Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Notebooking Daily Writing Exercise September 3, 2014

September 3: Wordbank day!

I hope everyone's Labor Day was productive and fulfilling. I had a little bit of this and it was delicious.

Today we'll return to the wordbank for our inspiration. From the following links to word sources, pick ten or more individual words that strike your fancy and write them in your notebook, these will be your wordbank words for the day: Washing, Pink, Adventurethis plot synopsis of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and a group of random titles from this sci-fi title generator.

Your words shouldn't be anything too ordinary, but if it's exotic you must do extra research. Do a couple quick searches for each word you've picked. I like to use a few familiar tools (wikipedia, dictionary, thesaurus, rhymezone, google/google news) and let anything catch my eye. The best part about researching the wordbank words is it's pretty free-form. You're just doing some light wading into the world via a single word as a jumping-off point. Write down your interesting tidbits, rhymes, your towns named Magenta, news items about new Laundry crazes. Just spend like twenty minutes (or at least ten, if you're strapped for time) mining the internet for interesting bits of information.

Now do a few of these simple writing exercises involving your wordbank.

1) Pick two words from your wordbank. Write three phrases, poetic lines or sentences that use both of those words.
2) Write three sentences that use one of the word bank words as well as the words "leather" and "stormy."
3) Write two phrases, poetic lines or sentences that use the word pair from exercise one but none of the other words (including articles, pronouns, everything (and no changing the first exercises either, buster!)
4) Using only words you haven't used from the wordbank, construct a paragraph that is at least four sentences long. The sentences should be of varying lengths, and use one different word from the wordbank each.
5) Find a place via wikipedia's disambiguation search function (usually at the top of the wiki page) that has the name of one of your wordbank words. Either do a little research on it, or just imagine the place in your head. Write a micro fiction piece (under 300 words--just over two tweets) that uses at least a fragment of one of your sentences, and is titled the place that you've researched or imagined (for instance "Magenta, Lombardy" or "Magenta, New South Wales")


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