Writing Training, strategies & exercises to help us finish Options

[percival]

This thread was inspired by a recent post from Robert on the Settings thread ...

The question is: how can we achieve a mean output of 1500 words per day?

Robert describes an interesting training exercise:
He tried to conoct a fic based on three words randomly picked from a dictionary.

That exercise sounds very difficult, especially when one looks at the words Robert picked

What I've started doing is post 15-minute-fics in my LiveJournal. The idea is simple: you get a word (provided by the LJ community 15minuteficlets), and you have 15 minutes to write. I usually get 100-200 words done.

Or just write flow-of-consciousness like in a notebook for 15 or 30 minutes - don't backtrack, don't edit, just write. That's one of Natalie Goldberg's favourite methods.

What are your ideas?

percival

[Imogen]

LOL Told you I was slow. Here you go ~ this was ALL I managed to get done:

***

She could remember the gentleness of his touch His shadow looming above her so that the bright sunlight was blocked out as she squinted fiercely towards him. A blur of browns and beiges lived in that shadow and towered far above her world in number four Romney Lane. His life was soaring bird-like far above into the bright blueness of the air.

An amazing man, people often said; a hero. She should be so proud.

Sepia photograph sternness became the memory. The handsome young man with a proud set of his jaw, uniformed for all eternity. She’d stared at the washed out expressionless eyes for hours, trying to impose the picture in her world. Her cardboard cut-out father.

Yet sometimes she could feel his fingers ruffling her hair like the lightest breath of wind; present for that instant and they dancing off, swirling far beyond her reach. She would touch her own hair briefly, letting her hands run through the soft strands to the very tips where the locks tumbled beyond her reach.