I listen to a podcast called Writing Excuses. In it, they give writing tips, writing prompts, sometimes they have special guests, and they plug books that either they’ve read or heard about. These are usually on Audible, of which they have a promotional agreement with, but I can forgive them that because I might do it myself via Amazon.
Anyway. One of the suggestions they mentioned was that writers should practice by doing 800 words a day. I know with NaNoWriMo requires 1667 words a day for 30 days. Yes, that’s crazy.
Another reason to do this was that a friend of mine, Cold Soldier who is hosting this site has a blog called My Page A Day. A page to me was 1000 words. I can’t do a thousand words every day! However, 800 words, yeah, I think so.
I didn’t have any ideas, however I have a couple of apps on my iPhone:
Brainstormer which gives you random plot/issues and two places/persons. The style is pretty neat, and I find the words generated to be so totally odd that I’m trying to search for something to fit. Amazingly enough, it does spark ideas, to which the muse loves to play with. An example was: Enigma, Wild West, storyteller. Have fun with that.
The other I have is StoryForm (you’ll have to go to iTunes’ store, there’s no outside link). This gives five items: Theme, Profession, Location, Thing, Theme. You can also save them.
Other inspirations are music and movies, and TV that I watch on DVD. There may be fan fiction here. If I write a story that ends up on warwriter, my other blog that concerns itself mostly with genre stories, I’ll just link it. Consider this space to be my junk drawer, idea seeds, sticky notes and my little notebook that I carry around everywhere I go.
So, for shits and giggles, I tried to do 800 words while I was at work. I did it in half an hour, just straight typing. It started one way, and went into an entirely different direction. When I finished, I refused to edit the meandering, just grammar and spelling.
And I looked upon it, and it was good.
Well. That didn’t hurt so much. Maybe I can do that. So…here you go. Enjoy rummaging.