Julie R. Neidlinger: Lone Prairie Art and Writing

Using spam for your writerly benefit.

written by Julie R. Neidlinger 0 comments link this post

I was talking with a friend of mine a year or so ago, and mentioned an idea I had about using spam email as an element in a writing project. She came up with the clever idea of writing a story where the main character would have the luck (both good and bad) of having all the email in her inbox be true and not scams. I often find myself using the fake names that come with spam email as the names of characters in my stories.

Spam email, I've come to believe, is a writer's gold mine. I've decided to give you some ideas on how to make your spam-filled inbox your writing prompt and muse:

A character who magically finds that all the spam, for her, is TRUE. (obviously just mentioned above)
Spam haiku: create hilarious haiku poems out of spam subject headers.
Spam poetry: similar to spam haiku, but without the 5-7-5 limitations. Again, lots of hilarious possibilities.
A story or chunk of dialogue where spam is used. Either the subject header, or some of those crazy large paragraphs where the spammer has evidently copied and pasted from fiction and non-fictional sources to create bizarrely bad and incoherent writing that seems to want to read true.

Any other ideas? I'll add more to this post as I think of them, but if you come up with some, be sure to post it in the comments section. And feel free to post any spam haiku or poems you create.