Weber County Writing Center

08/27/2026

✨ NATIONAL SPARK THE WORLD DAY

EVERY STORY BEGINS WITH SOMETHING SMALL

Writers sometimes believe they need to have everything figured out before they begin.

The world.

The plot.

The characters.

The ending.

The magic system.

The twelve-page genealogy explaining why King Whatsisname hasn’t spoken to his second cousin since the Great Turnip Incident of 843. 😂

But stories rarely arrive fully formed.

Sometimes they begin with something incredibly small.

An image.

A woman standing alone beneath a waterfall.

A character.

A warrior carrying an axe and a secret.

A question.

What if the stars in the sky weren’t the stars someone remembered?

A sentence.

A scrap of dialogue.

A strange footprint.

A name you can’t stop thinking about.

A single spark.

And then something extraordinary happens.

You follow it.

One question creates another.

The character acquires a history.

The path leads into a forest.

The forest contains ruins.

The ruins suggest someone came before.

Suddenly that tiny spark has become a place with histories, cultures, creatures, conflicts, friendships, songs, legends, languages…

A world.

That’s one of the quiet miracles of writing.

You don’t need to see the whole fire before you strike the match.

You only need something that makes you curious enough to ask:

What happens next?

✍️ FIND YOUR SPARK

If you’re struggling to begin, don’t try to invent an entire story today.

Write down one thing that fascinates you.

One character.

One place.

One impossible situation.

One question beginning with:

What if…?

Then give yourself ten minutes to follow it wherever it goes.

Don’t worry about whether it’s good.

Don’t worry whether it becomes a novel.

Don’t even worry whether it makes sense yet.

Just protect the spark long enough to discover whether it catches.

Because somewhere inside an unfinished sentence, an odd little idea, or a question scribbled in the margin…

an entire world may be waiting for you to find it.

✨📖

08/27/2026

🍒NATIONAL CHERRY POPSICLE DAY: CAN YOUR READER TASTE THE SCENE?🍒

Writing with the five senses

Consider these two sentences:

Lyra ate a cherry popsicle.

Perfectly functional. We know what happened.

But compare the experience of:

The first bite was sharp with cherry and cold enough to make Lyra wince. A moment later, melted crimson syrup was already slipping over her fingers.

Now we’re there.

That’s the power of sensory detail.

Writers naturally gravitate toward what characters see, but your reader has four other senses waiting to be recruited.

👁️ SIGHT
The jewel-red popsicle glowing almost translucent in the tropical sunlight.

👂 SOUND
The faint crack as she bites through the frozen surface.

👃 SMELL
The sweet-tart scent of cherries as it begins to melt.

👅 TASTE
Cold, bright sweetness followed by a little sour bite.

✋ TOUCH
The shock of ice against her tongue. Sticky juice running between her fingers. Condensation against her palm.

Suddenly we’ve transformed a character eating a popsicle into an experience.

But here’s the trick:

You don’t need all five senses in every description.

That can make prose feel like the writer is working through a checklist.

Instead, choose the specific sensory details your viewpoint character would notice.

A child might notice the bright red tongue it leaves behind.

A chef might notice the balance between sweetness and acidity.

Someone standing outside in sweltering heat might care about only one glorious thing:

COLD. 😂

✍️ THE THREE-SENSE CHALLENGE

Take an ordinary sentence from something you’re writing:

She entered the forest.

Now rewrite it using three senses other than sight.

What does the forest smell like?

What does the ground feel like beneath her feet?

What insects can she hear?

Is the air cool against her skin?

Can she taste rain approaching?

You don’t have to describe everything.

Choose the details that make the reader feel as though they’ve stepped through the page.

Because description isn’t simply telling your reader what something looks like.

It’s giving them a body inside the story.

WRITE BEYOND WHAT THE EYE CAN SEE.

🍒📖

08/26/2026

📖 WORD OF THE DAY

ASSIDUOUS

/ə-SIJ-oo-əs/
adjective

Showing great care, attention, and persistent effort.

Example:
Through assiduous practice, the young scribe transformed uncertain sentences into confident prose.

Talent may open the door.
Assiduous practice teaches you what to do once you’re inside.

Great writing is rarely one great effort.
It’s many small efforts, repeated.

08/26/2026

🐾NATIONAL DOG DAY🐾

ANIMAL COMPANIONS AREN’T JUST COMPANIONS.

THEY’RE CHARACTERIZATION.

GIVE YOUR CHARACTER SOMEONE WHO CAN’T READ THE SCRIPT

There’s a reason animal companions have wandered through stories for thousands of years.

They can reveal things about a character that dialogue never will.

A hardened warrior may intimidate everyone he meets…

until a muddy dog puts its head in his lap.

A character who claims to care about nobody may quietly divide their last meal with a hungry animal.

Someone incapable of saying “I love you” may communicate it perfectly by checking an old horse’s injured leg or staying awake beside a frightened puppy.

Animals don’t care about your character’s reputation.

They don’t know they’re the Chosen One.

They haven’t read the prophecy.

And they’re remarkably unimpressed by dramatic backstories. 😂

They respond to behavior.

