Welcome to the first writing exercise here at GOYAW!!!

First, if you know me and I know you, or even if I don't know you, and you want to join to write, email me! My address is in the sidebar. I would love for people who are interested in participating to become members so you can post your musings instead of just leaving them in comments. I also envision a writing community where everyone suggests different writing exercises, offers links to people like This Guy, and in general is all about writing, wanting to write, writers block and the eccentric tendencies of writers to not do the thing they love- write.

So write here. Write now.

I'll start with my favorite exercise... the LIST.

Read the questions, pick ONE and come up with at least twenty answers. This exercise doesn't work if you don't get close to twenty- the answers from 15 to 20 are the ones you could use as a plot in a novel- they are going to be the fresh, original ideas that only you come up with. Answers 1 thru 10 are typically the most obvious and would be the same as what someone else has come up with.

Questions:

* Why would a woman with long, dark, beautiful hair cut it off and dye it blonde?
* Why would a man take a new route to work?
* What might cause a family of five to move to a foreign country?
* Your main character goes crazy and walks into his place of employment with a bomb strapped to himself. What happened?
* A man is in love with a woman he just met, but she abhors him. Why?
* After ten years of marriage, a woman empties her bank account and vanishes into the night, leaving 2 small kids and a loving husband. Why?

OR MAKE UP YOUR OWN.

Here's mine:

I'm choosing why a man would choose a new route to go to work:

1. He's bored with the old route.
2. He's having an affair and the object of the affair lives on that route.
3. He's stalking a coworker.
4. He's following his teenage kid, whom he believes is selling drugs.
5. The old route has potholes.
6. They installed one too many lights on the old route.
7. He's dumb and he thinks it's a shortcut.
8. (ugh, struggling...) The new route goes by a house he'd like to buy for his wife.
9. He's being followed by the CIA.
10. He's being followed by the mafia.
11. He read somewhere that you should change up your routines so as not to be targeted by identity thieves.
12. He's a pervert, and there's more kids in the neighborhood that the new route goes through.
13. He's on a diet and there is a McDonald's on the old route, and he's weak.
14. He heard that there's a meth lab on the new route and he's a new addict, spending his family's savings to feed the habit.
15. (ugh, again....) He's trying to get fired, and since he is normally a punctual person, the extra five miles makes him ten minutes late.
16. A co-worker he hates got his promotion, and that co-worker always takes the same route as the man. The man is afraid that he might pull the gun out of the glove comartment and shoot at the coworker if he sees him on the road.
17. They built a Krispy Kreme on the new route, and he's not on a diet.
18. There's a state trooper that hangs out in a speed trap on the old route, and the guy already has 4 speeding tickets and can't afford for his insurance to go up again.
19. He bikes to work, and he's avoiding a viscious oversized poodle that haunts the old route.
20. Hmmm, this one is tough.