Matches 6 – Pride

It’s Pride Week, and while a tonne of my writing prompts have indeed been pretty queer regardless, I figured this week I’d offer up something I did at a convention once: make it all queer. It was a talk I gave at a Romance Convention, where I asked readers to quickly sum up the stories they loved, and then we queered them to highlight what had to change, what didn’t, what might, and what needed to be considered differently. It was a great way to highlight some of the things that make being queer different from being not-queer. Also, it gave a tonne of people plot bunnies, so that’s always a good thing.

If this is your first visit to my prompts (or ‘matches’) it’s in honour of a book called The Writer’s Book of Matches. It has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event, and since I first got it, I’ve been noting my own prompts to myself the same way.

If you ever find success or just fiddle around with any of these ‘matches,’ please do let me know!

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• After a long campaign where his being single and not “a family man” was often used by his opponents, the newest elected Prime Minister announces he has indeed started seeing someone: he’s dating the man who helped run his campaign.
• “The B isn’t silent, bitch.”
• A organization known for thinly-veiled religious “freedom” intolerance holds a lottery-style fund raiser. A lesbian couple are entered without their permission by an ill-spirited relative, and they win. The sudden in-flux of public attention–and a nice check–is an opportunity the couple isn’t going to pass on.
• During a city Pride Parade, a sudden downpour threatens to ruin the day’s celebrations, but just as people are about to give up, it ends, and the clouds part to reveal a rainbow–and a genderqueer kid at their first parade realizes not only is everyone strangely bone-dry, no one else but them has any memory of the rain at all.
• A high school student puts on a re-written version of ‘Grease’ where Sandy is a gay boy, and the Pink Ladies are a lesbian and bi girl gang, and the T-Birds aren’t cool with Danny being gay. Write the scene from the point of view of these three characters: the student, who has a major crush on the actor playing Danny; the young woman playing Rizzo, who is bi and can’t wait to belt out ‘There are Worse Things I Could Do’ from the point of view of a bi girl dating a guy; and the principal, who knows many parents are going to freak the hell out.

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See you next week, and by all means, drop any prompts of your own in the comments!