Yes, yes, your moderators have been painfully absent. Especially me. What can we say? The dreaded (cue ominous music) Real Life (/om) occasionally gets the best of us.

But the season is over (sob) and now is our chance to synthesize what we've learned about the characters during the season, and enjoy the freedom to write about current events without ( Read more... )

Today's exercise explores two writing concepts: learning to use random ideas and creating very short drabbles. With our other exercises, we've assigned you a set of prompts. This time, you get to choose your own ( Read more... )

Just to prove that The Clinic's friendly mods have not completely disappeared under the morass of real life, we've cooked up a little exercise. Because we love puns, it's the R exercise. Dispensing instructions are as follows:

We have 15 words, all starting with the letter "r". They are: reciprocate, reason, respect, report, robbery, redeem, race ( Read more... )

I'm thinking of a new House fiction project for myself.  Here's the inspiration:

• I have been reading great fics, and I realize I don't have a grand, long story idea at the moment, but I enjoy writing shorter ones.
  
• I have really been enjoying the Kickstarters exercises here in the Clinic.
  
• I read a great fic that had a touching image of two ( Read more... )

We’re bumping up this collection of The Clinic’s two Kickstarters writing exercises for those who’ve just started visiting here and may not have seen them. Some of these have been very popular and sparked some great Housefics, which you can read by clicking on the links below. All the finished works have led to great discussions, and there are ( Read more... )

genagirl recently had a great idea for a writing exercise. She wrote six 100-word drabbles that connected to create a single story. Her idea, beautifully executed, is here: The Space Between Us.

The latest writing exercise for The Clinic draws from that, and it also aims to incorporate some of the good information about drabbles that extrabitter recently brought to ( Read more... )

The object of this exercise is to take a collection of ordinary objects and weave them together in a fic.  For an outstanding example of how this works, check out
( Read more... )

Here’s the second batch of Kickstarter dialogue prompts. Same idea as before: Use the prompt. You are allowed to change it slightly. Keep the story under 1,000 words, if possible. There is no deadline.

These have a general theme of “ultimatums and declarations.”
( Read more... )

This exercise came out of several topics on "what makes you want to read a story?" that have been discussed recently in the Housefic writing communities. The consensus was that a bad summary can stop a reader cold, and can be major impediment to checking out the work of a new or unfamiliar writer ( Read more... )

Just a reminder that the Kickstarters exercise Kickstarters #1 still has several prompts no one's used yet.

Thanks go to all the writers who've participated so far. As Kickstarters are more addictive than M&Ms, you're allowed to have more than one. Go for it!