People love symmetry because it feels right having things match up. You have a superhero, but also a supervillain. You start your story on a bus and end it on a bus. You have two main characters, one very rich and one very poor. There are lots of ways to have symmetry or mirror elements…
Tag: musings
Muse on Monday – February 3, 2025
As Forrest Gump said, “Life is like a box of chocolates: it can get dark and it might get nuts, but it’s usually pretty sweet.” Okay, fine. What he actually said was: “you never know what you’re going to get” meaning there’s a lot of randomness to life. In writing, there is less randomness than…
Muse on Monday – January 27, 2025
Have you ever read a story where the fate of the world rests on what the characters do? Probably, since that’s a lot of stories. This is what is called a high-stakes story and the reason they are so common is that the higher the stakes, the more we are invested in it all turning…
Muse on Monday – January 20, 2025
I wrote a story once about a vertical city. The rich people lived at the higher levels and it got poorer as it went down. Sort of like the Snowpiercer train stood on its end, or the silo from the Silo series. What would it really be like if a city got stood on end?…
Muse on Monday – January 13, 2025
Happy Monday! I hope you had a good weekend. This week’s prompt is a super-specific one. There are enough blanks you can fill in to make it your own, but it sends the story in a specific direction. Story Prompt: January 13, 2025 It is your birthday and you are stuck in your apartment. The…
Muse on Monday – January 6, 2025
Welcome to 2025! This is our first Muse on Monday for this year, so hopefully we can set a good tone for the year. I haven’t had anyone ask me about New Year’s resolutions for a while. Maybe people are cynical about then since they seem to last until February at the latest. Still, I’m…
Muse on Monday – December 23, 2024
So it turns out that Christmas is this week. So for this week’s prompt, we’re going to write a Christmas story. What exactly is a Christmas story? There are several different meanings of this. These are: The third one isn’t an official name, but it’s the type of story that takes place during Christmas and…
Muse on Monday – December 16, 2024
There is a type of movie called the buddy comedy. This is a movie with two main characters who have to work together. They are often very different since that produces conflict (and also, comedy). There are books like this as well. Normally, these are two people, but in a fantasy story, this duo can…
Muse on Monday – December 9, 2024
The unknown can be scary but most of the time, it is just that: unknown. However, it can be shocking if we think we know something that turns out to be different. Normally, when you tell a story, you should tell the reader about the world the story is set in, at least a little….
Muse on Monday – December 2, 2024
Story Prompt: December 2, 2024 Write a story that takes place at a concert. Decide what kind of concert it is and listen to that music as you write, just for inspiration. Remember that the tone of the music does not have to match the tone of the story (you can have a cute, romantic…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 