Author: Lorelle VanFossen

Lorelle VanFossen is a pioneering XR Innovator and WordPress leader, tech educator, keynote speaker, and producer bridging virtual reality and digital innovation. Co-founder of Educators in VR, founding WordPress community member, and passionate advocate for emerging technologies and human rights. Expert in immersive education, VR/XR event production, UX, and digital transformation.

Prompt: Character Secrets and Relationships

The following prompt comes from the must-attend Be Writing Conference in Eugene, Oregon, presented by the WordCrafters writing group. It is a two part prompt and works best when done with a partner, though it may be done alone.

With your own character or select a personality or behavior characteristic from list one and a job description from list two and write about the resulting character using the prompt under these two lists:

  • List One: Personality and Behavior Characteristic:
    • Pyromaniac
    • Abused
    • Humiliated
    • Convicted
    • Egotistical
    • Kleptomaniac
    • Lying
    • Time Traveling
    • Barbaric
    • Bigoted
    • Suspicious
    • Curmudgeon
    • Pompous
  • Job Descriptions:
    • Kindergarten Teacher
    • Doctor
    • Baker
    • Dairy Farmer
    • Grocery Clerk
    • Nurse
    • Mother
    • Truck Driver
    • Housekeeper
    • Janitor
    • Accountant
    • Lawyer
    • Bank Clerk

Describe the following for your character, keeping it fairy concise:

  • Name.
  • Description as if pointing to the person across the room.
  • Where does this person spend the majority of their time and why?
  • What is their deepest secret, something they might never tell anyone including their best friend?

The next step is to either do another character or do this with someone else.

Share your characters with each other described in one to three sentences.

Answer the questions:

  • How would these two people know each other?
  • How did they meet?
  • What do they have in common?
  • What is there relationship? Is it friend, acquaintence, co-worker, family?
  • How does this relationship change your characters?

Scrivener: Formatting Your Manuscript for Writing

I’ve been asked to continue this ongoing series on how to use Scrivener, a powerful writing tool that is a must for many professional writers. Scrivener works for those writing poetry, fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, and…the list is long. It is a pre-production tool, a tool for the writing and development of your material for publishing. While Scrivener includes the ability to export the information as an ebook and material ready for publishing, it isn’t designed as a tool for publishing a pretty book. It is the workhorse that gets you to that point.

Scrivener is software installed on your Windows or Mac machine and is produced by Literature and Latte. The price is very reasonable and the purchased version of Scrivener maybe installed on your desktop and laptop without problems so you may work in both environments.

So far in this series we’ve covered:

In this part of the series, I’ll cover how to set the standard format for new documents, the process of fixing content that comes in a jumble in formatting, and how to set the default or standard format for new documents in Scrivener projects.

Setting the Standard Format for New Documents

Let’s begin with how to set the standard formatting for new documents in Scrivener, projects you are just starting. I’ll cover the process for Windows machines. It might be slightly different for Mac. (more…)

Prompt: Being Brave


The prompt this week is from Pat Schneider’s book “Writing Alone and with Others,” a book we use as one of our key guides for our writing group. The exercise on being brave.

Write something that feels too huge, or too dangerous, to tell. Courage is not the special prerogative of those who have experienced some dramatic suffering. It is a part of the human condition, related to the danger and the suffering we all experience. Once a writer friend said, when she learned that I had been in an orphanage as a child, “Pat, you are so lucky! What hurt you is so clear and obvious!” She grew up in a proper home where church and community kept things in order. How do you find what went wrong, when the table is set with silver and the candles burn and everything is so proper? It takes courage – perhaps more than for those of us who have dramatic material in our background.

The following poem, of which this is an excerpt, served as the prompt example You may read the whole thing on Google Books for free.

The poem was written by a young woman in Japan during one of Pat’s workshops there. The woman is C. Misa Sugiura and speaks of the shame a child feels when ridiculed, focusing on the poet’s attendance at an elementary school in the United States.

When I was little,
people laughed at me
and called me
flatface.
They pulled their eyes into
slits
and said,
“Me Chinese!”
and laughed.

I didn’t know my
face was flat
so I went home
and looked in the mirror
to see…

So I went to school
and said, “I’m Japanese and
my face
is like yours,
isn’t it?

And they said,
No.
It isn’t!
It’s flat like a pancake.
Me Japanese pancake-face!
And they laughed.

And I went home again
and looked in the mirror
and I cried because
they were right.

Prompt: Forget About Today Until Tomorrow

From Mr. Tambourine Man by Bob Dylan:

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Prompt: Limerick

The prompt this week was to write a limerick. A limerick is a poem style that gained popularity in the early 18th century and has a strict form and rhythm. It is such an accepted form of poetry, many can finish the last line if the writing compels them to do so with rhythm and rime.

According to Wikipedia:

Limerick is a form of poetry, especially one in five-line, predominantly anapestic meter with a strict rhyme scheme (AABBA), which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The third and fourth lines are usually shorter than the other three.

According to some experts, a limerick isn’t a true or pure limerick unless it has an obscene element, and that clean limericks were just a “passing fad.” Edward Lear (19th century poet) truly popularized the form and was published in the papers, though he claimed these were not limericks.

An example of an early form of limerick by an unknown author is:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
Into space that is quite economical.
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

A limerick consists of the standard form of a stanza of five lines. Using the measurement of a “foot” as the limerick’s meter and pattern, it is ta-ta-TUM, an anapaest. The first, second, and fifth rhyme with each other and have three “feet of three syllables each.” The third and forth lines are shorter and rhyme together with two “feet of three syllabus.”

