The Prompt
Pick one of these photos.
Use the scene in the picture as the setting for your tale.
It can be where the story starts or where it ends.
It can be for a portion of it or for the entire story, but make sure to feature the setting significantly.
Give the reader a defined view of the place using all the senses.
Tell us what your characters hear, smell, touch/feel, taste, as well as see in this locale.
Lastly, avoid the info dump! Weave your setting in as you go.
Gabrielle Johansen
Gabrielle writes fantasy and super soft sci fi from her NC home. She has been published in Haven Speculative and Across the Margin. As a regular at StoryADay, this is her fifth time participating in the challenge.
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Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version
This was an unexpectedly emotional one for me. The third picture (of the beach) instantly invoked memories of the times I came together with my family to remember our lost loved ones and offer them a final resting place. I decided to write a narrative poem, a series of connected haiku, to portray and honour those bittersweet memories and the people behind them. I can only hope they’ll like it.
The photo that I choose was a great inspiration for a fantasy story with a plot and few characters that I would never imagine I would create.
Great prompt! I forgot to “check in” yesterday. I enjoyed writing my character into the third picture🙃 thanks for the prompt.
I wrote about the tree! My story isn’t finished, but I like the start. I picked the picture of the tree and it is part of a magic spell.
Thank you for the prompt. Using all the senses is something I struggle with. I chose the forest. The story is about a young woman coming home after years of living in the city.
I aimed for a drabble, got 132 words on the second image—to my brain, a deep pool into which things can be dropped and thus forgotten. Thanks Gabrielle!
I chose the bright light shining over the roof of a house and illuminating what I take to be a weeping cherry.
First person narrator, present tense. She and her husband hate the damn deer, and assume that the light comes from floodlights on the mansion behind them, turned on by motion detectors triggered by deer. It turns out that the bright light comes from an alien spaceship, that draws her husband and his pals up into it, as rises into the dark.
The instructions to invoke all the senses and to avoid an info dump, together helped me to pace the story gently, and introduce a lot of related topics in a very short space.
I chose the tree. It is a Weeping Cherry. My story went very dark. The tree was planted by a murdered woman and her daughter is seeing it blossom for the very first time.
Oh my gosh, Brenda! Nice!!
As a woman is dying she sees three choices of settings she can choose from after she hears the spirits explain to her that she can choose her favorite of these to spend eternity in.