• pineapple

    Writing Prompt: Murder is legal as long as the murder weapon is a pineapple

    Here’s a little warm-up I wrote today. Murder is legal as long as the murder weapon is a pineapple. So the first rule is “never eat a pineapple”. It’s too easy to inject or lace a pineapple with strychnine or cyanide. So more fruity Hawaiian drinks. No more canned fruit cocktails. And no more pineapple on pizza, which put an end to that debate quickly. We’re lucky it had to be pure pineapple, not pineapple and poison mixed in with something to disguise the taste. A cynical man would think that demand for pineapple would be driven up, even if the fruit was no longer consumed. In actuality, pineapple plantations…

  • rapunzel tower

    A Little Writing Prompt Exercise to Kill Time This Friday

    “Begin a new story at a far psychic distance and, within 200 words, gracefully decrease the psychic distance until you are in first person.” “Your main character is Rapunzel when the prince comes along. Or your main character is the prince when he meets Rapunzel. They begin to talk. She starts falling in love with him, and he starts falling in love with her. From the point of view of either of them, write about falling in love.” The speck she thought at first was a fly was actually in the distance, she realized. It was moving too slowly to be a fly. Among the bushy trees, like stalks of…

  • dark room

    Writing Exercise: Darkness

    “You, a grown adult, are afraid of the dark. Explain why this is a legitimate concern, so friends won’t laugh at you.” All right, so this is the reason I’m scared of the dark. Now obviously I don’t tell anybody about this, because I’m a grown-ass man. I should know better, right? But you all have your childish fears too. Some of you are afraid of showers or tunnels. If you think about it, there’s no reason to be scared of spiders. There are three thousand species of spiders in North America and only two are poisonous. Two! Only four people die from spider bites per year. When you take…