Sandbox Challenge #9: Mix Up Your Prompts

For this challenge, I’ve combined two common writing exercises—to use an image or a random line from a book as a prompt:

Open any book and let your finger fall on a sentence. Then open a magazine and note the first picture you see. Combine the two and write a scene, a character description, some dialogue, a poem, a freewrite, a memory or whatever else arises.

If you like, post your creations in the Go Wild! section of the Readers’ Sandbox. (I love it when people share!)

Here’s mine (from a sentence in The Lovely Bones and a photo in National Geographic):

Ruth would get an image and it would burn into her memory. She didn’t forget things like Jasper, who struggled to recall anything beyond the basic facts of his life 30 years ago. If he sat quietly for a while, he could conjure up vague reminiscences. But almost as soon as they arrived, the impressions floated slowly away from his mind, like glaciers drifting off the edge of a faraway alien country.

Copyright @ Sandy Ackers, Strangling My Muse: Struggling to Live a Creative Life in a Stressful World, http://www.stranglingmymuse.com

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