April A-Z Challenge.

Well, it slowly appears to me, that this year 2011 is becoming my year of the challenges. In February we had the February Journaling Challenge, hosted by Dolly and myself. A couple of days ago Carol's blogpost draw my attention to:

Some of you might remember FJC, Day-09: I Am... A-Z. I LOVE those ABC lists. They are a great for training your brain and a wonderful source for inspiration. You might imagine, that I instantly caught fire for that new Blog Challenge!

But our own challenge had taught me well. You just can't start such a challenge and hope to end it successfully without a little planning. I wanted to have at least my complete prompt list! While pondering about that, I came very fast to the conclusion to give my posts a theme: My blog is supposed to be about writing, so, the one and only logical conclusion, that my theme for the month will be Writing ABC!

Why should I rack my own brain, when some research does the trick? For 'writing ABC' I've mainly found instructions how first-graders learn to write the ABC. And 'writers ABC' gave me alphabetical lists of authors. Even 'writing lexicon' brought no useful results... I found myself quite surprised, that obviously there doesn't exist anything like a Writing ABC, or I just searched with the wrong words. Anyway, I should keep that in mind!

Instead I asked some befriend writers about their ideas - btw: Thanks a lot! My dear friend Dolly additionally made me think beyond the obvious, she wrote:

"You could pick words / phrase and write a story that centers around it. Or you decide on a longer story, and write a scene each day. First decision is what do you want to write? Fiction? Non-fiction? Short Stories? Novel? Poetry? Articles? Once you decide what you want to write, then you can choose appropriate theme."

She was right! The prompts alone aren't enough. The idea to write a serial with an alphabetical start of the daily scene was very intriguing, remember Michael Ende did that in his 'Never ending Story', but not what I'd intended to do.

So, what else? I finally ended to do it the Carrie Bradshaw way. I'm going to write a daily column. 200 words about my thoughts, believes, experiences, etc. to a special prompt. I already have my prompt list:

As you can see, my list has grown quite well over the last couple of days. I only have to chose which prompt I take. It shouldn't collide with the 30 Writing Questions, but I think, that will work out well!

I'm looking forward to the challenge and I'm quite excited about it! Maybe some of you want to join in, too! One way or the other, enjoy reading the upcoming ABC posts!

P.S. If you have some ideas for the letters J, O, U, X and Y, leave me a note!