Writing Prod - Advertising A-No-No - 2

            Do you know what today is?  

            That’s right; it’s back to school day. Let’s shout out a big hooray. After two weeks of holiday madness and children with too much energy from too little activity outside the house I am finally free. Well, mostly free. They monsters are coming back home eventually.

            Today is also the first full week of the New Year. I’m not going to call it a resolution, but I have been mentally preparing myself to get some serious writing done this year. Not that 2012 was a horrible year for writing; I finished a rewrite of a novel, submitted it twice and had it rejected just as often, and sold three stories. The trouble is that I could have done so much more. This year I plan to do more. Expect me to work on my novel Exit Stage Left and submit it before the year is out. 

            In a few months, I will be attending my fourth LDStoryMakers conference. These are great and you don’t have to be LDS to attend. It will also be my third time for entering the First Chapter contest they hold each year. One of the entries I plan to submit is based on a Writing Prod idea I generated on the blog a few months ago. I mention that only to demonstrate how effective writing prompts can be to a writer – even a writer as full of ideas as I am. (Not to toot my own horn.) 

            On with today’s prompt . . . Advertising A-No-No. This is one of the sillier prompts that I have listed. The idea is to take an ad from radio, television, or magazines and develop a story based on a world that is really the way they show it in the ad. Then from there you turn that into a story.

            Or else, you can develop a sinister ad campaign of your own and then write the story behind it. There has to be some item, or personal quirk, that you think should be widely available to the masses. Just thinking about it gave me an idea for a story.   

 

  

          Canned Goods           

            While attempting to invent “Ready to inhale” dinners that a person merely breathes in to consume, Todd Frinkle stumbles upon a method of packaging good behavior. Just pop the top off a can of Consideration and breath deep and you will be amazingly gracious all day long. Fame, fortune and dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize all fade away when Todd discovers a group that plans to reverse engineer the technology so they can create a line of products that will turn people into remorseless killers. Even if he can find a way to stop them it turns out that the short cut to good behavior leads to a prolonged inability to tell right from wrong. But how can a crack-pot inventor, a couple of neighborhood kids, and a nearly blind dog going to prevent it?