The Weekend Writing Showcase is open!
TGIF, YeahWriters! Let’s make this place your home for all the stories that didn’t make it to the YeahWrite competitive grids this week. As a refresher, here’s what we had going on!
Technique Toolbox: What’s in the Box?
Every time you write, there are three groups of people involved: Writers, Readers, and Characters. The quickest way to confuse all three of them is to forget who knows what at which point in your story. Check out our tips and tricks for keeping that straight with a Se7en inspired question in this month’s Technique Toolbox!
Fiction|Poetry Prompt Up:
The first prompt for our month of 7s is: incorporate one of the Seven Deadly Sins into your plot in an INTEGRAL way. In other words, your story wouldn’t work if the idea of the sin was taken out. As with last month’s defined words, you do not have to use the word in your story, but the definition of one of the sins must be a pivotal and identifiable element in your plot.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Seven Deadly Sins, you can click the link for more information, or you can find good resources here, here, or here. For our purposes, the Seven Deadly Sins are the following group of vices within Christian teachings:
- Lust: an uncontrollable passion or longing for bodily pleasures, especially sexual in nature.
- Gluttony: the overindulgence or overconsumption of anything, to the point of waste.
- Greed: the insatiable pursuit of material wealth or gain, to the detriment of the spiritual realm. Also known as avarice or covetousness.
- Sloth: a disinterest in, and inability for exertion, the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.
- Wrath: uncontrollable anger, rage or hatred towards another person.
- Envy: the resentful desire for someone else’s traits, possessions, abilities, experiences, or status.
- Pride: considered the original and most deadly of the seven deadly sins, and the sin from which all the others arise, pride is the excessive belief in one’s own abilities and importance to the exclusion of others and of the grace of God.
The second prompt, from YeahWrite #362 fiction|poetry winner Ruby Bastille (Laura Duerr), is a 7-word line of dialogue that your story must contain unaltered: “I’d never seen anything like it before.” Note that this is dialogue. A character in your story must say or think it. This is not narration.
Poets: Use the line of dialogue (“I’d never seen anything like it before.“), write a poem focusing on one of the Seven Deadly Sins, or write a rime royal poem (or any combination of those three).
April Poetry Slam: Rime Royal
It’s our seventh birthday and we’re celebrating with a seven-line form, the rime royal. This form’s heyday stretched from Chaucer to Shakespeare, but we think it’s time for a revival. With only three rules, what could go wrong? Stretch your poetic muscles and join us this month!
April Microprose:
Seven years is a long time, but it also feels like an instant. So for this month’s microprose challenge, we want you to give us a story in exactly 49 (7×7!) words that begins with the word “seven,” and ends on the word “years.”
A few rules:
- Total wordcount is exactly 49, including the two prompt words. You provide the other 47.
- Words must be used exactly as-is. (“Seven,” not “seventh” or “seventeen; “years,” not “year.”)
- Words may be part of dialogue.
- Words may not be part of a hyphenated word. (No “seven-year-old,” for example.)
You know the drill, YeahWriters. Bring us your best writing this weekend!
You got rules, right?
What?! It’s the weekend. There are no rules during the weekend. You can share a post that’s as many words as you like, a piece of fiction, a poem of your choosing, or a persuasive essay. Whatever you want, you can share. Well, except commercial or sponsored posts. That’s the one rule that never changes.
While you’re hanging out with us, please remember to visit other posts on the grid, comment, and take part in the community here! That’s what makes YeahWrite the place to be.
How to submit and fully participate in the Weekend Writing Showcase:
Basic YeahWrite guidelines: no word limit; no date restriction; no commercial/advertising posts (product reviews, sponsored posts, etc.); three post maximum per writer.
1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the Weekend Showcase badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.
Have fun!
Loading InLinkz ...About the author:
In early 2014, Arden joined YeahWrite as a contributing editor and social media manager, and we haven’t been able to get rid of her since. Behind the scenes, Arden is currently working on the first novel of her Hybrid trilogy. She also recently published a fantasy anthology entitled The Seven Sceptres which can be purchased on Amazon. Arden lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband and two fur-babies. To read more of her stories, visit her website.
