Writer's Journey

Looking for some fun writing exercises to boost your creativity or enjoy with your kids? Here's a fun writing prompt to sharpen your writing skills and strengthen your creativity. Finish the following sentences and then keep writing. Use each prompt as the first sentence in a paragraph (at least five sentences long). You can keep the story going with several paragraphs if you're having fun. Each writing prompt should start a new paragraph/story.  The ___________________ ate all of the _______________I had in my kitchen.  The yellow ____________________ scared me when I saw it.  The airplane carrying_________________ flew to ______________.  When I opened the door, I smelled the _____________________ my Mom was cooking. 

The more we write, the better writers we become. That's what I tell all of my students. Sometimes we need a break from our writing projects required for school or for our career. Writing prompts can help us refresh our creativity while honing our writing skills.  For a fun activity, try this writing prompt:  Write at least a 500-word story that uses this information:  You (or your character) have to live on an island for one entire summer with just one friend. You can’t leave the island until the summer is over, and you won’t have any visitors. You will be the lighthouse operator.  The owner of the lighthouse will ship over three months’ worth of food. What food would you have shipped over that is easy to cook?  What would you plant in the garden that you could eat? What eight items (besides clothes) would you take with you?  You have to do something productive and also something fun each day. What would you do to stay busy? 

You often hear writing coaches tell students to use the "show, don't tell" technique when writing. This technique means to let the readers experience an emotion or visualize a setting with descriptive wording rather than just a blunt information dump. When we walk into a cold room, we might wrap our arms around ourselves or grab a sweater. If we have a warm drink such as hot cocoa or coffee, we might wrap both hands around the cup to get our fingers warm. Describing those actions draws the reader into our story more than saying, "It was cold in the room." Readers can picture the actions of trying to get warm. Nothing particular comes to mind with just writing that it was cold. There's nothing to visualize for the reader.  Writing Prompt:  Use dialogue or descriptive language to show the readers what is happening instead of telling them. Example: He was cold. (telling) He stepped out and felt the bitter wind hit his cheeks. He immediately stepped back in and ...

Nothing gets us in trouble more as a writer than misusing punctuation. A misplaced comma can change the meaning of what we are saying. To help you understand the basic rules, I am going to keep the sample sentences very basic. First rule: Any part of a sentence that can be deleted without changing the basic meaning of the sentence should have commas before and after that word, clause, or phrase. Example:  Oslo, who is my smallest dog, is learning how to sit. Identify the core sentence: Oslo is learning how to sit. The fact that he is my smallest dog is a clause that can be deleted without changing that core sentence. This additional information is just a bonus for the reader. The clause needs to be separated by commas. If the wording being removed changes the meaning of the sentence, no commas are needed. Example:  Dogs who are afraid of water wouldn’t like to swim in my lake. No commas should be put around who are afraid of water because that is key to the sentence. Without t...

I remember discovering the music of the Beach Boys as a middle school student. The group had been around since before I was born, but I had never paid any attention their music until I heard a friend playing "California Girls" one day. I immediately saved up for their Sounds of Summer vinyl. The songs about the beach and surfing made me want to live in a perpetual summer season. Played at the right moment, beach music makes us feel willing to accept the extreme heat of the season so we can have some fun.  Life in the South seemed different in the summer when I was growing up. We could stay outside later, swim in a lake, vacation at the beach, and spend all day in a bathing suit. If things got hot and we couldn't go anywhere, we sprayed each other with the garden hose. If we were lucky, we also had music playing somewhere. Some people had record players. Others had boom boxes and eventually cassette players. My family even had an eight-track cassette player. We all had a s...

While Pencils Move ©Chris Pepple 2013                It’s that time of day again. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. The laundry smells fresh from the scent of my fabric softener I used this morning. A warm spinach and feta cheese aroma lingers in the kitchen from our pizza we completely devoured. The cats have settled into their comfy spots for an afternoon siesta. My daughters are stretched out in the floor in front of me. One has an open math book. The other one has her history book opened to a section on World War II. She is reading and taking notes.                These moments are times I cherish. I look over my computer screen and watch my daughters learning and growing. I remember when their legs didn't stretch out this far. I also remember when their homework involved mostly coloring or cutting and gluing. Now they thi...