Day 10

24: Ways of Seeing. Imagine a person with an idiosyncratic way of seeing the world (for instance, an occasional drug dealer who, because of his amateur status, is more than usually prone to seeing danger where there is none; an entomologist who tends to categorize the world dryly, as if seen through a microscope; a world-class athlete in top shape whose clarity of vision is almost hallucinogenic). Have this character witness a traumatic event that does not directly involve her. Narrate the event from a first-person POV, making sure that the perspective is carefully built around the idiosyncrasies of this personality. 600 words.

Game On, Day 9, v. 2.0

Apologies for the month-long interlude that unexpectedly happened as Gina and I both moved around our respective towns on our respective coasts. We're buckled in for Fall, and we're going back to the hope of 30 stories in 30 days. Hope you'll join us for the season!

Since we didn't do Smart Pets last time, we'll start with Day 9 again and throw that prompt back into the book. This one just seems appropriate to come back to.

Day 9 (Version 2.0)
111: Home. Use a house in a story fragment. Think about the power of rooms (kitchens, basements, unfinished attics, walk-in closets) on psychology and conversation. In this fragment, make the house a unique, though passive, participant in the unfolding events. The room need not be in a typical house. Think about all the other rooms we become familiar with -- classrooms, office cubicles, public toilets. What are their personalities? How do the more public spaces we inhabit affect our behaviors? You might consider keeping several characters permanently stuck in different rooms in a house, communicating by shouts, cell phones, intercoms, Dixie cups and strings, or telepathy. Ghosts haunt houses, and writers are often ghosts to their own cherished or bedeviling childhood homes. 500 words.

Day 9

47: Smart Pets. Write a very short story about an animal -- a dog, cat, or parrot, say -- that is used to spending time around humans. Let this pet observe, with familiarity yet bafflement, the way males and females of this other species interact. The animal cannot understand much of our language, so its observations will have to be based on physical behavior and gestures, but it could still be an intelligent observer, with its own built-in biases and clarities humans are incapable of (the sense of smell, for example -- a dog would know when a woman was menstruating or a man just had sex with someone else). A caged animal would have a different perspective than an animal free to roam. 600 words.

Day 8: One Moment.

96: One Moment. Write a third-person fragment of story about one important moment in someone's life. Examine this moment from every possible angle. Think about smell, light, texture, distant and near sounds, and the details that will stick in the memory of the participant. Don't worry about telling a whole story (although you may learn that you can't not tell a story here, when you explain the importance of the moment and tie up some of the threads attached to this moment). 300 words.

*I replaced the Argument prompt for now, because it just didn't seem to be happening for me.

Day 7: Villanelle

128: Villanelle. Write a very short story on the model of a villanelle, which is a nineteen-line poem of five three-line stanzas, plus a four-line stanza at the end. The first and third lines of the first stanza alternate as the last lines of the next four stanzas. Then, in the final four-line stanza, those same first and third lines of the story become the last two lines of the poem, in order. ABC DEA FGC HIA JKC LMAC. For the purposes of this exercise, your "lines" may be full sentences or not. If you chose not to use a full sentence, make sure this incomplete sentence will be completed by several different concluding phrases without harming meaning too much. It might be best to write this first of all in the form of a poem. After you've set it up, then turn it into prose. 250 words.

Day 6

94: Life Story. Write a short first-person story of someone's entire life. Make the sentences islands of themselves, the scene of action, and detail. Don't worry about making "sense" from sentence to sentence (which is good advice for any kind of writing). But also don't forget that a reader has to follow a thread, a set of bread crumbs, a trial of broken branches, footprints, and crumpled candy wrappers. Focus on the details that reveal the personality and the changes in personality of the character. How do people change? Why do they change? Imagine a frame device that makes this kind of story possible - a guy in a bar; a grown woman magically transported back to third grade who is asked to tell what she did last summer, except she confuses this with what did you do with your life? 300 words.

Day 5: Monotony

130: Monotony. Write a story with the following monotonous structure: short sentence (less than 8 words); long sentence (more than 16 words); very short (less than 5); long (more than 12); then repeat this pattern five times. This story should be about a character's inability to be invisible when all she wants is to observe a compelling scene taking place in front of her. I'm pairing this subject and this monotonous structure so you can see the intricate relationship between style and substance. This character's failure to go unnoticed ought to interact with the simple repetition of sentence lengths. A person like this thinks in patterns -- we all do. Find a set of patterns that mirrors the problems being faced by your characters. This exercise will be twenty sentences long. 250 words.

Day 4: Cooking.

48: Cooking. Use cookery - menu preparation, the love of this essential process - as a way of understanding a man and a woman's relationship to each other. Or, to put it another way, use an evening of cooking (and perhaps entertaining) as a way of exploring a relationship between a man and a woman. If you have any kind of experience with cooking and know of certain unusual recipes, adapt these for the purposes of this exercise. 600 words.

Day 3: Loveless

27: Loveless. Create a character around this sentence: Nobody has ever loved me as much as I have loved him. Do not use this sentence in the fragment of fiction you write. This sentence comes from Guy Davenport's aunt, Mary Elizabeth Davenport Morrow, via his essay "On Reading" in The Hunter Gracchus. Resist the temptation this exercise offers for a completely self-indulgent character. Of course, some self-indulgence will be fun. Think of this sentence as a kind of mathematical formula. Is the person who utters this sentence speaking of all the friends and loved ones he has known in his life? Or is she focusing on one person who did not return love satisfactorily? Consider the strong possibility that whoever would say something like this is unreliable. 500 words.

Day 2

14: No ideas, but in things. Write a very brief story told only in images - concrete, simple, visually effective movements and details. This exercise does not ask you to eliminate people from your prose, just to watch what they do and what objects they crave and caress rather than what they say or think about these objects and actions. 300 words.

Day 1

The Reluctant I. Write a first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun (I or me or my) only two times – but keep the “I” somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself than in what he is observing. You can make your narrator someone who sees an interesting event in which he is not necessarily a participant. Or you can make him self-effacing, yet a major participant in the events related. It is very important in this exercise to make sure your reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize that this is a first person narration. Show us quickly who is observing the scene. 600 words.

The people we tend to like most are those who are much more interested in other people than themselves, selfless and caring, whose conversation is not a stream of self-involved remarks (like the guy who, after speaking about himself to a woman at a party for half an hour, says, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”). I’m not trying to legislate only likeable characters or narrators. I use the example of successful social selves above to give an idea of what is needed in successful fiction. Another lesson you might learn from this exercise is how important it is to let things and events speak for themselves beyond the ego of the narration.