Writing Exercise - Novel

Writing Exercise – Novel

I’m often asked where the ideas for my novels originate. Having an extremely vivid imagination makes that hard to answer. They’re everywhere. Like the idea below it normally starts with a question.

You received an email this morning saying you were going to die today. What are you going to do?

From there, I create a character.

In this case my character is a hard nosed journalist for a local paper. She would normally just ignore a stupid email like the one she just opened – EXCEPT – in the past month seven people had died mysteriously, and the only thing they had in common was the fact that on the date they died they all received the same email.
So now I have my character and my idea. What is she going to do?

Dennie Burns had grown up in one the roughest parts of Chicago. She’d never learned to simply give in or give up. The local authorizes and FBI had gotten nowhere in their investigations into the seven mysterious deaths. She had 24 hours. She wasn’t going down without a fight.

Now the easy part is done. The rest is putting it all together.

Give it a try. I’d love to see how different people, different occupations, different lifestyles would respond to receiving the same message. The receiver doesn’t even have to be your main character. Your main character could be trying to help the receiver. Perhaps your character is a thief and they decide to pull off the biggest heist in history before they die. Your character is a serial killer that goes on a bloody rampage. Dress it up, have some fun. I hope you’ll share your thoughts or a short blog post to share with others. It’s been said there are no original stories left to write—but there are original ways to write them. This is an exercise in originality.

Linda S. Prather, Author
The Gifts, A Jacody Ives Mystery ($.99 - Amazon Kindle)

Sacred Secrets, A Jacody Ives Mystery ($2.99 - Amazon Kindle)