Weird Word Of The Week (Double Edition!)

SORRY PEOPLE

Yes Weird Word Of The Week. I know i missed it so now you get two!

First Word:
Wabbit

No, not Elmer Fudd saying Rabbit. Wabbt actually means to feel exhausted and slightly unwell. That might be a tricky one to work into a story!

Second Word:
Agowilt

This one is also difficult to pull off as it means sudden or sickening fear.

Good Luck to anybody incorporating the WWotW!

Hopefully I'll be back next week!

Writing Prompt 3: Impressive Vocabulary

As a writer, words are the tools of your trade, so you need to have lots of the best words you can get and you need to know how to use them, the way a chef needs to have the most high-tech cooking equipment available. So, instead of using sad, use melancholy, or use serendipitous instead of lucky - it sounds much better, but only if you use it right; the true skill is using it without sounding melodramatic (for example, unless you character is particularly posh, they wouldn't say "Are you alright? You seem melancholy. You're not very serendipitous, are you?"). In my experience, using impressive vocabulary works best in third-person narratives with a sophisticated style or voice.

So far, Ross has posted three Weird Word Of The Week entries. They are spatulamancy, regicide and quinquereme. Now, include all three of those words in a piece of writing. Go on, I dare you.

And if you want a further challenge, look up three words in the dictionary which you didn't already know the meaning of and get a friend to do the same, then swap, so that they get your words and you get their words. Then include these words in the same piece of writing. You could even try not giving each other the definitions of these words when you swap them - so that you have to guess their meanings when you use them!

Weird Word Of The Week #3

QUINQUEREME

That's the Weird Word of the Week. Because, let's be honest, Qs are underappreciated. So in support of Qs i have shosen a word with 2 of them! Woo!

Definition: A Quinquereme is a type of ship used by the Romans, Greeks and (I think) the Carthagininans. It had multiple oar banks and also multiple sails.

This word was chosen because i have been playing civilisation V all week :)

See you next week with the next Weird Word of the Week

Writing Prompt 2: The Everyman Hero

When I went on a creative writing course last summer, one of the guest speakers - Tom Mogford - talked to us about writing crime novels (the title of his lecture was The Everyman Hero: Writing Your First Crime Novel). During the course of his talk, he explained that by Everyman Hero, he meant a protagonist, or main character, who is not a policeman or some sort of secret agent or anything - he or she is just a normal person who has been embroiled in this crime, whatever it may be, through other means - by a misunderstanding, perhaps.

The example Mr Mogford gave to us was that your innocent character has been randomly approached - on the street, maybe - by a complete stranger who offers money for your character to assassinate somebody your character has neither met nor heard of. The hypothesis behind this, Mr Mogford explained, is that most murders are committed by somebody the victim knew - often intimately. But what if somebody is murdered by somebody completely unrelated? If your character knew that because of this there was a 100% chance of them never being discovered (let's just say it's 100% for the sake of this), what would they do?

I can neither remember the exact beginning sentence which Mr Mogford proposed we use for the writing exercise we then did nor find the piece of writing I wrote beginning with it, so this is just an approximation, but, nevertheless...

Based on the idea outlined above, this week's (two days late) writing prompt is to begin your story thusly:

My name is... [insert your character's name here] ...and I have been asked to kill another human being.

Good luck and enjoy writing!

Weird Word Of The Week

Here we are again! Another week, another word. So today the word is...

-Drum Roll-

REGICIDE

Some of you may know this one but if not regicide is the act of killing a king. Fair enough right? Helpful for anybody writing a fantasy story :D

See you next post :D

Writing Prompt 1: Real And Fictional Places

So this is how this is going to work:
Every week on this day I am going to post a writing prompt. Some of these will be ones that I made up, some of them will be from my school creative writing club, and a few might be from a week-long creative writing course I went on this summer just gone, and other sources. Some may well be for more than one writer to collaborate on. Bonus points if you manage to include Ross's Weird Word Of The Week in your piece! (We'd love to hear if you do!)
If you want to share what the prompts inspired you to write with us, then please do! Post it in the comments if it isn't too long - or maybe just your favourite paragraph or line.

