Wednesday Writing Prompt 25

Happy 🐪 Day!

Here's this week's writing prompt:

1.      Having just been laid off, you suddenly find yourself free for the first time in years, and decide to finally pursue the one thing you’ve always dreamed of.

Wednesday Writing Prompt 24

Happy 🐪 Day!

Here's this week's writing prompt:

1.      As you browse books in your family library, you find the old journal of your great-aunt.

Rhyming Bias

Otherwise known as the "rhyme-as-reason effect," the rhyming bias is a proven mental tendency people have to trust things that rhyme more so than things that don't.

Not only that, but rhymes also stick in our heads better, and longer, like many songs heard in our childhood. Incidentally, it's why I've always said Disney should make all of its animated features musicals, because those songs help anchor their stories in people's very beings, making potential lifelong fans of them, whereas those without songs often fade into obscurity.

So why does our brain latch onto rhymes so well (even if it could be to our detriment)? Well, rhymes makes statements catchy, pretty, and easier to process because of it (our brain LOVES patterns!).

As stated on Effectiviology, "[p]eople, such as marketers or politicians, might use the rhyme-as-reason effect as a manipulation technique, potentially in an attempt to get you to act irrationally and against your best interests." So whenever you hear a rhyme, be careful! Someone might be trying to pull one over you (looking at you, Mother Goose!).

Wednesday Writing Prompt 23

Happy 🐪 Day!

Here's this week's writing prompt:

1.      Before you can graduate, you have to intern at an orphanage and show you know your material by teaching there. But the children teach you something else in return.

Living Up To Your Potential

 "The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in ever conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject--but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit--the habit of inferiority to our full self--that is bad." ~ William James, Energies of Man, 1907  

Why am I posting this quote? Because, as I get ready to face 2023 (I know, but it's already mid-November!!), I want to remind myself that it's too easy to let routine (or whatever other life event might be hitting me at one point or another) take over and sap my momentum.

Steven Kotler says in his book, The Art of Impossible, that we "lose by not trying to play full out, by not trying to do the impossible."

*Not a true representation of my writing desk

My impossible in the last decade or so, has been to write 2000 words each and every day (whether writing a story, or writing out the plans for one, or brainstorming my next piece, or even editing). I want to change that. I'm tired of having ideas for a dozen stories, yet still only moving at a glacial pace.

The key for me, I believe, is to figure out how to get into the flow, where I can spend hours uninterrupted plunged into my own stories. As Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote in one of her newsletters, "[r]eally good writers binge-write, the way many of us binge-read an author or binge-watch a really good show." That's what I want to work up to.

As Kotler stated, "the only real way to discover if you are capable of pulling off the impossible--whatever that is for you--is by attempting to pull off the impossible." And if I can't pull it off? Well, at least I'd be failing upwards. Right? 

Wednesday Writing Prompt 22

 

Happy 🐪 Day!

Here's this week's writing prompt:

1.      You find an old, grizzled dog lying on the side of the road, clearly abandoned, and decide to take him in.

Wednesday Writing Prompt 21

 Happy 🐪 Day!

Here's this week's writing prompt:

1.      It’s a hundred years in the future, and contrary to past beliefs, humans have managed to save the world from utter destruction by using new technology and completely changing their way of life.