Writing Prod: Advertising A-No-No

       

            Are you ready to set pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and let loose the dogs of inspiration? If you aren’t quite ready to start your serious writing you can get a nice creative warm-up with this weeks writing prompt. Or you can just check out what kind of craziness I come up with for my examples. No matter what your reason for stopping by (and I’m awfully glad you did) it’s time for this weeks prod.

            The prompt for this week is a little bit silly. I call it Advertising A-No-No. Isn’t that a cool sounding name for it? The idea is to take an advertisement on television, radio, or any of the print media and write a story about what would happen if the world was just as it is depicted in the commercial.

Now, if you want to generate a story that is a little more serious all you need to do is take the commercial and turn it into a sinister conspiracy. Imagine what nefarious goal, other than making money, a company might have for wanting you to purchase their product. If you want you can even try coming up with your own diabolical sales campaign and sell us a product that no one in their right mind would want to buy.

Example 1:  Based on the current series of M&M commercials that have the witty candies talking to regular people. This presents what would happen if the world was just as it is depicted in the candy commercial.

Food For Thought

Lenny doesn’t have any friends. Unless you count his roommate Stewart; the only person in the world with less social skills than Lenny. Worse yet, he has three weeks to finish his final thesis for psychology and has no idea what to write about. Then Stewart asks Lenny to test his latest chemistry experiment – a food additive that will make people smarter. When Lenny takes the serum he doesn’t get any smarter, but now his food talks to him. Candies, vegetables, even soft drinks want to give him advice on everything from the stock market to his love life. He questions his own sanity and urges Stewart to find a way to reverse the effect until he realizes that what the foods have to say makes sense.

 

Example 2: Based on your average beer commercial that depict a happy and carefree atmosphere as long as you drink their product, I have developed a little conspiracy to give you something to think about while you’re drinking.

            Happy Hour

Nate might be in a rut, but what a rut it is. Energy-drink his way through eight hours of complete tedium and then meet up with the gang at The Dive. As soon as that first beer hits the back of his throat everything changes. He laughs. The people around him laugh. They don’t even have to know what they’re laughing about. This is the life. And then Nate hits the jackpot; he wins a tour of the local brewery for him and five of his friends. He is half way through the tour when his alcohol-diminished sense of balance sends him tumbling down a set of stairs. Eventually, he wakes up and overhears a discussion that sends chills down his spine. The company is brewing up more than just some tasty suds, they have laced the beer with a chemical that overrides the human drive to excel thus making the country susceptible to an invasion.

Challenge: Writing about how a company turns an unwanted item into a marketable product is a story all of itself. I had thought of presenting an ad campaign for toxic waste as an example, but I think I will leave it as a challenge for all of you instead. Can you come up with a way to sell this? (I know a couple of companies that did.)

  

This Week In The Blogverse - The Warrior Muse

            For the final offering of This Week In The Blogverse we are going to hop on over and visit Shannon Lawrence at The Warrior Muse. This is another blog that I’ve been following for a long time and really find it useful.

            On Mondays, Shannon offers writing advice. This is sometimes her passing along what she has learned from J. T. Evans and titled Write Brain, which most recently discussed computer security. She also puts out tips of her own; as she did this week with a post about taking inspiration from life and included a writing prompt about it.
            Then she has Mostly Wordless Wednesdays which is sort of a double feature. First up is the mostly wordless portion of the post where she includes pictures of whatever theme / topic she picked for the week. These vary from week to week, but often involve personal elements of her life. Last week, she posted pictures of the fires around her home in Colorado Springs. My favorite was the pictures that she took at the Fine Arts Center.
            However, it is the second part of her Mostly Wordless Wednesdays that originally caught my attention. Shannon offers helpful links. Most often these links are to writing contests or other writing related events on the blog. As it just so happens, I am working on a short story today so I can submit to the Once Upon An Apocalypse contest I read about thanks to Shannon.
            For me, a blog that has assembled a host of writing opportunities into one place that I can check out on a regular basis is marvelously useful. I wish I knew more about more blogs that did this.
            You may notice that the link to her blog takes you to a post on writing post-apocalypse stories. Yeah, I did that because that’s my favorite genre and really enjoyed the post. But it’s all good.

Movie Review: Brave

Brave  $$$ 1/2

PG

100 Minutes
Starring: Kelly MacDonald, Emma Thompson, and Billy Connolly.
Director: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell.

            As usual, Pixar does a wonderful job with this film. Before I get into that I want to take a moment to comment about the short feature they included with it. I love that Pixar has brought back this form of micro entertainment to the theater. Not only is Luna a fun featurette, but it’s a nod to masterful storytelling. It demonstrates that conflict (which is at the heart of any true story) can be fun and light and that character can be developed without using a single understandable line of dialogue. For all of my fellow authors, take a moment to admire the craft that goes into creative and compact story.

            Moving on to the main event, we are introduced to Princess Merida (Kelly MacDonald). She is a free spirit who wants to choose her own destiny. Unfortunately she is the princess and expected to select a suitor from one of the three clans that are allied with her father’s kingdom. None of them are good matches for her, but even if they were she is headstrong and unwilling to accept the life that has been arranged for her.

            The opportunity to direct the helm of her own destiny is given to her when she follows a trail set by the will-o-wisps and encounters a witch. Merida purchases a spell from the witch that will change her mother and in doing so will change her destiny. As you can imagine, the change is not what Merida expected or wants and she must race to save her mother and her father’s kingdom.

            If I have to find a fault with this film it is in the fact that it is predictable. That’s not always a bad thing. You know coming into a Pixar film that it will be good family entertainment where we have a predictably satisfying ending and a host of laughs along the way. Let’s face it, that’s why we go to Pixar films in such large numbers. The story line is interesting and I especially love the Scottish setting of the story.

            The voice acting was seamless and the animation was beautiful. This is everything you expect from the Pixar studios. Normally, this is where I would make a comment about the villain and how he/she either made the film better or weakened the movie with their sub-standard appearance; however, there isn’t a true villain in the movie. The conflict in the film is provided by Merida and her mother Elinor (Emma Thompson) in a manner that makes the story all the more touching because of it.
            See this first run so you can enjoy all the color and sound in its best presentation, but you can probably wait for a bargain showing. While it caused me to tear-up in spots, I don’t find myself anxiously waiting for it to come out on DVD so I can purchase it, or a need to rush out and see it again right away. This is good fun and worth the money to see, but I don’t expect it to be the best movie of the year or even of the summer. 
 

            Randy’s Rating System

$$$$   = Full Price    See this movie right away and pay full price, it’s worth it.

$$$     = Matinee      Catch this as a matinee or other discounted showing.
$$        = Discount     Wait until this movie reaches a discount theater near you.
$          = Rental         Wait until this movie reaches your local video rental outlet.
0          = No Sale       Don’t see this movie at any price.