Sailing the Sea of Imagination

I'm currently working on a manuscript for Pumping Your Muse for kids. I love to encourage kids to be writers. Don't know what the title will be, but I'm working through the exercises with two children and having a blast. They started out thinking it's too much work, and walked away yesterday excited and with their first scene written.

My purpose for this blog is to help pump your muse, too, so that you too walk away with a new scene, character, skill or idea. If that happens, drop me a line at dsundblad (at) theinkslinger.net. You can also contact me with questions.

Today's Prompt:

For today, we'll use this photo prompt. Look at the photo and if you don't know where to begin answer these questions:

Where are they going?
Why?
What led up to them setting sail.
What do they smell?
What do they hear?
What do the feel?
What do they see?

Have fun as you sail on the sea of imagination!

Olympic Emotions Writing Prompt

The Olympics are full of emotion and present a great opportunity to learn how to show emotion rather than tell about it. As swimmers slap the wall in a close race they look up at the official times to see the reality of who won. The camera isn't on the board, it is on the swimmers. Their faces SHOW it all!

Pick an Olympic event and challenge yourself to write a paragraph that shows the emotion on an athlete's face. If you have time, I suggest you do more than one. These paragraphs will come in handy later when you write a story that requires joy, nervousness, crushing defeat...

Learning to incorporate real emotion in your writing is like the difference to watching the official times on a board, or seeing the emotion on the athlete's face. Which would you rather see in your writing?

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For a wealth of writer prompts check out my book Pumping Your Muse. These prompts can be used separately or used to pull together a fleshed out novel outline.