A Writing Challenge & How to Ideate
I was reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and was reminded of what Michael Dirda had written in its introduction:
If, as has been said, the world’s most basic post is “A stranger comes to town,” one can summarize this novel’s as “A strange carnival comes to Green Town, Illinois.”
It is exciting to think that a story can be summed up in just a few words. But it is even more exciting to think about just how many wildly different stories can be summed up in the same few simple words. ‘A strange man comes to town’ has so many possibilities. This is soil where my creative writing challenge grew its roots in.
I have come up with one ‘basic’ summary sentence that will act as an anchor to all the creative writing pieces written for this challenge. The creative writing itself can be anything fictitious: a story, poem, interview, diary entry, free flowing passages, or a satirical essay. The important rule is that is that one should be able to summarize it with the same one summary sentence provided.
The summary sentence is:
It all began with the night film.
Here are five ideas to play with it that I have come up with till now. These are specific to the prompt I have mentioned above, but I hope it can be used for other things as well:
Play with punctuation, emphasis, or grammar!
Think of how different ‘It all began with the night film’ sounds from ‘It all began with the night film’.
Does night film imply the existence of a day film?
Why is it ‘night film’? What are its defining characteristics? Is it nothing but a couple’s way of addressing their Saturday movie nights? Or is it something more sinister? Like a film that is only screened at 3:13 AM? Does it even need anything defining, though?
Is the night film a work in progress?
What if its about the people who are working for it rather than people who are consuming it?
Play with the senses!
The night film implies that visual perception of it might be a big part of its purpose. Give the readers something unexpected by changing its way of perception! What if its something to be touched, felt, heard, and not seen?
Is the night film speaking?
The writing can be something that is the night film rather than something about it. What if it’s conscious?
For one week, every day, I will write one short piece adhering to the summary sentence. I will try to experiment as much as I can with genres of creative writing! I will post all the links for the seven days of my writing here. Feel free to participate and post links in the comments section!
Find my About Page here.
Find me on Twitter here.
Subscribe to my (upcoming) Newsletter here.