Weekly Chat Writing Topics: Summer 2012

Question

The Tuesday afternoon chat was going well, and we agreed amongst ourselves to have an informal writing exercise every week. Chatters are free to participate or not, and to ask for critique or not.

The criteria for the exercise are posted and pinned in the chat room. Chatters are encouraged to post their exercises on their blogs (or other website) and then share the link in chat. If the chatter has no blog or other website, then we appreciate other methods of sharing text, such as Google Docs or Pastebin, that allow only a link to be shared, so that we don't drown the chat room with pasted text.

Chatters who post on their blogs may optionally include the following site-promotional boilerplate, provided to us by Mr.Shiny and New:

This blog post is a writing exercise from writers.stackexchange.com. Visit the Writers chat room every Tuesday for new writing exercises. This week's exercise: [the text of the exercise]

This post will be updated with the current exercise.

In the final August chat, we did a speed writing exercise (ten minutes, wriet as much as you want on a surprise topic). We enjoyed it so much, we decided to do one or two of these every week—live in chat!

Answer 1

For the 9/4/2012 chat (concluded), write a microfiction story (no longer than 600 words) using the first line prompt: "She did her best, but she was young."

In the 8/28/2012 chat (concluded), we wrote some microfiction during the chat session for fun and practice!

(NB: the 8/21/2012 chat was cancelled)

For the August chats:

8/7/2012: Write a scene where a couple is eating dinner at home and talking about their new next-door neighbors' weird possessions.

8/14/2012: Write a second scene in which the couple and the new neighbors (from last week's exercise) interact at a social gathering of some sort (a block party, BBQ, public pool, etc).

8/21/2012: Complete the story with a twist.

Most of us haven't finished these, so we will discuss them ad hoc in upcoming chats.

For 7/31/2012 chat (concluded): Write a dialog (only dialog!) between two people that includes within it pants and tacos.

For 7/24/2012 chat (concluded): Let's write a paragraph or two. The paragraph(s) should have no dialog, and contain a rusty nail, a tulip, and the word "spangled."