Monday Writing Prompt: Collage

This week's story starter is based on an exercise by Karen Brennan in a book called Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers. She offers three different prompts, actually, with instructions to write one paragraph for each one:

1. a personal memory (or dream)
2. a current news story or cultural event
3. a detailed description of the natural world

"Do not worry how your pieces relate to one another; the longer you work on your collage, the more the pieces will begin to establish their own connections," she says. After getting down your initial response to each prompt, follow your intuition in revising them. You may decide to massage the paragraphs into a more traditional narrative, or to stick with a more disjunctive, experimental style.