And here's the first prompt!

All books and stories need a setting; it's one of the things you learn to put in a story when you're in primary school. Choose a place that you know well and then choose a character - it would work best if you choose someone from a fantasy or future/dystopian world, or from a different culture, or someone from a historical novel. Now put that character in that place. Bearing in mind that this setting is by no means one that they are familiar with, what are their thoughts about this place? Describe it from your character's point of view: what does someone seeing it for the first time see that someone who sees it on a more regular basis might not?

Introduction 2!

 Here goes:

My name is Ross. I am fourteen and therefore currently in my first year of GCSEs (I'm doing Music, Film, History  and German). I love reading (fantasy mostly) and writng (same) and would love to become a writer if i can. I have ideas for a few things, and I am working on making them. Bring on the years and years they will take to write!

Anyway, other things. I am also a big music fan and at the moment I am mostly listening to different variants of Folk Metal. I am also a fan of most kinds of Rock/Metal/Film soundtracks/Norse chanting music...

I will be doing the Weird Word of the Week here as well as contributing to other stuff. 

I know it is not much of an introduction but........hm......probably should've thought of a positive of short introductions........never mind!

Bye for now!

IntroDUCKtion

See, isn't that duck so very surprising?

Well, anyway, I thought that we, the admins of this site/blog/thing, should introduce ourselves, so here we are.

My name is Beth. I am a seventeen-year-old sixth form student and a part-time waitress who lives in England. I am studying biology, English language and German, and am applying to go to university to study linguistics or linguistics with German next year.
My lifelong dream is and always has been to be a published writer. Technically, I have already acheived that dream; a short story of mine was published in the Red House Young Writers' Year Book 2012. But I'd preferably like a full novel of mine to be published one day - at least one, anyway.
I am a member of National Novel Writing Month, meaning that this very November, I am attempting to write a novel in a month. It's rather fun. I attend my school's creative writing club, which is very crazy, and hope that from Creative Writing Club I can gain ideas for writing prompts etc which I can then post on here for you lovely people, whoever you may be.
My favourite things are sleep, food, grammar, books and music. Mostly I enjoy symphonic metal music (Nightwish, Within Temptation, Evanescence), but I do have a soft spot for country and folk (The Band Perry, Lady Antebellum, Frank Turner). My favourite writer is American fantasy writer Kristin Cashore and I sincerely hope to meet her someday. :)

So that's enough about me, but if you don't think that's enough about me, then there's more about me on my blog, which I am posting a link to here. :) As dear beloved Tigger would say: TTFN, ta ta for now!

Weird Word Of The Week

Okaaaaaaaaay

So we wanted to do a new thing called....

-Dramatic Drum Roll-

...Weird Word of the Week!
Let me explain, every week I will post a word that i find weird, wonderful and wobbly (because that is an awesome word). They will usually be in English but in some exceptional cases they may be in different languages. This is as sometimes words are too awesome to miss out on.

So this weeks word is

-Another Dramatic Drum Roll-

SPATULAMANCY

Definition: Spatulamancy is a form of divination involving an animal's shoulder blade.

Cool right! Right?

Swiftly moving on, this will hopefully be a weekly thing and for now, I sign off

Welcome!

Let me explain a few things.

I thought a while ago - maybe a year ago, maybe longer - that it would be nice to have a place where writers who know and trust each other can talk about their writing and share it. I shared this thought with a friend of mine, and because we're not very sane, we decided that it would be called Surprise Duck. I can't remember why. The reason will have been incredibly random.

Anyway, I forgot about this for a while, and created my own blog for the purposes of posting my own writing (and other ramblings). It wasn't very successful but I conveniently ignored that fact and continue to do so to this day.

Then, for some unknown reason, the first thought about the writing community returned to me, and that in turn caused the Surprise Duck idea to return as well. So, on a whim, I created it, and then had no idea what to do with it. And here we are now. :)