Write what you want! —

Pick a topic. It’s not so important to “write what you know”, but “write what you want!”, and let it be something you care deeply about. Choose a situation based on raw emotion and  explore that — through your fiction writing — as a way to process relationships and events in your life.

If you are still drawing a blank about a topic, try this writing prompt.

Imagine that you are walking along a beautiful shore with your best buddy. Somehow the conversation gets onto a wrong track, and you say a hurtful thing that you didn’t mean, that isn’t even true.  You can’t un-say it but you wish you could.

Let your character try to explain it, apologize, rant still further, or whatever you hear in your head.

The act of writing up such a situation, and fictionalizing it, can help wash a real situation clean. You might find yourself more hopeful, or better able to laugh at yourself after taking your experience and working it into a story.

Remember to change the names of the people and places. Let it be fiction, not a diary.

Now go and try the exercise and see where you get. Then come back and let’s visit some more.

— Manna is everywhere! —