Writing Topic Tuesday - 12 Writing Prompts for May 31, 2011

Here are some random topics for the May 31st, 2011 edition of Writing Topic Tuesday:

• Unseasonably hot and humid
• Ohio State coach Jim Tressel resigns because of NCAA violations by his players and failing to report them
• Tom & Jerry
• Banned books
• End of month reflections - May 2011
• Political correctness
• Graph paper
• Last week of school
• Graduation party
• Parking lot
• Jumping off the edge
• Crazy dog

Provocative Phrase Friday -- The Harper's Magazine Edition II

A lazy week for me means that I'm taking a short cut this week and pulling provocative phrases from the June 2011 issue of Harper's Magazine.

Here are the provocative phrases (writing prompts) for May 27th, 2011:

• This is an awful story...
• They didn't even call...
• The worst part is...
• An uncivilized part of me wants to...
• One of the most sinister effects of...
• I decided that I wouldn't ask him more about his mom.
• I trust that most people can imagine...
• Was it my fault?
• But I was speaking of those two...
• You are a liar, a thief and worse...
• Hey Walker, you suck.
• I hope it was worth it and you can live with yourself...

Writing Topic Tuesday -- The Harper's Magazine Edition

In keeping with the theme of using a current issue of a magazine as a writing topic resource (and similar to last Friday's Provocative Phrases) I am selecting topics suggested by the pages of the June 2011 issue of Harper's magazine (many of them simply the titles of stories and articles within the issue). See? Generating writing prompts is easy!

Writing Topics for May 24th, 2011:

• Pick of the litter
• King James edition of the Bible
• Life in the zone
• Dust to dust
• Truly Tasteless Jokes
• For love or money
• The Dead Sea
• New books
• Safety of nuclear power
• Findings

Writing Lessons from The Hunger Games

Holy cow!  Have you read this book? My son brought it home from school and I have heard good things about it, so I picked it up just to read a couple of chapters. I read until 2am.  It has been a long time since a book has kept me this spellbound.

In many ways it is a textbook example of how to write good fiction.

I am moving on to book #2 Catching Fire, but stay tuned for a series of posts on the lessons a writer can learn from reading The Hunger Games trilogy.  WARNING!  These postings will spoil the hell out of these books so read 'em now!

Provocative Phrase Friday - 12 Writing Prompts from Harper's Magazine

Continuing with last week's theme of picking out writing topics from a magazine, I have the June 2011 issue of Harper's and I am plucking out provocative lines to inspire your writing. All of these lines were selected from letters, stories and ads within the first 30 pages of the issue, and I didn't look very hard for them. Now take them and bounce them in a different direction.

Provocative Phrases for Friday, May 20th, 2011:

• It's time...
• Just for fun, let's take our...
• Then again, I could be wrong.
• On my eleventh birthday...
• I'd been a high school freshman for a month when...
• That was everyone's reaction when I...
• Hear the buzz?
• Don't you have something better to do?
• Are you ready to change...
• If you really, truly believe in Jesus...
• What in the hell is wrong with you?
• I don't know what Jeff did.

Writing Topic Tuesday – The Wired Edition

This week’s inspiration also comes from the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine.

These are topics that I plucked out of the magazine just by skimming through it, not from an in depth reading of the magazine. Here are today's writing topics:

• Lawn darts
• Artificial floating island made of recycled carpet and plastic cleans a polluted lake
• Finding a picture of a coworker in a tiny bikini online -- What do you do?
• Circle of unfriends – The types of people on Facebook who you might want to unfriend.  Or how what you reveal on Facebook can create social awkwardness or just general unease
• Google wants to kill off the desktop via cloud computing
• A graphic designer with a grudge and a twisted sense of humor
• Useless lost cat posters (see item above)
• Bad Romance?  A married couple that prank each other, some of them quite nasty, and post them on YouTube.

Provocative Phrase Friday – Wired Edition (May 13th, 2011)

All of these phrases have been plucked out of the first 60 pages of the May 2011 issue of Wired magazine.  These are random phrases in the articles and advertisements that caught my attention, and could be used as story prompts.

• While the world’s been waiting for…
• Twenty-five years ago…
• When I’m in a contaminated place…
• Last chance to…
• It happens all the time.
• While the years roll by…
• And before you know it…
• It won’t be easy.
• Passion should never take…
• How do I get them into…
• Who says that you can’t be devoted to more than one…
• Of course you can always speed things up by…
• To help us understand how he does it…