The storytelling order of a limerick is:

  1. Introduce a person and a place, with the place words at the end of the first line.
  2. Line two continues the action, and rhymes with line one.
  3. The third line sets up the “fall” of the person and is short and sets up the rhyme for the next line.
  4. Another short line continues the action and rhymes with the line above it.
  5. The last line is the punch line, and rhymes with the first and second lines. Sometimes this is a repeat of the first line through a twist of works, but not always.

One of the most famous examples of limerick forms is:

There was an Old Man of Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket.
His daughter, called Nan,
Ran away with a man,
And as for the bucket, Nantucket.
– Anonymous

The prompt was to write a limerick. Play with rhymes and storytelling, and attempt to create a twist at the end.

The Car Had a Mind of Its Own

The following was written by Writers in the Grove member, Lorelle VanFossen, inspired by Prompt: The Haven, to write an anthropomorphic description of something.

The car had a mind of its own. Warm morning starts were appreciated, purring with the welcome strokes of affection. Cold mornings were greeted with angry whines, coughs, shutters, and sighs, none too eager to leave the comfort of the cave.

On the flat, it raced and roared, a lion exploding from a crouch among the grasses with a burst of speed, seizing the nape of the road with blood thirsty glory.

Hills made it gasp and wheeze, an old man dragging himself, cane in one hand, banister in the other, up each dreaded step, questioning each one, evaluating the true reward at the top.

Downhill, I swear the car held its arms over its head and shouted “Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee” like a child tearing down a wintry hill barely holding onto the cardboard under its body. Downshifting to control the free fall brought little result save billowing clouds of blue smoke out the back in protest of being called home for dinner when there was fun still to be had.

The job of the little car was to get me there and back safely. It took its responsibilities seriously, never letting me forget how hard it worked for me. Thus, it deserved its name: Martyr.

Prompt: The Haven

The following prompt comes from the book “Beasts in My Belfry” by Gerald Durell from chapter 2, “A Lust of Lions.” The following describes an official building at Whipsnade Zoo in the UK, one of the first zoos to attempt to provide “natural” quarters for their wildlife, and his adventures as a young man working there, determined to become a wildlife specialist.

The nerve centre of the section was a small, tumble-down hut hemmed in by a copse of tangled elder bushes. The hut wore a toupee of honeysuckle at a rakish angle, practically obscuring one of its two windows and so making the interior dark and gloomy. Outside it sported a battered notice-board on which was the euphemistic title “The Haven.” The furnishings were monastic in their simplicity – three chairs in various stages of decay, a table that rocked and jumped like a nervous horse when anything was planed on it, and a grotesque black stove that crouched in one corner pouting smoke through its iron teeth and regurgitating embers in quite incredible quantities.

The prompt was to describe something, preferably an inanimate object, using anthropomorphic descriptions. Make us see the character of the thing.

Treasure Hunting the Streets

The following is by Writers in the Grove member, Lorelle VanFossen, based upon Prompt: Dumpster Diving.

“I need a foot stool,” I said, balancing on a chair to reach the cupboard over the fridge.

“Have you checked the streets? You don’t look safe on that chair.”

“Not yet. Just realized I needed one.”

“Here,” my husband said. “I’ll get this. Check the streets. You’ll find one.”

And I did.

The streets of Tel Aviv and much of the big cities in Israel are famous for three things.

Constant and never-ending reconstruction of the sidewalks. They tear up the brick and sand to lay down new pipes to supply water, electricity, and gas to the buildings. Then they tear them up to add cable and telephone lines, then rip those up to fix the pipes that were damaged by the cable, tear that back up to add improvements, then start all over again as one or more of these processes messed up the previous processes, and up goes the sidewalk. It’s a constant battle as you move through the city to walk in and around sidewalk construction and reconstruction as well as half-cobbled sidewalks.

Dog shit. Numerous attempts at poop-and-scoop laws brought little foot placement security to pedestrians as the laws are rarely obeyed by a society that decided a long time ago that many of these laws were for other people, not them. Certainly not them, the dog-walking owners.

Lastly, the streets are a treasure hunt for household items. Shops filled with second hand, used goods are rare in Israel. At the time we lived there, I believe there were four in the entire country. Decades of sanctions, import restrictions, over-priced and taxed goods, and poverty made every article of clothing, every dish or pot, every plant, every stick of furniture precious. Clothing worn out became rags at the worse, cut down and remade into something else to wear or cover a bed or warm toes watching television in the winter, a technique known today as “upcycling.” They mastered the technique ages ago. Rarely does anything go to waste. It was a necessity of life as it is around much of the world. Use what you have and make do with what you can find.

When you are finally done with something, you set it on the street corner. Someone would walk by and check it out. If it met their need, it would find a home. If not, it would wait for someone else, but not long. Rarely did anything last more than a few minutes on the streets.

Within two days a step stool appeared on the corner a block away. Two steps up, finely crafted stained maple, it folded up to a scant width for easy storage. Perfect. Home it went.

That night, my husband found me atop my new stool reaching into the cupboard over the fridge, now within my reach.

“I see I’m obsolete now.”

“Not completely.”

“Where did you find this. It’s beautiful,” he asked, examining the beautiful workmanship. A few nicks and scrapes here and there, but still a lovely piece.

“It was a street sale.”

“Of course it was. I wonder how many feet have been lifted up on this over the years, moving from home to home.” I stepped off and he picked it up and held it up to the light for closer examination.

We laughed and the stood became a part of our lives for the next four years, always there to lift our spirits and bodies to a higher level. When it was time for us to leave the county, it went out on the street corner to find another home, and continue its journey.