Writing Prompts from the Clarion Writers Conference
My other main web project is the Harlan Ellison directory. My goal is to catalog Ellison’s many writings, in sf, crime, and essays. So far, with the help of fellow Ellison fan and Quarter Up contributor AT Gonzalez, we’ve cataloged over 400 works. We’re still a long way from the 1,700 that Ellison frequently proclaimed.
When reading The Book of Ellison, I came across the essay School for Apprentice Sorcerors. The essay is about the Clarion College Writer’s Workshop in Science Fiction. Ellison was one of the instructors at the original 1968 workshop. Originally hosted at Clarion State College in Pennsylvania, it is now hosted at UCSD in California.
What intrigued me most about the essay was a list of writing prompts Ellison shares at the end. If you’re a writer, these make for a good set of mental workouts.
Try turning one (or all!) of these into the first lines of a story.
1. The unemployment line was long: one vampire, two werewolves, a ghoul, three witches and a succubus.
2. Nora felt disgusted at having to eat the Catholic priest; she’d never really wanted anything to do with the church.
3. Monroe’s time machine was a real innovation: he activated it and promptly destroyed Monday, September 22nd, 1969.
4. The Indian brave, Momashay, ignored the child’s protests as he swung it by its ankles and smashed its head into a tree.
5. When I am in the sun, I half close my eyes and look at my lashes. There are rainbows: that is the only beautiful thing to me.
6. His shoe swiftly consumed his foot.
7. They crucified Christ again today. I don’t think he did anything this time, either.
8. Once, upon a dime, a flea ran through a quick but impressive circus act.
9. Body tense and sweating, Byron concentrated on marking off his answers; if he failed the written part of the masculinity exam, Laura would find herself another husband.
10. Sam Untermeyer was a rotten kid; even his mother said so.
11. Icarus passed overhead with sound and fire like all the wars of all time and struck the earth somewhere beyond Chicago.
12. “My son, the Polish Army had one helluva time keeping up with combat on the semi-sweet Eastern Front.”
13. He stood grinning, with a penguin under each arm, as though a man with a glass tumor was a thing of the past.
14. When Harold Plidner was four years old, he decided he wanted to be a cauliflower.
15. Sylvia took off her clothes seductively, jumped into Harry’s lap and began to wag her tail.
16. One day the Pope forgot to take her Pill.
17. The road to Cinnabar was lined exclusively with the burned-out shells of school buses.
If these don’t get your narrative gears running, nothing will. If you write a story from one of these prompts, leave a comment with a link to it! (directions for emailing comments below)
UPDATE ON QUARTER UP
The summer issue of Quarter Up comes out this Friday. Be sure to check out the page for our quarterly pinball/arcade newsletter at nantucketebooks.com/quarterup.
In the summer issue, you’ll find a review of the Sonic Cafe in Houston, claw machines in Katy, Texas, Leland’s history of Wyvern F-0 by Taito, and a posthumous column from Buffalo. I’ll update this post with a link when it’s out.
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