First: The ebook is here! The ebook is here! Get all yer writing prompts ahead of time and start planning your month, today! Only $2.99. Don’t wait, the price goes up to $6.99 on May 1!

Now, on to the last Write On Wednesday prompt before StoryADay May 2015!

They say you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
What they don’t mention is that fear itself is pretty darned terrifying!

The Prompt

Your character is on the precipice: about to do something that terrifies them.

Tips

• Think about who your character is and what would frighten them the most (maybe your character is committing to an extreme writing challenge in a few days’ time…)
• Can you make it even more frightening? (If your character doesn’t post in the Victory Dance group, there are sharks. Sharks delivered by tornado…)
• You can start the story with the decision—they do it or they run away—and then the rest of the story becomes the unraveling of why they made the decision and what the consequences were.
• You can start the story slowly and allow the character to fill us in on all the details. In this case let the reader in on what the stakes are, and then, at the end when the character make her decision we understand the ramifications already.
• You can decide to do a hybrid of the two and allow the character to make the big decision in the middle of the story. Set up some stakes at the beginning, show us the decision, then take us through some of the consequences (internal or external).
• Give us lots of details about the thing that’s frightening them as they decide to do it, or run away from it. More detail slows things down (like during a car crash).
• Try to hold in your head a sense of the shape of the story, while you write. Remember that you’re aiming for an emotional connection with the reader.

Go!

Just for practice, if you finish this story today, either post in the comments below or in The Victory Dance group. And if you haven’t signed up for the newsletter yet, leave a comment and I’ll give you the super-secret entry code to get in to the community.