Why?

I don't know about you, but finding "the words to say it" on my scrapbook layouts is one of the most challenging aspects of scrapbooking for me. This year, one of my creative resolutions is to ensure that I not only create something weekly, but create something meaningfully as well. I don't want to take for granted the power of my voice on the pages that I create, and I no longer want to add journaling as an afterthought.

Thus, the Wordplay Challenges were born.

In her poem "Spelling," Margaret Atwood writes: "A word after a word after a word is power."

Each week, I will post a prompt that is designed to help me -- and anyone else who wants to play along -- embrace a bit of word power and engage in a little wordplay. In the process, we can become more mindful of the way we "compose" our selves in our scrapbooks, and we can also enjoy the process, knowing that we are making definite creative efforts toward "finding the words to say it."

Wordplay Challenge 1: A Fortunate Sentence

For our first-ever challenge, consider the following:

With the advent of the new year, now is the perfect time to communicate messages of hope and good fortune. This challenge isn't about filling a page. It's about choosing words carefully, and making every word count. The fortune above could have read, "Your smile will bring you luck," but words and phrases like "winsome" and "sure protection" are far more precise and eloquent.

The "fortune" that you compose could be practical ("You will discover a fabulous new conditioner that enables you to disentangle your hair with ease") or lofty ("Your joyous heart has many rooms, which will always be filled with love and laughter"), but it should ultimately reflect what you consider "good fortune" in the year(s) to come.

As you compose your fortunate sentence, feel free to dispense with the second person pronoun "you" and adopt a different approach, in the form of an intention, whether meant for an individual ("May I finally learn to recognize the difference between living to eat and eating to live") or a group ("May we lose ourselves more often in laughter, and find ourselves more often in love.")

If you don't want to limit yourself to a single sentence, don't. A litany of fortunes might be the way to go for you, or a single, repeated fortune could take on a mantra-like feel.

As an extension to the challenge, if you're looking for a creative twist, consider the way that you "package" your fortune. Just as a fortune is hidden within a cookie, so might your page, card, or other project seek a novel way to enclose the fortune.

Have fun with this one, and be sure to share what you come up with by leaving a comment with a link to your blog or by posting a link on the challenge threads at Two Peas in a Bucket or Studio Calico (which I will start to post beginning on January 1).