The Prompt
“Just one more drink couldn’t hurt anything …”
Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner is the co-founder of 100 Word Story, the co-host of the Write-minded podcast, and an executive producer on America’s Next Great Author.
He is the author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story.
Listen to his podcast Write-minded and subscribe to his newsletter Intimations: A Writer’s Discourse.
https://grantfaulkner.substack.com
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Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday
Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version
I was going either down a more depressing route or with a silly memory for this one, until I realized how well it fit a certain Star Wars story I started years ago, about an undercover agent looking to ensnare her target at a very public social event. Great opportunity to flesh out both the character and the story as a whole.
Funny
This prompt churned some interesting ideas for me. I had fun with it, but full disclosure, yesterday (19th) I produced a very, very raw rough draft, beginning, middle, and three potential endings which are partly recorded on the computer, partly scrawled on a piece of paper at work. I had fun with it.
Last year I had one ‘master project’ for the challenge and when I went back to look at it later in the year, I was very proud of Past-Julie for making notes like “in your journal, page 96” for days like this, when the writing would not confine itself to the computer.
I wasn’t going to do today’s prompt. I was tired and a little k’vetchy. I had promised myself that I would read every prompt this month, so I did that first thing in the morning. I sat down for a coffee around 1pm and there was a couple of papers in front of me, blank. I just started to write. A two hundred word outline of a short story flowed from my pen.
So now we’ve discovered how to make you write…
Since this was Grant Faulkner’s prompt, I wrote a 100-word story about four friends in a bar. One does great at Karaoke. They have a round. The next beats everyone at Dance Dance Revolution. Another round. And so on.
The prompt invites you to have fun, and I played around with it in my mind all morning, thinking it would be about a thousand words. When I sat down to write, though, I decided it would be even more fun to make it happen in the shorter form. It was.
Excellent. You know I love a 100 word limit…
Inspired by the concept of a 100 word story, I tried to write one. What I got was two friends chaotically and gleefully destroying property during a zombie apocalypse (ish). 702 words. A bit longer than intended, but a great length for flash!
Awesome prompt!
This definitely sounds fun.
A great prompt to use again and again.
This was a fun prompt. I wrote a 100-word story about our 93-year-old neighbor who has a couple of glasses of bourbon and water every day. He swears it’s the secret to his longevity. The bourbon kills all the germs. It was such a fun prompt that I wrote two more 100-word stories substituting the words “cookie and cigarette” for the word drink.
Your neighbour sounds great, Gabrielle! I love that you did a couple of victory laps on this prompt!
What a great way to extend the prompt. I can see a whole series developing…
Another little snapshot story(317 words this time) that may or may not end up in Nik & Leigh’s story. Some drunk texts may have been sent. 😀
Oooooo, I’m cringing even as I read that (in a good way, of course!) 😉