YEAH WRITE!

Take thirty 3x5 index cards.  On 10 of them, put a thumbnail description of a place.  ”Pizza parlor with jukebox,” “treehouse in a suburban backyard,” “forest with creek and ravine,” “small 2-bedroom house in a low-income neighborhod,” etc.  On 10 of them, put thumbnail descriptions of fictional characters or people you know.  Name, age, gender, physical traits, job, a few emotional/psychological traits. Nothing too complex here.  On the last 10, put thumbnail descriptions of events.  ”A child’s birthday party,” “a washing machine overflows,” “A Ramadan break-the-fast dinner,” “loss of virginity,” etc.  If you’re really ambitious, up the number of cards in each stack to 15 or 20.  Then shuffle each stack and pull.  That place, that person, that event.  This will be like a hard workout in the gym for your writing muscles, and it’s also a lost of fun.  I used this in a writing class I taught for 7th and 8th grade aged homeschooler kids, and it was extraordinarily successful.