This video prompt gives you the chance to practice writing a few rungs lower on the evolutionary ladder.

After viewing the video begin writing.

Dear Unpublished Guy:

Do you actually think kittens are tasty? Judging by the short story you submitted to our journal, you must have dined exclusively on kittens for many years. To call your submission fiction would be inaccurate. In …

Moments that grip, surprise, twist, amuse, frighten, and seduce have no business in fiction. The unpublishable writer must consider half-baked, haphazard moments. The story won’t elevate to the level of unreadable unless it’s stuffed full of these moments.

• The moment

…

He was a high school biology teacher working on a special science project.

Book Cover – I Was a Teenage Clone

I Was a Teenage Clone tells the story of Mr. Landon, a biology teacher at the local high school …

After the fiasco with the stampeding herd of chevrotains, Ishmael returned to his room at the Pequod.

Motel Run Like a Whaling Ship

The light flickered the way bad motel room lighting stereotypically does. Ishmael Barz pulled a slab …

Fiction writing style that features repetition and more repetition.

Tale of a Whale

The Chopsticks style was pioneered by Fred Schonell and popularized by William S. Gray and Zerna Sharpin of Dick and Jane fame. Its popularity peaked during the …

Sorkin, Writer of Short-Lived Mathew Perry, Slop Suffers for Art

This past weekend, Aaron Sorkin, writer of the West Wing and some short-lived Mathew Perry slop, broke his nose while writing. Apparently, he was reciting dialogue into a mirror …

A character from my novel in progress.

Sleepy Ahab’s Baader-Meinhof  Clones

Sleepy Ahab runs the motel, where the main character of the novel has been staying. The motel is located along highway 19. Sleepy Ahab has crazy Albert Einstein hair

…

Dear Ms Unpublished Guy:

We were dismayed that your short story title, Happy People, had not intended to be ironic. The gratuitous acts of good will were truly appalling. We have never before read a story that contained so …

Chip is just like you or me. A blue, frosty complexion. He had chocolate drop eyes and a vanilla wafer tongue. But something made Chip different.

Book Cover – Chip

This is the incredible story of a pastry chef with …