Weekly Chat Writing Topics: Fall 2012

Question

Tuesday afternoon chats are continuing to go well. We meet in The Overlook Hotel starting at 1pm Eastern time (1800 UTC) and generally wrap up anywhere from 2pm to 4pm Eastern, depending on how much people feel like chatting. The schedule is posted here, and we are looking to start a second session for people who can't make it during those times.

We have an informal writing exercise every week. Chatters are free to participate or not, and to ask for critique or not. All are welcome to come, read, and discuss; completing the exercise is not necessary.

Chatters are encouraged to post their exercises on their blog or other website, or by using Pastebin or Google docs, or by pretty much any method that allows the chatter to share a link in chat.

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]

About the writing exercises:

1. The criteria for the weekly exercises are posted and pinned in the chat room.

2. Please share only a link to avoid cluttering the room with criss-crossing text walls.

About the timed exercises:

1. The topic will be announced in chat when everyone is ready.

2. Volunteers may give a topic if they want to. Please coordinate with the host if you want to suggest the timed writing topic.

3. After ten minutes, the host will declare that time is up.

4. Please use the same sharing method as the weekly exercises (paste a link).

All exercises are for fun. We want you to have a good time writing and talking about writing, as well as have an excuse to sit and write at least once a week. If you have suggestions for writing exercises, feel free to post them here, or better yet, come to chat and discuss them! See you there.

This post will be updated with the current exercise.

Answer 1

For the 12/11/2012 chat: We'll talk about the story Monkey on my Back. The writing exercise is three paragraphs. In the first, describe an object. In the second, describe a person. In the third, describe the interaction between the person and the object.

For the 12/4/2012 chat: What did we learn from NaNoWriMo? And for those who didn't participate, what do you want to know about how it works?

The November chats were relatively quiet, although we used them as pep talk time for Wrimoers.

For the 10/31/2012 chat, we got amped about starting Nano.

For the 10/23/2012 chat (concluded):

We'll talk about how to figure out your writing pace, so you can plan how much time you will need for NaNoWriMo.

For the 10/16/2012 chat (concluded):

We'll look at your character sketches. Bring your drafts and we'll talk about what sort of things we can do to examine pertinent aspects of your specific characters.

The 10/9/2012 chat was a free-for-all chat about writing and chat.

For the 9/25/2012 chat (concluded):

We'll talk about the novel-sized worlds we're creating and discuss how to design characters.

For the 9/18/2012 chat (concluded):

We'll bring an idea of what we might write about for NaNoWriMo, and we will brainstorm on expanding or enhancing those plots. You don't have to participate in NaNoWriMo to join. We are practicing preparing for it.

For the 9/11/2012 chat (concluded):

We will review the work on the three-part August exercise and discuss any other work as requested.