Sunrise

Welcome to a new week, did you have a nice weekend?

Today's writing warm-up for the A to Z Challenge marks the beginning of a brand new day...

S for Sunrise

View from my office

1. Do you associate sunrise with waking up? Or do you only see the sun rising if you've been up all night? Think of all the scenarios you could write where the sunrise could play a part:

• The baby's been up all night and you're stressed out your box. What's wrong with him/her? You wish your partner was around to help with the baby, but they're gone. Furthermore, they'll never speak to you again. Where are they? What's happened?
• You've had to come into work at the crack of dawn, because your boss is a bully and is offloading his work on to you. Your work life is having an impact on your home life (are you taking it out on your family? Do the kids miss their mummy/daddy?). Your boss has taken credit yet again for your work and landed a fat pay rise, and you can't take much more of it. What are you going to do?
• You're walking home from a riotous party alone, though you arrived with your partner. What happened? Try and come up with as much drama as possible during those darkened hours.

2. Sketch a mind-map using the key word as the nucleus, then branch out in whatever direction you please. You might find yourself going in completely unrelated paths (which I personally prefer). Do a five-minute freewrite incorporating as many (or few) branch words as you like. Here is my mind map (created using the SimpleMind app on my phone).

3. Choose one of the following sentence starts and freewrite for a few minutes, letting the words tumble out without a second thought:

• I'd been searching all night. When the sun began to rise, my hopes of finding him began to fall...
• He watched the sun rise from the window, bleary eyed. He'd had not a wink of sleep, but had to leave in an hour...
• Their parents slept soundly, unaware that they weren't really staying with their friends that night...

I find it best not to read my freewrites for at least a few days. Why not stuff them in a drawer and surprise yourself? It's blatant evidence that our minds work in mysterious ways. Plus, I defy you not to find an array of story seeds amongst your work.

 

Do you have any writing warm-ups you'd like to share?

 

Take care,

Catherine x

 

Note: All photo prompts in the A to Z Challenge 2013 are my own. Use and abuse to your hearts content, I'm not precious about them. Help yourself. :)

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Sunrise