That makes them wonderful tools for characterization.

🐺 MEET FROSTBITE

Cedridir found Frostbite as a direwolf pup after goblin fur trappers killed his mother.

He rescued him.

Fed him.

Protected him.

Raised him.

And somewhere along the way, the helpless, rescued animal became a loyal companion and fierce protector.

That tells us something about Frostbite.

But it tells us considerably more about Cedridir.

We can be told that a character is compassionate.

Or we can watch him encounter a helpless creature in the aftermath of violence and see what he chooses to do.

✍️ WHAT DOES THE ANIMAL REVEAL?

If you give a character an animal companion, don’t let it become furry scenery.

Ask:

How does your character behave when nobody human is watching?

Does she talk to the animal?

Does he sneak it food?

Who protects whom?

What does the animal understand before the humans do?

What happens when the animal dislikes someone its person trusts?

And perhaps most importantly:

What side of your character does this relationship allow the reader to see?

Because sometimes characterization isn’t found in what someone says.

It’s found in who they stop to care for.

🐾 Happy National Dog Day.🐾

08/26/2026

🍅 LA TOMATINA DAY

MAKE A MESS.

Somewhere along the way, writers got the idea that a first draft is supposed to look like writing.

You know…

Beautiful sentences.
Perfect descriptions.
Clever dialogue.
Elegant transitions.

Preferably something you could hand directly to an editor while casually saying:

“I dashed this off over the weekend.”

Nonsense. 😂

A first draft has a different job.

It has to exist.

First drafts are allowed to be messy.

They can contain terrible sentences.

Characters can change personalities halfway through.

Plot holes can gape open like sinkholes.

You can write:

[FIGURE OUT WHY SHE DOES THIS LATER]

and keep going.

You can discover on page 147 that something you wrote on page 12 makes absolutely no sense.

Keep going.

Because drafting and editing require two very different mindsets.

Drafting asks:

What could happen?

Editing asks:

What should remain?

Try to answer both questions simultaneously and you may spend forty-five minutes polishing a paragraph that eventually gets deleted anyway.

So today, in honor of La Tomatina, take a lesson from thousands of people happily pelting one another with tomatoes:

🍅 MAKE A MESS.

Get the story onto the page.

Throw ideas around.

Try the ridiculous possibility.

Write the melodramatic dialogue.

Follow the character who unexpectedly wandered into the scene.

Let your manuscript get tomato juice everywhere.

There will be plenty of time later to clean it up.

✍️ TODAY’S WRITING CHALLENGE

Set a timer for 15 minutes.

During those fifteen minutes:

You are not allowed to edit.

No deleting sentences.

No going backward to rewrite.

No spending six minutes deciding whether ambled is better than walked.

Just move forward.

And if you don’t know what belongs somewhere?

[FIX THIS LATER.]

Congratulations.

You have just invented a perfectly respectable first-draft sentence. 😂

Because sometimes the thing standing between you and a finished story isn’t a lack of talent.

It’s expecting the first draft to behave like the last one.

**WRITE FIRST.

CLEAN UP LATER.**

🍅📖

08/26/2026

🎭 In Memory of Tim Curry

Today, we remember Tim Curry, a performer whose unmistakable voice, presence, wit, and theatrical brilliance brought unforgettable characters to life across stage and screen.

For writers, his remarkable career offers a reminder of something we sometimes forget:

A character’s life doesn’t necessarily end at the edge of the page.

A writer may create the words. They imagine the character, construct the dialogue, devise the conflicts, and place ink upon paper.

But then, sometimes, a performer picks up those words…

and discovers something inside them.

A pause the writer never imagined.

A raised eyebrow.

A peculiar cadence.

A flash of vulnerability beneath the villainy.

A perfectly timed silence.

A laugh, a glare, a gesture, or a single line delivered in such a distinctive way that generations of people remember it.

Tim Curry possessed that rare gift.

Whether he was being hilarious, sinister, flamboyant, frightening, absurd, charming, or some wonderfully improbable combination of all six, he understood that memorable characters are rarely one thing.

They have texture.

Contradiction.

Rhythm.

Voice.

Presence.

From The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Clue to It, Muppet Treasure Island, Annie, Spamalot, and decades of stage, screen, music, and voice performances, Curry demonstrated just how much possibility can exist inside a character once someone truly inhabits them.

For those of us who write, there is something beautiful in that.

We place imaginary people on paper and hope, somehow, that readers will hear their voices.

Performers remind us just how powerful those voices can become.

Today, the Weber County Writing Center remembers an extraordinary storyteller who didn’t need to hold the pen to leave his fingerprints on countless stories.

A writer creates the words.
A performer gives them a soul.

The curtain eventually falls.

The stage grows quiet.

But the stories remain.

And somewhere, someone presses play, opens a book, walks onto a stage, quotes a favorite line, or meets one of those unforgettable characters for the very first time.

And the performance lives again.

Thank you for the magic, Tim Curry. 🎭📖

1946–2026

08/26/2026

♀️ WOMEN’S EQUALITY DAY

WHAT MAKES A STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER?

