Pet Projects

How to Design a Creative Writing Prompts Catcher

By Maria Chatzi

Are you the proud owner of a cute pet, like Chris Dunmire’s Kitty (pictured sitting "loaf-style" in this project)? Do you enjoy honing your creative writing skills with writing prompts?

If your answer to the above questions is “yes”, then this craft project is for you.

Materials:

• a print of a digital photo of your pet, dimensions: 3.9 inches x 4.7 inches
• a piece of thick craft paper, dimensions: the same as the photo print’s
• a piece of decorative lace ribbon, 4.7 inches long and about 0.5 inches wide, any color your prefer
• some threads in various colors
• scissors
• craft knife
• paper hole puncher
• ruler
• glue

Instructions:

1. To start with, glue the photo print onto the thick craft paper. Wait for the glue to dry.
2. When the glue has dried, use your pencil and your ruler to draw two rectangular-shaped “windows”, one below the other, anywhere on your Creative Writing Prompts Catcher that looks best to you.
3. These “windows” must be 0.35-0.39 inches wide. However, they could vary in length, 1.2 inches being the shortest. Mine are 1.25 inches long (the first) and 1,57 inches long (the second). The space between the two “windows” has to be 0.39 inches wide.
4. Next, take your craft knife and cut carefully on the lines you drew, to open the “windows”.
5. Glue the decorative lace ribbon on one side and wait till the glue dries.
   
   Your Creative Writing Prompts Catcher is ready to use.
6. OPTIONAL: Use the hole puncher to punch a hole on the top side of your Creative Writing Prompts Catcher, near the decorative lace ribbon. Tie the threads through this small hole to make a tassel). Now you can use your Writing Prompts Catcher as a bookmark as well.

Tips:

1. Design these “windows” away from your pet’s head. Opening them on the body is a good idea (like I did with Chris Dunmire’s Kitty loaf photo print), while opening them near the pet’s face may ruin the aesthetics of your craft project.
2. The “window” size I’m suggesting enables you to capture single words (e.g. verbs, adjectives, nouns) or two word combinations (e.g. adjective + noun). If you’ve got enough space you could make one or both of your windows longer, to capture whole phrases. Of course, a third short window could also be added. It all depends on the photo print – you wouldn’t want the number of “windows” to finally draw more attention than the photo of your adorable pet.

How to Use the Creative Writing Prompts Catcher

Place it on any page of a book, newspaper or magazine and move it around, just like mousing over a picture on the web, until you see words captured in the “windows” you opened. Take a piece of paper, or a notepad, and write down these words only if they are adjectives, nouns and verbs. As mentioned above you could also choose to note down a whole phrase. Catch writing prompts from as many pages as you wish until you have a list (short or long) of collected words. Keep in mind that the longer your list gets, the more difficult it becomes to use ALL the words (and phrases) in the piece you will be writing.

To give you some ideas on how to use these words, you could write:

• the opening paragraph of a story
• the ending of a story
• a paragraph that describes your main character or his/her rival
• a paragraph that gives us insight to your main character’s way of thinking and his/her feelings (revealing the conflict in your story).
• a paragraph describing the setting

Have fun writing!

© 2013 Maria Chatzi. All rights reserved.

Updated 1/21/14