Thursday, October 16, 2008

Tell Me A Story

If you are familiar at all with SpongeBob SquarePants, you know how fun imaaaginaaaation is. You also know that Squidward Tentacles has very little imagination, though he plays a mean clarinet. While Squidward can entertain himself to a certain extent with his clarinet skills and his hobby as a painter, what does he do when he's out of reeds and his paint has dried up? And the TV is broken? And Patrick Starr borrowed his radio and used it to rig a jelly fish trap? And the Krusty Krab is closed due to one of SpongeBob's shenanigans?

He needs to hone his imaginaaaaaation!

And so do you.

There's a book that I've been wanting to buy for a while now called The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg (the author/illustrator of Polar Express and Jumanji among others). In this book, a fictional editor introduces the images contained therein by telling about an author/illustrator named Harris Burdick. Burdick came to his office wanting to publish some books he'd written and illustrated, and left one picture from each book with the editor, each with a title and a caption. Before they could be published, Burdick disappeared, along with the rest of the stories. All that is left are these mysterious images with their cryptic captions and our thirst to know the whole story.

Below I have included one of the images from this book. The title of the image is "Under the Rug," and the caption is, Two weeks passed and it happened again. (OoOoohh...mysterious!!) My challenge to you is this (it's pretty simple): come up with a story to go along with this picture!

Here are some options:
Option one: come up with a full story on your own and post it on my blog.
Option two: start a story to go along with the picture, but leave a cliff hanger. The next person to sign on will continue the story, and so on. (You've all played games like this at parties...) I like this option, but want to leave you to choose.

Let's dust off those imaginations and get writing!



2 comments:

jules said...

Hey Kitty Kat,
That's cool. I don't want to write a story....but I did want to say, I have a similar little book called "The Writers Block" by Jason Rekulak. 786 Ideas to jump start your imagination.
Here are some examples:

Chronicle the longest time you have gone without sleeping.

Spark word: Prom

Write a story that begins: The last time I saw my mother was fifteen years ago.

Describe the most disappointing gift you've ever received. What did the gift reveal about the giver?

Invent the perfect crime.

If you could script the plot for the dream you'll be having tonight, what would it be?

Spark word: Superstitious

Invent a charachter who wins 76 millino dollars in the Florida Lottery. What's the first thing they buy? How long before an ex boyfriend or girlfriend comes back into the picture?

Katherine said...

OoOoOOooh! Those are some great ideas!! I feel some more stories in the offing...