WFMAD Day 27 – Friday five for your writing

Bookavore, bookseller extraordinaire at WORD in Brooklyn (and my oldest kid) has weighed in with a resolution to remedy the mud-slinging that seems to be heating up between adult “literary fiction” authors and adult “genre fiction” authors. (You haven’t heard about the feud? Details here.) If you, too, were a Model UN nerd in high school, this will completely make your day. Even if you weren’t a Model UN nerd, this will make you smile.

Ready… “Too often, as we leave the tribal culture of childhood – and its sometimes subversive tales and rhymes – behind, we lose contact with the instinctive joy in self-expression; with the creative imagination, spontaneous emotion, and the ability to see the world as full of wonders.” Alison Lurie Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Why Kids Love the Books They Do

Set… before you tell the world to go away so you can write, make sure you have blocked out writing time tomorrow and on Sunday.

Today’s prompt:

1. Go for a walk. Bring something to write with and on whilst walking. (Bonus points if you can walk in a park where kids are playing.)

2. Write down five things of nature you see on your walk. F. ex: brook, dead salamander, clouds.

3. Write one sentence about each item from your POV (point of view).

4. Choose the face of a child from this website.

5. Write one sentence about each of your items from that child’s POV. Then choose the item that is most intriguing to that child and write as much as you can about how it came to be there, about what its purpose is, or about what is going to happen next to that thing. Don’t judge your work, don’t impose your adult vision on the words. Be more chill and let them tumble out.

Scribble… Scribble…Scribble!!!

4 Replies to “WFMAD Day 27 – Friday five for your writing”

  1. Loved today’s prompt. Absolutely amazing. The brain of a child works so differently. In some ways, growing up is the gradual sewing together of the mind (that’s a halfway quote). I’d love to hear about how music affects your writing. It affects everything for me. In one story I wrote a whole scene based on the song Hyper-Ballad by Bjork. I feel like music really is the best inspiration.

  2. I was literally going “awwww!” during today’s prompt! It had me laughing and letting lose, and it was my first time writing from a child’s POV. Everything is so…simplified. And they tend to ramble and say the first thing they think. I tried to work that into my dialogue between two twin brothers, and it ended up being the beginning to an amazingly sweet part.

    Today was my strongest day of writing. I didn’t really focus on the time, instead I let out my caged child, let the music play, and danced around with my writing. This was definitely the funnest prompt yet. 😀

  3. Oh! Only four days left of WFMAD!

    I drove my daughter and her best friend to school yesterday. Her friend, still all a-wonder over the early hour and all of its goings-on, exclaimed, “There were so many people up at 6:30 this morning going to work! I didn’t know that’s how that happened!”

    I’m still giggling!

  4. I had my four-year-old granddaughter this morning, so I didn’t read the prompt until later in the day. One of the things we did was take the dog on a walk, as she wanted to check out the dead possum she had seen when I drove her to my house.
    On the walk, I noticed the shadows of the trees. The invasive vines I detest. The sun on my skin, which I need to avoid.
    She, however, noticed broken glass, the dead possum surrounded by flies, and the dead skunk, which was merely flattened black and white fur, bones, and a teeny, tiny skull. She found this fascinating and squatted to get a closer look, while my job was to keep the dog from wanting to rub in it.
    For the prompt, I used a photo from the site you linked to.

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