Your week’s BEGGAR Challenge:
Pick up an object on your right.  Doesn’t matter what it is – could be your mouse, a book, a chocolate bar – just whatever is closest to hand.  Take a minute to look at it.  Really look at it.  Notice its seams, its texture.  Does it have a smell?  Once you’ve turned it over several times, gotten a solid, tactile idea of what it is, put it someplace you can’t see it.  Now describe it.  Use a lot of adjectives.  Be florid.  Describe it like it’s the most important object in the room.  Incorporate as many senses as you can, within the bounds of logic (you don’t need to describe how your mouse tastes, for example, unless you really want to!).  Make it a whole paragraph!

Got the paragraph?  Now take all of it, every dripping descriptor, and truncate it to a sentence.  Capture as much of the original paragraph as you can.

Have your sentence?  Now, make this object truthfully the most important thing in the room.  Give it magic.  Make it the keystone of an insidious plot, or  the last of its kind.  Or maybe its value was in the person who gifted it.  Make it up!

And most of all, have fun with it. 🙂

I may not participate in this challenge, just because I have a crazy ton of stuff due to my boss (that’s the slave-driver in my conscience, and her whip is painful) this week.  It’s a fun exercise, though, and once you get good at it, you’ll never want for story ideas again!