Stories are everywhere. Not just ideas for stories but actual stories: if you see a wrecked car on the side of the road, that contains a whole host of stories, including the final one that led to it being wrecked. A painting holds the story of its creation as well as the ideas that the…
Tag: muse
Muse on Monday – August 8, 2022
Emotions are very important in storytelling, of course. However, it is not only the characters that can have emotions. The entire story can have an overall feeling, whether it is sad, joyous, tense, scary or anything else. This is called the mood. You can show this in the descriptions of the setting (is the sky…
Muse on Monday – August 1, 2022
Food is a very big part of our lives, even if it’s often a mundane part of it. In stories, we often don’t need to mention every time the characters eat or drink, unless it’s important to the story. However, there are times when food can be absolutely central to a story. This is true…
Muse on Monday – July 18, 2022
I don’t know about you, but this summer seems to be going fast. It seemed like it was just May and now it will be August in a few weeks. They say time flies when you’re having fun, but there are many reasons why time might seem to go slower or faster. Sometimes a year…
Muse on Monday – July 4, 2022
It’s a new month and a new chance to do things differently. It’s a good idea to look at things in a different way, if only to see how you could improve things. This is a valuable skill for writers. If we only look at life from one perspective, we are missing so many other…
Muse on Monday – June 27, 2022
A lot of stories are about journeys since all stories are a journey of one kind of another, either moving from one place to another or growing or changing as a person. When we think of travel stories, they are usually big journeys over a lot of space. However, journeys of very short distances can…
Muse on Monday – June 13, 2022
I hope you have a good week. Here is a prompt you can use to write a story. Even if you don’t write it, down, think about what the story might look like. Where is the conflict? How does it end? If you think outside your normal patterns of thought, it can only broaden what…
Muse on Monday – June 6, 2022
One of the nice things about fiction is that you can write anything. Stories should be internally consistent and follow the rules you make for them, but beyond that, you are the creator of your own worlds. For example, I once wrote a story about a taxi driver who was a pigeon. The concept is…
Muse on Monday – May 30, 2022
Because of movies, we tend to think of action stories as having to do with fighting, crime or some other sort of swashbuckling adventure, usually since those are the most exciting stories to watch. However, an action story can be any kind of high-energy story that has a fair bit of movement. This week, I…
Muse on Monday – May 23, 2022
I’ve been away from the site for a couple weeks since I’ve been down with COVID. It might have been a time to do some writing, but unfortunately, it was not the asymptomatic variety. But I’m back now and almost as good as ever. This week’s prompt is the first line of a story: In…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 