a beast so large that it took two men to see across one of his tracks.” That’s the take of Will H. Dilg, The DeKalb Daily Chronicle, 1925.

It isn’t merely that the writer wants the reader to imagine an ox that is especially large, but that it's ridiculously large.

Another writer, James MacGillivray, in 1906 tells us, between Babe’s horns, it measured "forty-two ax-handles and a plug of tobacco" (Oscoda Press). Using the unorthodox measuring tools makes sense because we're talking about lumberjacks, but adding the plug of tobacco just takes it another level. Let's not forget that the ox happens to be blue.

Paul Bunyan himself was so large that he used a Douglas Fir tree as a comb. Not just any fir tree. A Douglas fir tree.

A Little Dab'll Do Ya!

Do you remember the 1953 commercial for Brylcreem?

Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya,
Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair.
Brylcreem, the gals'll all pursue ya;
They'll love to run their fingers through your hair!

You didn't a lot. You need it just enough to get the job done, and all the gals apparently would come running. The commercial naturally didn't tell you what would happen if you used a big glop of it.

It's the same thing with hyperboles.

Don't overdo it. You might find yourself laughing at your own work, but it's easy to exhaust the reader. You've got to ground your story with otherwise believable characters and contexts. If everything is hyperbole, then nothing is normal. If nothing is normal, hyperbole becomes normal. That's not good writing.

Think about your colorful characters and the things they say. Add a dash of hyperbole. Maybe two or three, maybe more depending on how long the story is.

Two Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward, hyperbolically speaking.

The boy carried a stack of books so tall that it scraped the very clouds and made the moon jealous. He walked for a billion years just to find a single quiet spot where the silence was louder than a heavy metal concert.

A Not Funny Joke

Q: Why did the writer cross the road?

A: She was in the middle of a brutal essay revision, so she crossed the street to reorganize her spice rack, volunteer at the local animal shelter, and research the entire history of the 1904 World’s Fair.

Something happens. That’s a story. Let’s not make this too complicated.

For something to happen, something must be doing the happening. That’s the subject of the story. What is happening is where we find conflict and resolution.

That’s most of the story right there.

Then we’ve got to consider characters, setting, and all those other things you learned in eighth grade.

Without something happening, nothing, um, happens. You might have created an atmosphere, tension, or a vibe. But not a story.

I generally follow what’s called Freytag’s Pyramid. No, I don’t know who Freytag was. You can read about him on Wikipedia. This guy. You can see in the photo that he looks so smart and stately that we’ve got to believe him.

We’ve got a couple of other structures you can think through and I’ll address them in subsequent articles: Three-Act Structure, The Hero’s Journey, Fichtean Curve. It’s not a right or wrong scenario. Once you know them, you’ll choose the one that makes sense both intuitively and on a craft level.

Back to Gustav Freytag, or, more importantly, his famous pyramid. It’s excellent for classical tragedies, linear moral fables, and traditional short stories.

• Exposition

• Rising Action

• Climax

• Falling Action

• Resolution (also known as the Dénouement)

I know, I know, it’s not really a pyramid. I think it should be presented more like a bell curve, but in textbooks it is drawn like a teepee. We didn’t call that when I was in grade school. We just called it the structure of a story.

Let me dig a little bit into what each category does.

Exposition

This is where you set things up. Where is the story happening? That’s both a general question and a specific question.

Think about the Andy Griffith Show (TAGS to hardcore fans). Is the story happening in Mayberry? Is it happening in the building where Andy works with Barney? Is it very specifically happening around Andy’s desk?

As you tell more of the story, the reader will learn that it’s in the American Southeast in a small town. The reader won’t know much about Mayberry, but he will know that, and that’s the only important thing. Whether Mayberry is in Georgia, South Carolina, or elsewhere doesn’t matter.

That context should include some sensory descriptions. Is it dusty? Can I hear the clanking of Otis locking himself in the jail cell? Is there a quiet echo to the otherwise empty room? Imagine this is in your book and not on television. You would need to describe the simplicity of the jail cells, the color of Andy’s desk, and the way the light shines on the floor. This helps readers be in the room themselves.

You bring out a couple of characters and help us understand how they’re different and why they initially matter.

And this story, maybe you’ve got Andy, Barney, Otis (the town drunk), and then Opie walks in for a quick exchange before leaving.

We already caught a little bit about Otis as he locked himself into the cell. He’s a disheveled man in need of a shave and a toothbrush, and probably a cure for a forthcoming hangover.

You need some clues so the reader can learn about Barney. Part of his success as a character was how he fumbled through his job full of earnest and thorough incompleteness. He wanted to do his job well, but he wasn’t very good at it at all. His character would need descriptions because physical comedy was part of his thing. His clothes didn’t quite fit, as he was gangly. You would need to show me how awkward and overbearing he was. There’s a lot to describe about Barney, and there’s a lot to describe about every other character in Mayberry. Mayberry is character-driven, and if you were writing the story as a book, you could have a field day.

Rising Action

We’re getting some cues to what might be happening. Foreshadowing is worked in here as it would be also in the initial section. Some little stuff might be happening.

Maybe Barney is telling Andy about an Inspector who is coming soon. He’s panicking as he knows the sheriff takes things casually. After all, it’s in Mayberry and Otis and Ernest T. Bass are the hardest criminals they’ve got.

With the rising action, the author moves things around to create a problem for the protagonists. To clear the way, something needs to change. Is a mobster coming into town? Is Aunt Bee going away for the weekend? Whatever is going to happen hasn’t happened yet, but the pieces are in place.

