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!

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!

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?