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In the Beginning
Some of our most enduring stories are creation stories. We’re not nearly as interested in the soap operatic relationship dynamics between Hades, Persephone, and Demeter as we are in the the story’s...
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Fifty-Word Inspiration
A few months ago, in our “Fifty“ writing challenge, Vincent Mars of Boy With a Hat asked us to tell a story in fifty words. I bookmarked a number of responses that intrigued me: tiny tales that said a...
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Leftovers
Our closets, our storage rooms, our blog dashboards. We keep so many different spaces to hold things (old papers, unfinished stories, shoes we’ll never wear again) we rarely revisit, let alone use. Yet...
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Honey versus Vinegar
Kill ‘Em With Kindness When I was eighteen, I had my first internship in New York City. Centered on my need to get wherever I was going in the same hurried frenzy as everyone around me, I was often...
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Mystery Ending
Let’s think beyond a single post written with a single focus, and lean toward the “weekly” part of “weekly writing challenge”: you’ll start your post today, but revisit and add to it over the next...
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The Ray Bradbury Noun List Twist
Ray Bradbury, author of 11 novels, including classics such as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, faced writer’s block just like the rest of us. Bradbury, in addition to giving great writing...
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Memoir Madness
Memory… is the diary that we all carry about with us. –Oscar Wilde One of our not-so-secret goals of the weekly writing challenge is to encourage you to try new genres and forms. This week, we’re...
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Manifesto
A manifesto, according to Wikipedia, is… a published verbal declaration of the intentions, motives, or views of the issuer, be it an individual, group, political party or government. Thinkers and...
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My Dear Watson
Dynamic duos From Martin and Lewis to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Pinky and the Brain to Batman and Robin, we love sidekicks, supporting characters, partners in crime, and dynamic duos. Take...
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Build Your Own
There aren’t any new stories, just new ways to tell them. You’ve probably heard this line before (and in fact, we discussed this in our last Blogging U. course, when we talked about finding the best...
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Full Tanka
Does anyone not like haiku? Didn’t think so. In fact, our Haiku Catchoo! writing challenge, which we ran last Fall, is one of our most popular challenges of all time. If haiku is the sashimi of poetry,...
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Kill Your Darlings
Being a good writer means knowing how to edit: taking what you’ve written and stripping out the dulling distractions so your ideas shine. It’s not always easy, but it is necessary. In this multi-day...
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That’s Absurd
Tiny Yellow Flowers Any time we read a book, we’re transported. A good author will develop the characters in such a way that we identify with them automatically. We see their flaws in ourselves, as...
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Foreshadow
“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best,” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better...
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Interview
Blogging is such a powerful medium for self-expression and self-discovery: every day, I read dozens of posts that channel their authors’ personalities and voices, giving me a glimpse of each blogger’s...
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The Unreliable Narrator
I recently finished the first season of HBO’s True Detective, and one element I loved — which made the episodes more exciting — was the possible presence of an unreliable narrator. Some of our favorite...
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Genre Blender
Musicians remix songs all the time, interpreting one piece of music through another genre. Why can’t we do the same with the written word? Need help figuring out what to write about for this challenge?...
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The Butterfly Effect
I found my dog outside of the animal receiving center for Animal Care and Control in the Bronx. It was my first time in the Bronx and I was going for an interview with a nearby doctor. At the time, I...
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Find a Muse in the Masters
In today’s writing challenge, you’ll choose a scenario (or invent your own) and write a poem, a short story, a vignette, a scene, or flash fiction based on Nighthawks by Edward Hopper. Nighthawks by...
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Oh, The Irony
In everyday language, we now use “irony” as a synonym for snark or sarcasm (or, sometimes, for unusually bad luck). At its core, though, irony is something much more interesting: a moment in which the...
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