And Now We Write

  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 37: Writing Exercise – Love, For Worse

    In the US, we celebrate Valentine’s Day in February. This day is usually seen as a celebration of romantic love, but love is a many-splendored thing. We love our parents, we love our pets, we love writing, we love New York. This month we’ll be writing about love in all its forms. For today’s ten-minute…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 35: Writing Exercise – Dialogue With and Without Context

    Our dialogue exercises this month, with a couple of exceptions, will focus on the mechanics of dialogue writing. The subject of the conversation is less important than the effect of specific mechanistic choices or constraints that we’ll be playing with. For today’s ten-minute writing exercise: Write a conversation between two people about washing the dishes,…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 34: Writing Exercise – Love Blooms

    In the US, we celebrate Valentine’s Day in February. This day is usually seen as a celebration of romantic love, but love is a many-splendored thing. We love our parents, we love our pets, we love writing, we love New York. This month we’ll be writing about love in all its forms. For today’s ten-minute…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 33: Writing Exercise – Tom Swifties

    Writing can be fun — and funny. Gene Perret is a master of classic humor, and in Comedy Writing Step by Step he coaches the reader from a blank sheet of paper all the way to developing a standup routine. We’re going to adapt a few exercises from the book, and today’s exercise is one…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 32: Writing Exercise – Questionable Dialogue

    Welcome to February! To kick us off this month, we’ll write a bit of dialogue that should have us questioning everything … or, at least, have one of the characters questioning everything. For today’s ten-minute writing exercise: Write a scene entirely in dialogue — no stage directions or descriptions allowed. Dialogue tags (“he said,” “she…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 31: Writing Exercise – User Agreement

    Using a well-defined text convention that is not narrative prose can catch the eye of a casual reader and force the writer to improvise to adopt the conventions of the borrowed form. For today’s ten-minute writing exercise: Using language as bloodless and legally flavored as possible, write a mobile app user agreement that grows increasingly…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 30: Writing Exercise – Unnamed Characters

    For a handful of exercises this month, we’ll look to works from the long and living legacy of Japanese literature for sparks of inspiration. For today’s ten-minute writing exercise: In The Tale of Genji, most of the characters are unnamed — they’re referred to by honorifics or by their role, like Heir Apparent. Recount the…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 29: Writing Exercise – Set the Plot in Motion

    This January, we’ve been working on first lines and beginnings in honor of the new year. This is our final exercise on beginnings! For now anyway! Happy 2025! Today’s ten-minute writing exercise is: In her flash fiction collection Ghosts of You, Cathy Ulrich starts every story with “The thing about being the murdered blank is you set…

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  • 2025 Writing Challenge Day 27: Writing Exercise – Who Is Right?

    Write an advice letter or Reddit post that’s seeking validation rather than advice …

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  • Flash Week Challenge Day 7: Writing Act Four

    It’s the last day of Flash Week! Today, we write “The End.” If you’ve gotten this far, you have a four-act outline ready, you’ve drafted the first three acts, and you are ready to write Act Four of this story. If you missed the first six days, I recommend you go back and start from…

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