Imagine that you have the opportunity to have dinner with three famous people: celebrities, historical figures, or cultural icons.  Choose three with the 2 following stipulations:

1)  One of the three people must be dead.  (As recently as last year or as distant as 3000 years ago!)

2)  One of the three needs to be of an opposite gender.  ( Read more... )

As students, we have become accustomed to responding to prompts pretty easily.  Teachers have been telling me “write about this” for as long as I can remember.  Even here, in the Eng. 105 classroom, our entire curriculum is developed around these prompts.  You grade has been affected ultimately by your ability to effectively respond to the prompt ( Read more... )

On the first day of my first poetry class in college, we went around the class and each named a random word, which the teacher wrote up on the board.  By the end of class, we had to have written a poem using 10 of these words and read it out loud to the class.  I was horrified!  I’d never heard of some of these words before.  And the words that I ( Read more... )

Write a poem/song/short story/creative non-fiction (i.e. semi-autobiographical) piece about TROUBLE. Good creative writing is ALWAYS triggered by trouble-or features a main character who finds himself in a lot of trouble. Bob robbed a bank, and he's running across the country to escape the cops. Little Freddie dropped his mom's vase and doesn't ( Read more... )

Sometimes, as writers, we find ourselves stealing from other people-- words, language, ideas.  While this is NOT okay to do in our scholarly essay writing, this idea of stealing can be extremely liberating to a writer, and it can take you in directions that you have never even imagined.  I have stolen and typed 10 first lines of poems/novels/songs ( Read more... )