This week: Personification Edited by: Legerdemain  
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"I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one's name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!"
— Emily Dickinson
Personification
I love my cats! I hold them and pet them and have conversations with them! I talk to them and they answer. They each have a cat voice and converse. I'm sure many of you do the same. Just like babies before they talk, we give them cute little voices.
Objects can have voices, human emotions, and actions...this is called personification. It doesn't have to be a conversation. They only have some of the qualities of a human.
The computer hummed contentedly as it worked.
The chair sighed as she sank into it.
The hurricane howled with fury.
The morning stretched its arms, waking up the world.
The newspaper headlines screamed for attention.
The salad ingredients mingled, creating a harmonious blend.
Anthropomorphism is similar, where a non-human behaves like a human. Winnie the Pooh tells Piglet to "think, think, think". I don't think Tigger bounced on his tail like a human, but singing a song while he did it is a human trait.
When writing your story, give your characters, human or otherwise some human traits. It makes them more approachable and the reader will relate more to the character/object's purpose in the story. And hey! Not all brooks need to babble...find a great word!
And as always, Write On!
This month's question: What are some of your favorite personifications? Send in your answer below!  Editors love feedback!
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Site Contest:
Excerpt: The task is simple: Write a letter to yourself and tell you what your goals are for 2025!
Excerpt: If George was still here, everything would be ok. Now he's gone, and I don't know what to do anymore. I'm too tired to take care of this big old yard and cook and clean and everything I used to do. There's no point now… I'm all alone.
Excerpt: In a motel nestled beneath the reflections of cold uncaring stars, Simon Nabo dreamt of a shiny black spider with large red eyes.
| |  | A Sweet Chase (E)
A police officer, cat, struggles to catch a skilled thief, a lynx in a big city.
#2333701 by MK Lowery  |
Excerpt: Alonzo Keyes scanned the streets, walkways, and intersections. The cat checked for any signs of crime and trouble. Piston City was enormous and prosperous. It had towering skyscrapers, sports stadiums, shopping centers, banks, restaurants, apartments, museums, and other establishments. Piston City was home to many cats, lynxes, wildcats, dogs, wolves, foxes, and coyotes. As one of the Piston City Police officers, Alonzo made his career and life to keep law and order.
Excerpt: As I sat working on my home computer, I suddenly saw movement from the corner of my left eye. I turned and looked through the window, and there sitting in my front yard, sat my 8” tall nemesis! Sitting as still as a statue, and glaring right at me. The nerve of the little bugger! Upon seeing he had my attention, he then had the audacity to start laughing, I mean really laughing. Holding its gut, rolling on the ground laughing, and the whole while pointing at me! When I stood up and approached the window, the little tyrant stopped, and also stood.
Excerpt: The ground rumbled beneath my feet as I set off. We’d had tremors for days, but this was the first time a quake was strong enough to make my stomach clench with fear. I glanced at the mountain as I crossed the overpass to get to the southbound highway. It looked like it so often did, its peak buried beneath cottony blankets of cloud. But this time, the rest of the sky was clear, the clouds isolated as they crowned the peak.
Excerpt: Her head bobbed in and out of the waves, the sun reflecting on her golden hair. Boats rowed past her, left and right. She would dive in and vanish for a minute or two, and then her arms would appear before her head surfaced again. Then, in she would go once more. After a few minutes, she would turn to find me on the shore and wave to me with a smile. When the current carried her away from me, she would swim back to face me again, and I would wave back with a towel.
Excerpt: Children, small, tall, weathered, and beaten, all stopped their play as the sun finally fell past the mountains grand, laying their toys down, the final kick of a ball sent on its way, marked the end of playtime, at the close of day.
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This month's question: What are some of your favorite personifications? Send in your answer below! Editors love feedback!
Last month's "Short Stories Newsletter (January 1, 2025)" question: Do you use the Writing Prompts or Ideanary?
Twinflame8 : I haven't yet, but I am looking forward to trying it out.
Amethyst Snow Angel  :
Nope, never ventured to those two pages. I rarely open the Tools sidebar at all... Which means I'm unfamiliar with a lot of cool features I apparently don't need 
Mousethyme  : I didn't even know they were there, or forgot they were there.
Indelible Ink  : I love writing prompts for 2 reasons:
1) I like the challenge of trying to create something based solely on someone else's terms. I think it helps push out more creativity from within -- kind of like the "Miralax" of writing creativity.
2) I don't have a clue as to what an Ideanary even is.
Soldier_Mike  : I use the Writing Prompts far more often than the Ideanary, mostly because it's right in front of me on The Hub. I'm afraid the Ideanary only crosses my mind when I click on Writing.Com Tools to check the proper formatting for popnotes and footnotes and such. With poetry filling my writing more and more, though, I should really keep the Ideanary in mind.
TheBusmanPoet  : No. I've done neither.
Beholden  : I was not aware of either of those tools but they arrive at an appropriate time, considering that I've stuck my neck out by signing up for "The Bradbury" Open in new Window. contest - a short story per week for a year!
tj wanderlust-words-in-motion  : I have used Writing Prompts a time or more, but I hadn't used the Ideanary; I wasn't even sure what it was, although I do remember something about it in the Newsfeed.
I Googled Ideanary: The Writing.Com Ideanary is a radically new, dynamic thesaurus where words are linked against meanings instead of predetermined synonyms.
Now I'm going to have to check it out; better late than never.
S 🤦 : The only prompts I use are from activities and the lyrics of songs.
Otherwise, my brain is weird enough to come up with its own insanity stories.
amy-Finally writing a novel. : I haven't yet.
keyisfake : No, my head is filled with ideas already.
Thanks everyone, for your responses. L~
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Short Stories: January 29, 2025 Issue [#12960]
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