The Time to Write
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The Time to Write

Any creative act takes time. Novels happen to take a lot of time, even just to get a first draft. That’s fine. When you’ve done it a couple of times, you expect to spend a large portion of your available time sitting at a keyboard, working away. NaNoWriMo just happens to require that you condense…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #7 – Prevention
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #7 – Prevention

Something explodes, a bomb, a volcano, emotional tension…but can it be prevented? So far we’ve looked at Cause & Effect in the sense that it’s a set thing, but is there something your characters could have done to prevent it from happening altogether? In this post, we’re going to look at the magical time travel…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #2 – Emotional Reactions
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #2 – Emotional Reactions

Previously, we looked at the ‘Something explodes’ card from the point of view of taking it literally. Now it’s time to step it up a notch. In this series of posts, I’m going to show you how this one card can be used to tell many different types of stories, and affect much more change…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #1 – Literal Explosions
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #1 – Literal Explosions

One of the first cards I decided upon for the first deck of Pocket Prompts was ‘Something explodes’. It’s bold, dramatic, and can stir a story. In this series of posts, I’m going to show you how this one card can be used to tell many different types of stories, and affect much more change…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #3 – Dire Consequences
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #3 – Dire Consequences

In my last post, I explores the concept of an emotional explosion, to pair up with the idea of a literal explosion. Today, we’re going to look at a different way of using the ‘Something explodes’ card: it’s time to look at dire consequences. One question comes to mind every time the news channel plays…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #4 – Cause & Effect
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #4 – Cause & Effect

So far, we’ve looked at types of explosions and how to use them in a story, and a disastrous (or hyperbolic) consequence of the explosion. Now it’s time to look a little further back: cause. Every story has a beginning, middle and end, and even if we begin with the explosion, the root explanation for…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #6 – The Aftermath
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #6 – The Aftermath

In our discourse about explosions – a sentence I never thought I’d write – we’ve looked at the sort of explosion, the cause of the explosion, and began to look at the aftermath. Today, we’re solely focusing on how the world looks after the explosion. Literal explosions are maybe easier to imagine for this, so…

Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #5 – Getting Political
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Pocket Prompt Expansion: Something Explodes #5 – Getting Political

In previous posts, we’ve explored literal and emotional explosions, dire consequences and Cause & Effect, and I promised we’d explore that more as the expansion of the ‘Something Explodes’ card continues. When discussing Cause & Effect, and specifically when focusing on something so charged as an explosion, one question must be asked that, unfortunately, rings…