Guest Prompt for March 10, 2023
Interested in being featured? If you would like to be featured for a guest prompt please send an email to sprinkledinspiration@yahoo.com
Feature Friday: Brian Mooney creator of Storymatic.
Brian David Mooney is the creator of The Storymatic family of creative prompts, which help people write and share stories and memories. He has published essays, fiction, and poetry in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Fiction, Bellevue Literary Review, Chicago Review, Cincinnati Review, and many other journals from further into the alphabet.
His essays about the creative process were presented by Leonard Nimoy for United States Artists at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Paramount Studios, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He's the recipient of two creation grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the NEA to support his work, and he's had writing residencies at the Hall Farm Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and Vermont Academy.
Brian received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts and has taught creative writing at UMass, Marlboro College, the Putney School Summer Programs, and the Smith College Young Women's Writing Workshop. His writing and teaching is very much informed by Robert Frost’s statement, "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
Brian’s Prompt
1. Combine the yellow cards to make one character who is both of those things.
2. Spend a little time writing about that character. Get to know that person a little bit.
3. Now complicate things with one or both of the blue cards. Send a little earthquake through the character. Let the card(s) change the internal weather of the character.
4. Move to a resolution in which the character adjusts to a new normal.
Related reading: The Kiss, by Anton Chekhov
For poetry, there are a few options. The first is to simply look at the cards and see what comes to you. You can use all or some or one of the cards.
For you puzzlers and wordplay people out there, there are 16 words on the cards. Seven of them are prepositions/articles (for example, “on the”). That leaves nine nouns/adjectives/verbs, etc. So: write a poem that uses one of the nine words in each of your lines. For example, “kiss” is in one line, “knock” is in another, “door” is in another, etc.
For More From Brian
You can find Brian on the socials
https://www.instagram.com/storymatic/
https://www.facebook.com/thestorymatic
https://twitter.com/Storymatic
If you would like to have your own box of fun you can visit Brian’s website to purchase Storymatic or the other writing games he offers.
Interested In Being Featured?
If you would like to be featured for a guest prompt please send an email to sprinkled inspiration@yahoo.com