The Prompt
Start a story that begins with the ending, then immediately jumps back in time.
e.g. “It all started 12 hours ago.”
Think of this as the way someone might shoot a heist movie: a character is being led out in handcuffs and a voiceover says, “It all started 12 weeks ago.”
(In a short story you probably need to keep the scale in hours as this means you don’t have too many scenes.)
Don’t worry too much about getting this perfect. Feel free to be cheesy. Just have fun. Leave a comment to let us know how you got on!
I wrote a story about someone who gets an unusual birthday present, and through the flashback it is revealed why they were excited to get that present and why it is meaningful to them.
I took the “feel free to be cheesy/just have fun” part of the prompt to heart, and wrote a super cheesy hardboiled detective story.
As I was writing I couldn’t figure out where all this silly dialogue was coming from… then I remembered how I used to love Calvin and Hobbes comics growing up and Calvin had an alter ego, “Tracer Bullet”, kind of a Sam Spade parody which I guess served as an inspiration. Not much mystery to my story, but plenty of bourbon, bullets and broads 🙂
I had fun with this one, thank you for the prompt!
I wrote a story about first contact, told from the perspective of two retired astronauts. I’m not totally sure of the ending, but I really enjoyed writing it and I fell in love with the characters a little bit, so yay!
I am sure the ending will come to you.
Thanks, tammyb!
This one took me a while. Was gone for a few hours, but I picked it back up when we got home. Turned out longer than I figured it would, too. I used some of Day 20’s story, working the text conversations into this one.
https://fallonbrownwrites.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/story-a-day-day-27-start-at-the-end/
It was an emotional write for me; but I did it.
https://terry1954.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/story-a-day-6/