Do you think nature is kind or cruel? It’s both, of course, although in stories it is often cruel, or fickle at best. Nature makes a good antagonist in a story with no human bad guys, whether it is a location like a desert or the open ocean, an event like a hurricane or a…
Tag: writing challenge
Muse on Monday – April 17, 2023
In my job, I sometimes pick up newly-arrived international students at the airport. It’s fascinating to be able to view your own town through their eyes where everything is new and exotic. It’s also a great opportunity to learn about other cultures and how things are different. This meeting of different cultures and different worlds…
Muse on Monday – April 10, 2023
Today is the last day of a 5-day weekend we got at work for Easter. The nice thing about vacations is that they are a change from the normal routine. This is why a lot of stories take place when people are on vacation since they are in new places and having new experiences. However,…
Muse on Monday – April 3, 2023
Personally, I love the word “quirky”, maybe because it describes a lot of what I do. If you look up the word, it means doing something in a unique way. It’s often linked with humor. So how do you write something quirky? It could mean different things to different people, but I’ve always seen it…
Muse on Monday – March 20, 2023
It’s kind of amazing that if you have a full-time job you spend a lot of life doing that. At the same time, unless your friends or family happen to be in the same field or the same office, they know very little about what your actual day to day life is like. Work can…
Muse on Monday – March 13, 2023
In stories there are a lot of possible sources of conflict, from external sources like an enemy, a rival company, a personal rival, etc. or from internal sources, like doubt, past trauma, addiction and so on. For this prompt, let’s look only at physical danger, where possibly your life or someone else’s could be in…
Muse on Monday – February 27, 2023
I have always been fascinated with other worlds and the idea of being able to go to them, and a lot of my writing over the years has had that idea in it. You see this kind of story a lot in fiction as well, from the Chronicles of Narnia, to Alice in Wonderland, and…
Muse on Monday – February 20, 2023
There are a lot of stories written about money, usually either trying to get a lot of it, such as in a bank robbery story, or not having enough of it. The lack of money, specifically, is a very common source of conflict. Money can’t solve all problems, but it can solve a lot of…
Muse on Monday – February 13, 2023
Story Prompt: February 13, 2023 Write a story based on the picture below: This is a picture I made with my niece. It has kind of a creepy feeling, but that doesn’t mean you need to write a creepy story if you don’t want to. A lot of the fun of fiction is subverting expectations….
Muse on Monday – February 6, 2023
People like to share messages—to share a bit of themselves with the world. This is common online, but it’s also common in the real world in subtler ways, such as bumper stickers, T-shirts, baseball hats or stickers on their books or laptop. Right now I am at a coffee shop wearing a shirt that says…
The Green-Walled Treehouse 