The Prompt
A person pulls up at a red light, looks to the car beside them, and sees themselves behind the wheel–just before the light turns and the other car takes off.
Tiffany Yates Martin
Tiffany Yates Martin is a career book editor, working with bestselling and award-winning authors, major publishers as well as indie authors. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial ( a Writer’s Digest’s Best Website for Writers) and author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career.
A regular contributor to writers’ outlets and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writers’ organizations around the globe, she is also the author of six novels (as Phoebe Fox).
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After seeing ‘himself’ drive off, the protagonist in my story is unable to hold back his curiosity about what on earth he just witnessed and quickly gives chase. As he tries to figure things out in his head, he grows increasingly paranoid about the possible truth, especially when he notices his look-alike is heading towards his home. It could use some polish, but I think I succeeded at building and keeping some decent tension throughout.
After she sees herself in the other car, she looks in her rearview mirror and sees that she is now a different person.
All these ideas sound so fun! I wish I could read all the stories that resulted. Thanks for participating, all!
This confused me so much that I had to use a translator.
Creating a story about an event as strange as this was a great experience. I’m excited to see what else is to come.
A surprise ending! I don’t usually delve in science fiction, but I really enjoyed myself as the driver (accompanied by her teenage daughter) met herself (and her teenage daughter.)
This was a fun prompt. A twenty-seven-year-old woman finds out she is adopted. Now she sees potential siblings everywhere.
This prompt was so like what I wrote on Day 14, I dove back in and expanded that draft today! Through a twilight-zone-like mechanism, a dude occupies a world in which everyone (that’s EVERYONE) is him.
An older man sees himself in the car he drove when he first got his license. The younger one pulls away, while the older one waits for his left-hand turn. This repeats, with versions of himself and his cars, sometimes from his actual past, sometimes from his desires. In the last iteration, the man pulls away from the other car, which this time holds his father and pregnant mother. Nicely atmospheric, but no goal or conflict.
Fun prompt! Ideas came for seeing a future or past self, but ultimately, I went with cloning. 🙃🙃🙃