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Your move to a new office building hits a major hurdle when you arrive for your first day only to find out your name wasn't on the move list. Write this scene. Read more

For the last 10 years, kids have been toilet papering your house on Halloween night. Unfortunately for them, this is the year you finally decided to get even. Write about your night of retaliation. Read more

You're attending an annual pumpkin-carving party with your friends when one of them stands up and makes a shocking announcement. Start your story with the announcement and end with "And that's how I got my head stuck in the pumpkin." Read more

A special anniversary is coming up and you've decided to go all-out to celebrate. The only thing is, this is an anniversary of something unusual and there's only one other person who knows what it's about—and he's uncomfortable celebrating. Write this scene. Read more

You are having the worst day of your life when someone calls and changes it for the better. Who calls, what's it about and what series of events follow that call to help brighten your day? Read more

Doing classroom visits with young writers is probably my favorite part of being a writer, narrowly edging out the actual writing. Kids inspire me; they give me new ideas for characters and stories; and, most importantly, they crack me up.

Plus, when it comes to doing classroom visits and giving “writing prompts” to the kids, I’ve got a head start: my first middle-grade book, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, actually has a writing prompt as a central plot element. The ogreish Social Studies teacher, Mr. Melville (spoiler alert: he has a heart of gold) assigns his seventh graders to deliver a report that solves some mystery in their lives. Our enterprising heroine, Bethesda Fielding, tackles the assignment by digging up some dirt on a particular teacher (spoiler alert: her name is in the title), and all heck breaks loose.

The problem is, the teachers who invite me to their classes wouldn’t be too happy if I assigned their students to dig up dirt on them.  Thankfully, I have an alternate prompt, one that touches on another big theme in Ms. Finkleman and its companion novel, The Mystery of the Missing Everything: Music. Long before I was a fiction writer, my early efforts at creative expression came in the form of song lyrics, written for various bands in which I played bass, beginning in middle school and extending through my college career. (One of my former bandmates, a guy named John Davis, is today the driving force behind a terrific pop band called Title Tracks).

Music has remained one of my primary wellsprings of inspiration, and I love to bring it into the classroom and see how it can inspire and excite young writers. So here’s the prompt, which never fails to generate some excited conversation and really interesting writing.

1. I give them the quote, often attributed to Elvis Costello, that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” We bat this around for a while, eventually landing on  some version of the main idea, that the sublimity of music is basically impossible to express in words, and then I deliver the punchline: “but we’re going to do it anyway!”

2. I play some tunes. I then plug my iPod into some speakers and play two pieces of music, one after the other, pointedly not revealing the titles or artists. (You should pick stuff you know and love; I usually do the fourth movement of Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major, followed by the deeply weird Tom Waits song “Kommienzuspadt.”) The students are to be either listening carefully or writing the whole time the music is playing. They write either…
a. about the music. “What instruments do you hear? how fast or slow is it?”
b. about how it makes them feel, or
c. a little story INSPIRED by the song.

3. We share.

The sharing is always the really fun part. I never tire of hearing the incredible sentences that come pouring out of young writers when they let themselves be carried away by songs:

“I hear trombones, and about a million violins, and I think someone hitting a piano with a trash can lid.”

“This song makes me feel like I’m super excited, but in a sort of sad way.”

“There’s a bunny, and she’s hopping in circles around a bonfire, and then a train comes rolling by and it’s got her a carnival on it.”

These gems cue up a long and wide-ranging conversation about the special way that music makes us feel, and also the vocabulary of writing about music, the specificity that’s required — and, hey-what-do-you-know, it turns out that that kind of specificity should be a part of all great writing. Other le

Write a letter of rejection to your past self, explaining why you needed to go through the rough patches that complicated your life the past few years to grow as a writer. Read more

You've been playing Scrabble with an anonymous person online. After some Internet chatting, you realize that the two of you live in the same town and decide to meet at a local pub. What you didn't expect was to fall in love. Read more

You come across a pack of matches that sets off a series of uncanny events. Start your story with “My mother always told me not to play with fire.” End it with … Read more

You received a call from you alma mater and they want you to be the keynote speaker at graduation. Write a speech that inspires the future generation to work toward their dreams. Read more

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What was your last twisted thing?

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What’s your best road trip story?

I’m doing a giveaway to celebrate Winnemucca’s release! Swing by any of these blogs to leave your answer and enter to win one of 5 Kindle copies of Winnemucca or a $15 Amazon Gift Certificate!

