A Word A Day

I am subscribed to A Word A Day's listserv, which delivers a single word and its meaning and etymology to my inbox everyday. Check it out for yourself:
http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html

Writing Prompts

Tonight at my writing group, Leah gave me this prompt: "why here is an apple in my bag." Ay ya yay, is what I thought. That's a tough one. But as my pen started scribbling, I started to write about two teenage girls, their relationship threatened by the loss of a treasured item. How I got that from that prompt is beyond me. But somehow the act of letting words run like a cascade of running water through the cogs of imagination pull out the most unusual narrative routes.

I have this book called "The Writer's Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination," which is chock-full of writing prompts.

Here is one I recently used: Pillowtalk.

Try it out for yourself.

The Beggar Maid (Alice Munroe)

A series of short stories follows Rose and her not-quite-ever-broken ties to her stepmother Flo in Hanratty, Ontario, an economically impoverished town. It is these ties that bind, entwine, and squeeze too tight that become a running theme through each story. The ties that become a tug-of-war between the real self she tries to leave behind in Hanratty and the imagined self she presents to others, such as to Patrick Blanford, heir to a chain of department store. And yet he does the same; he falls in love with the idea of Rose as a beggar maid, the innocent, ragged imp he hopes to fashion into someone refined and glamorous. And Rose, liking the attention and possession he feels, lets herself be taken in. Neither in marriage nor in the go-nowhere affairs does she find satisfaction or fulfillment, the latter marked by endless "watchpot thinking," waiting for hours and days, strangled by hope; "the waiting would be interspersed with such green and springlike reveries." So characteristic, perhaps, of Rose who has in fact escaped the fate of others from her hometown, and yet never escaped. She becomes an actress and then a teacher of drama, play-acting for others and continually doubting herself. Perhaps not surprising is that she finds her closest connection with a classmate whom she briefly sat next to in class. It is with Ralph Gillespie--famous for the imitations of others he does--that she feels kinship. Munroe's book is not a quick read for the beach or for the plane, as the language she uses must be savored and swallowed slowly to be fully appreciated.