Doing this every week is revealing, to say the least. The first thing it’s teaching me is how shallow my understanding of various genres really is. My writing is more of a parody of a stereotype of romance—to take this week’s exercise as an example—than it is actually evoking the genre.

Brown Leather Chair and Ottoman $1395
Photo by Paris on Ponce & Le Maison Rouge

On the other hand, it’s proving that I actually can bring a story to completion under time pressure, if I’m given enough structure. I have not once had an idea of how any of these stories would end. But I’m able to find an ending in the roughly twenty minutes of actual writing. They’re kinda clichéd and lame (today, I had two endings, and I decided on this one; I’ll put the alternate ending in the comments), but they’re endings that wrap up the story. That’s honestly more than I thought I could do on a regular basis.

As always, we’d love to see your take on these prompts in the comments. Or just poke fun at our attempts!

Character: Father

Object: Ottoman

Genre/Tone: Romance

Continue reading “Friday Freewriting – Robert – April 30, 2021”

We’re writing new original stories every week, and we’ll be posting them on Fridays. Here’s Robert’s response to this week’s prompts. Feel free to use the prompts to write your own story, and to share it in the comments if you like.

Character: Photographer

Continue reading “Friday Freewriting – Robert – April 23, 2021”

As mentioned, we’re writing new original stories every week, and we’ll be posting them on Fridays. So here are the prompts we used this week, followed by Robert’s story (crossposted at his personal site). Feel free to use the prompts to write your own story, and to share it in the comments if you like.

Accounting

Character: Accountant

Continue reading “Friday Freewriting – Robert – April 16, 2021”

It’s been a while since our last post. We’ve been working on a writing project which has kept us pretty focused on our own little world. But we’re poking our heads up again, and looking forward to connecting with others!

One way we’re doing that is by writing an original story (each of us) every week, just to get in the habit of telling stories. These aren’t really serious stories, really just writing exercises – but they’re exercises that create a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

There are lots of ways to do this, but for the moment we’re using what we’re calling the Mary Robinette Method.

Continue reading “Back to Basics”