Ten-Minute Writing Exercise #36: Show Me Love

2025 New Year's writing resolution: spend 10 minutes a day getting words on the page.

Today's 10-minute writing exercise is a love story! We're showing love without telling, and as usual your anonymish host is writing along. This is something she wants to improve in her writing, so she sets herself an extra challenge.

This is a no-homework podcast! Every episode, we build in ten minutes of time for ourselves to do the assignment, and the assignment is always to write write write.

You can write to our daily writing prompt, but you could also:

• journal
• brainstorm
• write for your work in progress

All that matters is that you do write and you don't cheat and you don't stop writing until the music comes in.

In the US, we celebrate Valentine's Day in February. This day is usually seen as a celebration of romantic love, but love is a many-splendored thing. We love our parents, we love our pets, we love writing, we love New York. This month we'll be writing about love in all its forms.

For today's ten-minute writing exercise:

Write out a quiet moment in a work in progress or a story you know well in which one character shows, through their actions, that they love someone else. Neither the character(s) nor the prose may explicitly state or describe feelings of any kind.

Our themes this month are:

• Love in all its forms
• Dialogue
• Comedy Writing Step by Step by Gene Perret

We will also write a complete work of flash fiction together in a week from Feb 17 - Feb 23. No pre-work needed, and as always, zero homework outside of our ten minutes a day. This month we'll use Dan Harmon's story circles method to plan out our stories.