Jan 14, 2013 / Topic Ideas

Writing Challenge: Starting Over

For some of us, blogging is personal. Others are trying to educate or entertain; many more are hybrids. Yet we’re all storytellers. Creative Writing Challenges help you to push your writing boundaries, show off your blogging chops, and, hopefully, spark more post ideas.

To participate, tag your post with DPchallenge or leave a link to it in the comments. (It would also be great if you could link to this post to encourage people to take part – the more the merrier!)  Your post should be specifically written in response to this challenge. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorite posts on Freshly Pressed on Friday.

Making a new start is never as simple as it seems on paper. It’s easy to talk about losing a few pounds or giving up the job you hate to weave animal-shaped baskets on a tropical island, but less so to make it happen, and keep at it.

In this week’s writing challenge, we’re asking you to write a short piece of creative writing (fiction/poetry/prose poetry/freeform mindjazz/whatever floats your boat) on the theme of Starting Over.

Drop Starting Over on your page and see where it takes you. Or, if you need a bit more to go on, here are some more ideas to play with broken down into a handful of genres/approaches:

Poetry/Prose Poetry

  • Winter’s end
  • A new stage of life
  • Moving on, up, down or sideways
  • Picking at a scab
  • Cherry blossoms in flight

Free Writing

  • New Year resolutions: aftermath
  • Where I’ve been, where I’m going, how they clash
  • Overcoming it all
  • You can never go home again

Horror

  • Sometimes things don’t stay dead
  • You can’t escape the things you’ve done
  • House of echoes
  • Consumed by the past

Science Fiction

  • Hard reset
  • Temporal disruption
  • Dissolving identity
  • Regime shift

Romance

  • Back, out of the blue
  • Swept away
  • Discovering a new me
  • Life after impossible love

Fantasy

  • A New reign
  • Burnt village
  • After the quest
  • Dark omen

LitFic

  • You can never go home again
  • Regret and remembrance
  • Road trip
  • The spiral down

Crime/Noir

  • Old identity unearthed
  • Revenger’s tragedy
  • Aftermath of a heist
  • The imperfect murder

As always, show us what you’ve got in the comments, or tag your post with DPchallenge.

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  4. I must admit to a cheat too.

    After a recent encounter with some blog “stalkers”, I was forced in a sense, to change the whole nature of my blog. It was something that I deeply mourned and still do, however, as the challenge asks us to do, it forced me to push past my comfort zone. To change the tone and types of postings I authored. Below is the first post where I realize how to “beat” the stalkers. The second is one of my NEW posts, not the journal entry like posts of yore but something totally different. I have also been dabbling in poetry too! http://iamanafterschoolspecial.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/an-ah-ha-moment-oprah-would-be-proud-of/

    http://iamanafterschoolspecial.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/a-clockwork-orange-by-anthony-burgess-tale-of-personality-disorder-or-a-misguided-youth/

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  6. Reblogged this on Queenie and commented:
    This is great idea that is why I have reblogged it and I so want to write something! I will see if I can squeeze it into my teaching week! X

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    　＿_▂▃_▅▆▇███▇▆▅_▃▂ Daniel says it’s good to start over

    http://myblogexactly.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/starting-over/

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  16. This sounds exciting. =) It’s a great list to keep for writers for the rest of the year actually.
    Thank you very much for the challenge.

    Lila

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