The Prompt
Your character goes back to an old haunt.
They don’t want to be there, but they have to go (brainstorm the reasons they might have to be there, but don’t over-explain it in the story).
- What does your character want?
- What’s stopping them from getting it?
While they battle to get what they want (and out of the story), pay particular attention to the things they notice, about the old familiar place.
- What does it smell like?
- What’s still there?
- What’s missing?
- How does what they notice inform the reader about their state of mind?
- Does one sensory detail change how they decide to act?
Use some of these details as you write the story today.
Julie Duffy
Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay May. She loves to poke around places she used to live, for stories. You’ll read some of them in the weekly lessons in the StoryAWeek Newsletter: 52 Writing Lessons & Prompts to Keep You Writing All Year
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For this one, I brought back my old D&D character, an opportunistic mercenary. Here, he finds himself in an inn to discuss a lucrative contract. His history with the place and the memories being dragged up make him none too eager to stay any longer than necessary, but his party and the aforementioned contract make leaving complicated. It took some effort to get going, but it was a great opportunity to delve a bit deeper into his thoughts and motivations!
Great prompt to work slowly and constantly.
I super enjoyed this prompt! There’s a story about a group of friends and betrayal that I’ve been trying to write for a while? One of those amorphous concepts that sits in your back brain and wants to creep out occasionally. I took a run at it using a place in the woods that me and my cousins used to call “the fort,” really a collection of boulders. I like the conflict implied in the prompt—the haunt used to be a place a character or characters went to regularly, and isn’t now. Why? That’s the question I tried to answer, to middling results. But! Making it good is a problem for future me!
When she goes back to the old haunt she and her boy-friend used to go to when they were young, she is disappointed by something she finds there.
Every idea I started with felt cliche. I mean, there are no new ideas, but I couldn’t think of any new way to look at them. But FINALLY a character appeared and she wasn’t what I expected.
I love when that happens!
Thinking about where the place would be and why the character would have to go there, I realized that I had written a poem not too long ago that matched the prompt. I decided to try re-writing it as a story. It came out still very compressed (less than five hundred words), but it was interesting to see where a particular idea or impression could be expanded or made more explicit.
An adult brother and sister are in the attic of their childhood home. It becomes apparent that they are clearing it out. They find a box filled with their family’s griefs and terrors; at the bottom is the death of a parent.
This prompt turned into a memoir piece of the time I went back to Germany to my grandparent’s small apartment. I had a lot of good childhood memories there, but this time was sad. My grandfather passed away several years earlier and my grandmother would not be able to return home.
This prompt generated an idea with an ending…I’ll have to finish it after work. While at work another idea cropped up, likely for future development…and it’s quite different.
I’m having fun with it, and find the questions helpful. Thanks!
I was up early this morning. I checked out today’s prompt. My mind was an absolute blank. I blamed it on lack of sleep the past few nights. On my to work this morning an idea popped in my head. I began writing a continuation of Day 25. (My character returned to her childhood home to find a house full of memories.) Today’s prompt is my character returning to her old elementary school where she just got a job teaching.