Party all the time
This weekend I took my younger son to a four-hour-long birthday party. What on earth, I wondered, could entertain a dozen five-year-olds for four hours straight? It doesn’t take much, as it turns out.
I have been to kids’ parties that were scheduled down to the minute. Twenty minutes on the trampoline, fifteen minutes to take down the piñata, a focused game of pin the head on the dinosaur, followed by cake and ice cream and presents and farewells. It takes a lot to keep kids moving from activity to activity, and by the end of it all, everyone is cranky. Do we really need all this structure, though? People are fairly simple, whether they are grown or small. A bit of food, some good company, a few rules to define the space, and everybody has a pretty good time.
In this case, all the kids wanted was the chance to run amok for a while and be themselves. My son made a bee-line for the tea set. A couple of the girls moved right into the dollhouse, and the rest of the kids bounced back and forth between the snacks and the dress-up clothes. It was a joy to watch each and every one of them find the thing that made them happy in that moment.
Now, we don’t provide the victuals, but we like to think we throw a pretty good party around here. Today, we’re serving up a little fiction and poetry. What are you bringing to the table?
[Speaking of birthdays, we’d all like to congratulate Natalie on her very own gift to the human race! The newest member of the yeah write community was born on July 31. Swing by the coffeehouse to give her your best wishes, or post a comment here.]
If you decide to play along with our fiction|poetry challenge, be sure to read the submission guidelines before you press Post. Have a favorite yeah writer or two? Why not ask them to be your writing partner? Everyone needs another set of eyes to point out the typos, content errors, and ungainly phraseologies in our posts. Stop by the coffeehouse and make some new friends!
Prompt up!
Prompt up is our optional weekly writing prompt for the fiction|poetry challenge! Here’s how it works: we choose a sentence prompt from last week’s winning nonfiction post and announce it in the kickoff. It’s your job to use that prompt in your poem or story and then run with it. The prompt is just a springboard, though: feel free to use it as your first sentence, move it, change it, or float down it to other territories.
Our prompt comes from Jan again this week: They think it’s hyperbole.
Wait! Where’s the poetry slam?
We’re taking some time off from our nonfiction know-how and poetry slams to focus on the super challenge this summer. However, you can always check out our archives if you’re needing a little more inspiration this week. Happy writing!
Check out Sunday’s post which kicked off the week here at yeah write. Our email subscribers can also join us in the yeah write coffeehouse at its home on Facebook.
Yeah write super challenge!
The second round of our first nonfiction super challenge wrapped up last Sunday, and the results are set to come out this week. Good luck to all our remaining contestants!
Feeling left out? Don’t worry, the next super challenge coming this fall will be for all you fictioneers out there. Sign up for our mailer today to get the announcements! We promise not to spam you.
Yeah write #277 fiction|poetry writing challenge is open for submissions!
Basic yeah write guidelines: 750 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; fiction or poetry only.
How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:
- In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the challenge grid badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry
- Follow the InLinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid
- Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message
- Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge
- Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog
Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.
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