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Today’s writing prompt is a picture of a sunhat, a journal and a handful of pansies laying together on a garden bench. Your assignment is to think about what kind of character might have left the items on the garden bench. Why would they have left them laying there? Do the hat and journal belong to a mother and the pansies were brought to her by her little girl? Why would they have left the items behind when they left?

What about the journal?  What might it be about?  What secrets does it hold?  Confessions of an affair? The struggles of a mother who’s child is disabled?  A young widow’s writing through her grief?  What if someone found the items and read the journal, what might they find in it?

Maybe a young man finds the journal of a widow left behind in a city park and falls in love with her through her writing.  Perhaps a husband finds his wife’s diary in the back yard and discovers she has had an affair, or knows about his affair.  Could it be the journal of the mother of a handicapped child and is found by a young woman who is facing the possibility of having a disabled child?  How would what the journal contains change the person who reads it?

I think by now you have probably got more than enough to get you started plotting, so I’ll let you get at it.  Have fun writing.

Today’s prompt is based on a picture by Sueanna at SXC.hu

As I get the Daily Writing Prompt back up and going, I am going to be making some modifications that will let me do better at keeping the site organized and updated on a daily basis.  I’m still working on the finalized version, so stay tuned and I will get that all ironed out as soon as I possibly can.  Thank you.

Gas prices have everyone thinking about ways to cut back on driving, so I figured that I would offer up gas saving tips as a prompt for today.  There are a lot of different ways to save gas and just about any market can have tips for ways to save gas targeted to it.  For example:

Business - ways to save gas when you need to drive for business, commuting tips, how to save gas as a delivery driver, is carpool or bus better…

Travel - gas saving destinations, saving gas by careful map planning, how to find the cheapest gas when traveling…

Writing - mail pickup instead of driving to the post office, save gas when writing a travel article, gas saving strategies for research and interviews…

Health - walking to save on gas, cost of gym membership and gas vs buying your own equipment for at home use…

I’m sure that you can think of a few ideas for your own market segment.  Try writing down your target market on a sheet of paper and doing a few cluster exercises to find ideas for how to save gas in that market.

I have been taking an online writing course, so I figured I would share information on it with my readers. The course I am taking is Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways.  So far I am just starting to enter into week five of the course, and I am still very excited about the things that I am learning from it.   I’m hearing thunder, so I am not posting more at the moment about it, but will get back to the course later on.  Right now I need to shut the computer down before the storm gets here.

Chaos caused this blog, unfortunately, to be one of many that I have been lax in keeping updated.  I think I have things, if not less chaotic, at least more organized now, so I am making the commitment once again to try and get out here once a day with a writing prompt.  Thank you all for your patience.

Since I am here now, how about tossing a little chaos out as a prompt for today?  Do something unexpected and chaotic in your story.  Give your hero a reason to pause or make something totally unexpected cause them to not be able to go and do what they were about to go do for a little while.  Don’t go tossing in a Dues Ex Machina, just rattle things with a little sprinkling of natural every day chaos.  I’ll leave it up to you to think up what that might mean in the context of your story.