Quickly, Quickly - writercize #AtoZChallenge 3.17

Please note: writercize (a portmanteau of write and exercise with a z for ... a twist? fun? street cred?) is participating in the A to Z Challenge through the month of April with alphabetical writing prompts. I'm skipping the stories behind the prompts so you can spend more time practicing and less time reading! Please participate, and enjoy!

writercize: Set a timer for two minutes and free write as quickly as you can. No punctuation, grammar, rules, story. 

This is a great way to free the mind and release your brain to prepare for a day of writing or business ... or to wind down after a long day and transition back into home life.

I love reading your comments and especially your writercize results, so please, drop me a line to let me know if this worked for you! Better yet, share your attempt with the world in your comment!

 

And, if you let me know you stopped by, I will be sure to pay you a visit as soon as I am able!

Click "read more" for writercizer sample response.

Just Joking Around - writercize #179 #AtoZChallenge

Why'd the guitarist cross the park? To get to the other slide!

One day a rope walked into a bar. He moseyed on up to the bar and took a seat.

"Bartender, I'd like a drink."

"I'm sorry sir, but we don't serve rope at this here bar."

The rope slid off his chair and slithered right back out of the bar.

He turned the corner and tied himself in a bow, scraping up his ends in the process, then marched right back into the bar.

He sidled on up to the bar and and took that seat."

"Bartender, I'd like a drink."

Irritated now, the bartender replies, "I'm sorry, sir, but aren't you that string I just talked to a couple minutes ago?"

"Why no, sir, I'm a frayed knot!"

(a frayed knot = afraid not ... get it??)

Q: What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?

A: I don't know ... and I don't care. 

I wrote one of these and borrowed the others. Can you tell which is which? Mine is definitely the most amateur of the three, in my opinion, but if you are tricked I am honored!

Writing a joke is really hard stuff. I applaud comedic writers and stand-up comedians. Subtle humor sprinkled into a story is a little easier, but a joke is like linguistic slap-stick. It's all about the timing and connection to the audience, and introducing unexpected twists. 

from morguefile.com free images

I googled "how to write a joke" in preparing for this post and discovered there are as many techniques as there are comedians. Probably more, since a few tutorials didn't look very funny. ;) There were, however, a few rules of thumb that popped up across stand up sites.

• Pick a topic.
• Write everything funny you could possibly say about that topic to brainstorm.
• When you start writing the joke, keep it as short as possible. Set up your story in the first two lines.
• Expose truth: what is weird, scary, stupid or hard about a topic? (from Kelly Swanson)
• Make the punchline a surprise.
• Don't try to hard to be funny in the set up. Keep the humor for the punchline.
• When starting out, use tried and true techniques such as blonde jokes, "difference between" jokes, knock knock jokes, chickens who cross roads, three people walk into a bar jokes, crossing unrelated objects, etc.
• Accept that it will need a lot of tweaking to get it right.

Got it? Ok, let's get writercizing!

writercize: Tell me a joke (or two or three). Please be original. 

Extra bonus happy dance points if I laugh out loud!

Good luck! Leave your writercize as a comment, and be sure to leave your URL so I can come visit you!

Click "read more" for a writercizer sample response ... and to reveal the joke above that is indeed a writercize original.

Hey Students and New Writers! Writing Advice - writercize #151

I recently received an e-mail from eCollegeFinder, an onine source to assist students in finding accredited online educational institutions. The e-mail asked for two seemingly simple pieces of information: a blog description and advice for student writers. Each had to be summarized in a mere two to four sentences. Most writers and bloggers could probably go on for days to answer such a question, so it was a task to narrow it down. Talk about precision!

I'd like to share my answer to the second question with all of you, and challenge you to share your best advice for student writers as well! I will be a bit more lenient on the limitation, and expand on mine in the sample response below.

writercize: What advice can you offer students aiming to improve their writing acumen? (I am adding: what advice can you offer beginning writers and bloggers?) 

No worries about the 2-4 sentences; you may expand to a couple of paragraphs or a max of 15 bullet points.

Read "click more" for writercizer sample response, including those extra goodies not included in the original email, and remember to stop in this weekend for the first ever #WeekendWritercize challenge!

Product Review - writercize #148

Now that the holidays are over and the decorations are slowly making their way back into their storage homes, I expect that everyone has had a chance to fully experience all the new gifts of the season. 

I was a very lucky, very spoiled girl this season by my husband and parents, and rounded out the year with a slew of new technology, including the iPad 2 and the Kindle Fire. Needless to say, I'm enjoying world wide access at the tips of my fingers. 

I am also really enjoying a third piece of technology, a gift from my Mom, one that I would not expect to elicit such joy - a vacuum cleaner. Not just any vacuum cleaner, the Mercedes Benz of vacuum cleaners. After years of frustration over a complete lack of suction in my previous upright model purchased at Target, I am thrilled to watch the floor lighten before my eyes and hear the sweet sound of granules of sand from my daughters' preschool get sucked right up out of the carpet fibers. I went to a vacuum cleaner store that sells and services vacuums, and was able to try a couple of models before settling on the beauty you see to your right.

I love it so much, that I have decided to spotlight it in today's writercize, a simple task which allows you to share your product "expertise" with the world, put your voice into the world wide web, work on lingo for marketing or critiques and have the satisfaction of instant online publication.

writercize: Accolades or a scathing review, pick one of your gifts from Christmas or Hannukah and review it online.  

(Hint: Amazon is an easy site to submit a review since they seem to have almost every item known to mankind, but if you can't find the product there, google it and follow one of the links to purchase the product. You'll almost always be able to review a product on a site that sells it.)