For example, in the story about inspection, we find out that Andy’s friend, the inspector, isn’t coming at all. Another inspector is coming who might not be quite as friendly. Andy, who previously considered the situation nonchalantly, is now understandably concerned.

The inspector finds out that the filing system is a mess. The jail cells are unlocked. Andy lacks modern equipment. Barney tries to impress the inspector. He overdoes it, as he always does. It goes on and on.

Climax

There’s lots of action in a climax, whenever what is happening is happening.

What is happening is that a man who Andy once sent to prison comes back to Mayberry. The inspector is expecting a violent confrontation. Andy’s folksy approach is facing a big test against the inspector’s “by-the-book” fear of criminals.

Falling Action

Things are still going on after the big test. The climax is no longer a threat but its effects remain. You can see the consequences of the big event even though everything is not yet tied into a tidy bow. This is where the inspector finds out Andy is the best sheriff for Mayberry. Andy confronts a crisis situation effectively but never strays from his easy-going persona.

He greets the man with respect and in return, the ex-offender likewise offers respect. There’s no shootout. No big arrest. The man just came to thank Andy for the fair treatment he received during his previous arrest. He also wants to tell Andy that he’s turned his life around.

Resolution (Dénouement)

A dénouement is the fancy French loanword term English majors learn for what is simply the resolution. When writers get together, we break out our Scrabble-champ vocabularies, even if we probably pronounce the French word incorrectly.

This can be a brief scene that involves a cowboy kissing his girl before riding off into the sunset. It could be a big dance scene. It could be where characters give their final goodbye to a hero who might have died to save the world, like what we saw in Avengers: Endgame.

In the case of this Andy Griffith episode, the inspector recognizes Andy might not follow any manual, but he is extraordinarily effective. He realizes Mayberry’s sheriff has the respect of the town, which is maintained through relationships and his good character.

He decides not to file a harsh report, and Andy and Barney go back to their usual routine.

Nip It in the Bud!

It’s good to know this basic structure. It’ll cover a lot of shorter pieces of writing and is worth keeping in your intellectual back pocket.

As you plan your story (more on this in a later article), you can see any likely plot problems before you write one word. Your story will have a better structure as a result while minimizing problems.

You can, as Barney Fife was apt to say, “Nip it in the bud!”

Two Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward.

The local sheriff finds a rusted 1950s sedan unearthed by a flash flood, its engine still warm despite the vehicle being reported missing since 1964. Inside the glovebox, a handwritten note dated tomorrow warns the town to evacuate before the sun sets.

A Not-Funny Joke

Ellipsis... “I have run out of ideas and hope you'll finish the sentence for me.”

For a moment, I must admit, I thought no one would show. But here you are.

I suspect you love books, and, perhaps, you’re a writer. Those are the best sorts of people, aren’t they? Well, not all writers. Some are nitwits who like writing mediocre stories. Not you, though. Certainly not me. We’re the good kind, the kind with fantastic ideas, who want to write great books.

The adventure we’re on is about writing, what’s good to read, and how to get it all done. Join us.

Anyone who tells you writing is easy has probably never done it. There’s coming up with an idea, working out the plot, writing it, and then, editing. Of course, a writer isn’t done yet. Getting it published opens up a big door into a new, colorful world. Then, you’ve got to help sell the thing. Hmm… and then you need to write the next one.

That’s OK. You’ve got lots of ideas. So do I. I’ve written a few of mine down. With over two decades as a professional speechwriter behind me, I know a little about what works and what doesn’t (and what could). I also know a kick in the pants can help.

I’m going to cover the practical aspects of writing. What makes a story a story, how to use metaphor and simile, when to use hyperbole, and the importance of outlining. From time to time, I’ll invite you to share your work, then pick a member’s story to discuss how it can be made even stronger.

I’ll use examples from popular culture and classic literature to show you how the greats do it.

We’ll get into the discipline side of things as well. Until you write it, it isn’t written.

Writing often happens alone, whether we are in a café, a library, or at our kitchen table. I want to make sure you have the right tools. While many of my articles are free, a paid subscription includes access to the full archive of lessons on voice and structure (and the rest). You will also receive guides on the mechanics of storytelling. Paid subscribers can participate in the comments and join the private subscriber chat. This support allows the publication to remain independent. For residents of the United States, a Founding Member subscription includes a choice of one of my books (and my heartfelt thanks).

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Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (the original book, not the movie) had a pair of silver shoes she acquired when the Wicked Witch of the East turned to dust. With a quick click, Dorothy could go wherever she liked. You have your keyboard or your pad of paper. You can go wherever you like. All you need to do is click.

That’s what I’m going to help you do. I’m going to encourage you to get it done. I hope my experience will help you.

Four Sentence Story Prompt

Here’s a quick prompt to push you forward.

Julian sat before the typewriter, where the blank page glared back with the clinical coldness of an interrogation lamp. A layer of dust had formed over his forgotten coffee, and the dish of almonds remained untouched as the only witnesses to his three-hour paralysis. Beside him, his phone lay face down, its muffled vibrations indicating that the person he was hiding from had finally traced his location. If Julian did not finish this chapter by dawn, the secrets he was currently transcribing would no longer be considered fiction.

A Not Funny Joke

Git-R-Done: A novelist spent years writing a book about a character who struggled with procrastination. After missing every deadline, the writer finally sent the manuscript to an editor. The editor returned the work immediately with a note saying the ending was missing. The writer replied that the ending is scheduled for completion in three to five years.

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