Jagged Edge
The Wormhole
Book Lover & Procrastinator
Aobibliophile
Supernatural Bookworm
Reality Bites
My Neurotic Book Affair
Phantom Paragrapher

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What did you dream about last night?

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When’s the last time you got burned?

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What’s your next big thing?

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What was the last brave thing that you did?

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What was the last misunderstanding you had?

Owning a blog seems to have become a 'must-have' for writers these days. It keeps us in contact with our readers, gives us a platform to display some of our great work and it's free marketing tool. But when you choose to blog every day, you can run out of things to talk about. I know it's happened to me on occasion.

My blog, The Gift, used to target a specific audience: special needs children and their families. I loved it but I realized I was running the same topics over and over and I missed chatting about the other passions in my life. In the last few months, I've given my blog a more general feel to it. I still talk about living in a special needs family as that's where my heart is but I also have days devoted to writing, music, gardening, cooking and other interests. And you know what? My followers have doubled, my daily hits have skyrocketed and I've even been approached for some pretty cool writing gigs!

I thought what I'd do for today's post is share a few ideas you can try when your blogging topic well runs a bit dry. Here's a short list of 30 you can try out:

1) Do a book review. And don't do what everyone else is doing. Choose a book that's controversial, edgy or just different.
2) Interview an author.
3) Interview a magazine or ezine editor about what's hot, what's not, the Do's and Don't's for their publication and what they're looking for right now.
4) Highlight a new writing opportunity.
5) Do a giveaway.
6) Get another writer, author, editor or publisher to do a guest post.
7) Review a writing resource.
8) Do a 'Top ____' list. Choose a subject such as best/worst books, best writing tools, etc.
9) Do an interview with a character from either one of your works or someone else's.
10) Post a picture and have followers write short story about it.
11) Do a weekly writing prompt.
12) Start a story and invite followers to keep the story going by adding their own scene.
13) Interview a child about his or her favorite books and why they love them. (Kids are a GREAT resource for writing ideas!)
14) Flip through a book, read the sixth sentence and write something based on that sentence. You can choose whichever numbered sentence you fancy! I just chose sixth.)
15) Share a short story, article or chapter from your latest work.
16) Participate in Six Sentence Sunday.
17) Write a post about your favorite song and why it means so much to you.
18) Put another author's blog in the spotlight.
19) Discuss a media tool (eg: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) or give some tips on how to use it most effectively.
20) Have a 'Writers' Treasure Hunt' where readers have to go to fellow writer's blogs for clues to win a prize.
21) Participate in, or organize, a writer/author blog hop with a specific theme.
22) Share a special childhood memory.
23) Talk about an issue that needs to be in the spotlight.
24) Highlight one of your other favorite creative distractions.
25) Have another writer join you for a post where your readers come up with three (or more) prompt words you have to create a story with.
26) Discuss a specific genre.
27) Talk about how you broke into a specific market and share a few tips.
28) Interview a publisher and get some tips for submitting to them.
29) Open the discussion about what a certain celebrity is doing.
30) Give a list of writing opportunities or writing contests.

These are just a few I came up with off the top of my head. What would you add to this

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If you could be anywhere in the world today, where would that be?

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My father has a freeway named after him. I’d rather have my dad.

Guys don’t really talk like girls about it, but when I stood in the graveyard it just, well, was hard to tell him. And I needed to. I needed to tell someone. Someone who wouldn’t tell anyone else. But, it felt like all the dead people were listening. And the worst part was, Dad was buried next to Grandma.

“What’s taking so long?” Hector yelled, still sitting on his bike, waiting for me, with all the understanding of someone who couldn’t wait two seconds for his friend to run into 7-11 for a coke.

Dad’s at the corner of Serenity Way and Heavenly Drive just up a grassy hill, beside an oak tree. I didn’t like him being so close to the oak tree. It had already messed with some of the tombstones five graves over. I didn’t think Dad believed in Heaven. He believed in rules. Well, the law mostly, and the law is sort of like the Olympics of rules. But there were other rules that were way more important when I was growing up. Like The Cut-Off, when I couldn’t talk on the phone after 10. And how he made me and my sister check-in all our “devices” until morning so we wouldn’t get into any “shennanigans.” He was hard core. And made what happened to Alyssa and me nearly impossible, until this year.

“Fabian!” Hector, yelled.

“Just freaking ride around the block or something,” I yelled back.

“Aren’t you done yet?” Hector looked down the road and didn’t budge. “How long does it take to tell him your not half a virgin anymore?”

Now the whole graveyard knew.

© Laura Elliott, 2011