Click "read more" for the writercizer sample review about the Miele Titan.

Guest Writercize - Mike Miller - Let the words simmer

I am very excited to introduce you all to Mike Miller, a fellow Group Blogging Experience (#GBE2) participant and a person whose words never fail to make me laugh.  Almost always out loud.  Read this writercize, try it out, enjoy, and visit Mike's blog.  You'll be glad you did.

Now, passing the virtual mic right on over to ... Mike!

Hi Folks,

What say we skip all the writer cizer jazz and just do some good old calisthenics?  No?  Good idea!  Let's sit here and use the old noodle to try and come up with some good literary pasta.  Well I do have something of an idea for this exercise, so here goes:

I'm thinking of a word prompt kind of challenge.  

writercize:  Please pick up the nearest book and turn to page four.  Pick out the noun closest to the upper left corner and use that for the subject of an up and coming sentence.  Page two has the verb, the one you find closest to the upper right corner, and the object is on page three near the lower right corner of the page.  You may be wondering how I know that, but just trust me, I do.

Oh boy.  NOW I look around and find that the closest book to me is the 1996 Physician's Desk Reference!  Here is my sentence, gleaned, as it were, from the corners of the three pages:  Acetaminophen contains doses.  

I am willing to bet that your base sentence will be a lot easier than mine, to turn into a short story.   That's right.  The challenge here is to take your obscure sentence and expand it three times; first from your randomly formed sentence into three coherent full blown sentences based on the idea of the original, and then into a decent tease of a story of one or two paragraphs.  That's only expanded two times?  Right again.  The third time I want you to turn your few paragraphs into a full fledged best selling novel or, as in my case, a medical school textbook.    In each step, it is only an idea derived and descended from your first sentence that must survive.

Now for the kicker, just in case you're still standing:  I want you to think about your primordial sentence for at least one hour before committing your three sentence rewrite to paper or screen. And then please let the ruminating juices flow for another hour or more so the next version of your idea has had time to sprout wings or leaves or fur, or something equally useful.

By the way, there is a point to all this.  I have so often observed that my first idea, while practically genius, can ALWAYS be improved upon.  Sometimes even by me!  Seriously, while I may be quick with the quip, or an inane observation, there have been a million times when I realized later that I could have said  “________”!  Or more to the point here; even after steadily laboring over some article or essay for a long time, I have been struck later by the realization that a major element is fatally flawed,  that I should have taken another approach altogether, or that I killed the hero off in the first paragraph.  Let time pass.  Give the mind a rest.  And then see what comes.

(Mike's sample writercize response below:)

Here's my effort.  And yes, I will heed my own prescription and let an hour pass before expanding on my own medicinal therapeutics.

2:44 PM     

Acetaminophen contains doses.

7:33 PM

The stands are full of excited fans this afternoon.
The trucks and jeeps are lined up, each one full of gas and ready to go the distance.
Enough delight will fly from those big tires today to cover each onlooker with inches of                      mud.
                   

12:20 PM (the next day)

Byron stepped hard on the gas but his bald tires were even worse than he knew.  While a dozen other trucks flew ahead and buried his windshield in their wakes, way overburdening his poor wipers, Byron just slowly slid back and forth, even in the thin mud at the starting line.  A glance out the side window showed him that the hundreds of people in the stands were missing the excitement at the first turn; they were all watching his four tires spin up a thin spray of misty mud, and they were laughing.

But one more glance made everything all right.  It had been a long hard year, and Byron had sadly discovered how disasters pile on.  The furnace died last Winter, the basement flooded in the Spring, and the long hot Summer was full of miscellaneous breakdowns and work lay-offs. He couldn't even afford to replace the AC so his wife had been stuck sweltering in the house, until today.  Byron looked across again, astonished at Minnie's great big smile where she sat in her brand new, mud-covered wheel chair. The sight made even his frustration at having to make the 'right' decision melt away.  Minnie never realized that By had traded in the new tires he bought last year, anticipating this very race, to buy her chair.  And as she watched him continue to glide back and forth, now somehow behind the starting line, and then heard him start to laugh out loud, she knew that while pills of pain may come in regular doses, a good man's love covers all like a flood.

Measures of Importance - writercize #113

How do you tell if a person is important?  

I like to believe that there is equality in the worth and value of all people, but I also am realistic enough to see that it is not the general perception.  Money, status and power can boost a person's "importance" (generally relates directly to influence) in society.

One friend of mine from college would say that in New York City, you could instantly pick out who was important during their weekend walk through Central Park by what they wore.  His take was the reverse of what one might imagine.  The more powerful politicians and bankers were dressed down in sweats and old t-shirts, looking relaxed and comfortable, while the entry-level politicians and bankers would dress in a suit and tie, always ready to impress whoever they may run into.  I can't say if this is true, but the comment has stuck with me for more than ten years.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, importance was indicated by a person's age.  Adam and Noah were both over 900 years old at the time of death, Abraham was nearing 200 years and Moses was well past the 100 year old mark.  There are literalists who believe that is the actual age that these people grew to be, but the more commonly accepted notion is that the numbers were indicative of importance in the stories.  Here's one Bible Geek's (self-named; I did not give the nickname) take on the question: "Why are people so old in the Old Testament?"

You may choose to use age, shoes, clothing brands, where a person shops, how they eat, if they have servants, what car they drive, their title at work, height, how others refer to them (John or Mr. Matthews or dude or sir?), IQ or a myriad of other means to tell your reader how important your characters are without spelling it out.

writercize:  Choose a way to measure the importance of a person.  To illustrate, compare two characters in a very short scene.

Click "read more" to see writercizer sample response about shoes.