She doesn’t have to wield a sword.

She doesn’t have to win every fight.

She doesn’t have to be fearless, sarcastic, independent, or emotionally untouchable.

And she certainly doesn’t have to be written as a man with a different name.

A strong female character is not necessarily a physically strong woman.

She is a strongly written woman.

Give her agency.

Give her desires that exist independently of the people around her.

Give her strengths that sometimes save her and flaws that sometimes cost her.

Let her be intelligent and still make terrible decisions.

Let her be courageous and frightened at the same time.

Let her be ambitious.

Let her be nurturing.

Let her be angry.

Let her be funny.

Let her be vain, generous, stubborn, compassionate, selfish, sensual, awkward, brilliant, insecure, commanding, vulnerable, or contradictory.

In other words:

Let her be human.

Equality in storytelling doesn’t mean every female character must be extraordinary.

It means women deserve the same range of humanity we routinely allow male characters.

A woman shouldn’t have to prove that she’s “strong enough” to deserve narrative importance.

She can fail.

She can need help.

She can fall in love without surrendering her identity.

She can rescue someone and later need rescuing herself.

She can change her mind.

She can make the wrong choice.

She can carry scars.

She can have dreams that have nothing whatsoever to do with romance.

And yes, she can occasionally be the most dangerous person in the room. ⚔️

But what matters most is that she chooses, acts, affects the story, and lives with the consequences.

✍️ THE AGENCY TEST

Choose one of the women in your story and ask:

What does she want?

Not what does the protagonist want from her.

Not whom does she love.

Not what does the plot need her to do.

What does SHE want?

Then ask:

Does she make meaningful choices in pursuit of it?

Can she change the direction of the story?

Does she have relationships with other characters that aren’t solely about the protagonist?

Can she be wrong?

Does she experience consequences?

Would removing her choices fundamentally alter the story?

If the answer to that last question is no, she may be present in your story without truly having agency within it.

On Women’s Equality Day, that’s a lesson worth remembering.

Don’t write strong women.

Write women strongly. ♀️📖

Strength isn’t one character trait.
Neither is womanhood.

08/26/2026

✍️ WRITING IS A PRACTICE

Imagine watching someone perform an advanced yoga pose and thinking:

“Well, I tried yoga once and couldn’t do that, so apparently I have no talent for yoga.”

That would be ridiculous.

You know what you’re seeing is the result of practice.

Strength developed over time.
Balance learned through repetition.
Flexibility gained little by little.
Probably quite a lot of falling over along the way.

And yet writers can be remarkably unforgiving with themselves.

We sit down to write, struggle with a scene, produce a clumsy paragraph, stare at the blinking cursor for twenty minutes and conclude:

“Maybe I’m just not a very good writer.”

Meanwhile, Rugar has fallen out of the pose entirely, Cedridir is attempting to defeat yoga through brute force, and Lyra is calmly saying:

“Again.” 😂

Perhaps she has the right idea.

Writing is not merely something you produce.

Writing is something you practice.

Every time you write dialogue, you practice hearing character voices.

Every description trains you to notice meaningful details.

Every scene gives you another opportunity to understand pacing.

Every revision strengthens your ability to recognize what is and isn’t working.

Even the pages you eventually throw away weren’t necessarily wasted.

They were practice.

📖 BUT WHAT ABOUT DISCIPLINE?

This is where writing advice can become unnecessarily punishing.

Discipline doesn’t have to mean:

❌ 2,000 words every day.
❌ Writing for hours regardless of circumstances.
❌ Never missing a scheduled session.
❌ Feeling guilty whenever life interrupts your routine.

A useful writing routine is one you can actually sustain.

For one writer, that might be an hour every morning.

For another, three evenings a week.

For someone else, Saturday afternoons.

The important thing isn’t constructing the most impressive routine.

It’s constructing one you can return to.

And you will miss days.

Life will happen.

Motivation will disappear.

Some sessions will produce pages. Others will produce three sentences, two deleted paragraphs, and an increasingly personal vendetta against the blinking cursor. 😂

That’s okay.

Because perhaps the most important part of writing discipline isn’t maintaining a perfect streak.

It’s learning how to begin again.

Show up.

Practice.

Wobble.

Learn.

Return.

Then do it again.

Not because every session will produce something brilliant.

Not because serious writers never struggle.

But because the skills you’re trying to develop are built through use.

Nobody begins with perfect balance.

Nobody begins with perfect prose.

And nobody reaches either one by waiting until they feel sufficiently talented to practice.

✍️ A SMALL CHALLENGE

Choose a writing routine small enough that it almost feels too easy.

Fifteen minutes.

One paragraph.

Two hundred words.

One scene every weekend.

Then practice keeping that appointment with your writing.

And when you inevitably miss one?

Don’t turn one missed session into evidence that you’ve failed.

Come back to the page.

Because discipline isn’t about perfection.

It’s about returning. 🧘‍♀️📖

08/26/2026

NATIONAL GOT CHECKED DAY

Know your body.
Know your risk.
Know when to get checked.

Some messages are too important to bury between the lines. 🎀

08/26/2026