The Prompt
Begin with a confined space. This could mean physically cramped, or that your character is constrained such that they must—for whatever reasons—remain in place for a spell. (A cave and a mandatory business dinner both confine in their own way.)
In this space, a phone that does not belong to your character rings loudly, in succession, at least ten times. (This is about five nonstop minutes of ringing.)
Questions to consider:
To whom might the phone belong? What does the ringing trigger in your character? Who will or will not answer it? Who is on the other end? What do they want? How is the phone silenced and what consequences might result?
Whatever the answers:
It can no longer be ignored.
Enjoy mining the conflicts and compelling needs this may spark. Happy writing!
Lara Hughes
Lara Hughes is a recipient of the 2025 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Best Debut Short Stories 2025 (Catapult), The Arkansas International, and is forthcoming in the Indiana Review. She holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and currently lives in Nashville, where she is at work on a novel and short story collection.
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Thank you for this prompt. I went through my old drafts and applied the concept to the start of a story and found it quite helpful. The protagonist is a tree, the interruption is knocking on wood from a great distance. I had a lot of fun with this one, wrote quite late, but got it done again.
Well done. Love a tree-protagonist!
I worked the discomfort into the story later, having convinced one of the characters that the ringing was ignored because she was more important than the caller. When she listens to the voicemails her world is changed. Further, something is set into motion to make the other character feel very stuck as she is released from the trapped sensations. I got the idea when I read it but haven’t had time to sit down and type it up until now. The warmup and brainstorm gave me a few more ideas to tuck away. Interesting to consider what could happen when something or someone feel claustrophobic either physically, emotionally, or a little of both.
Oo, that sounds like a great use of the prompt.
I spent most of the day outside with my dogs. I thought about the prompt all day. When I got home I wrote down an outline about phones ringing during a wedding ceremony. When the officiant asks if anyone objects ALL the phones start to ring.
Love it!!!!!!!!! What a great idea!!!
Ha! Love it
For this prompt, I decided to make my character stuck in a dentist’s chair while getting a root canal — what could be more awful than having to bear a incessantly ringing phone under those conditions?
I really struggled to write narrative even after I found my idea. But I did wrote the first couple of paragraphs and in brackets told myself the rest of the story, middle and end. So I’m happy to say that I at least started a story and outlined the rest of it, even if it’s not totally fleshed out.
Drilling and unanswered calls? Yikes!!! Way to get it done!
Sounds like a good way to get as much out of the prompt as possible.
An actual story this time (though not a good one), riffing on Phil Ochs’s “A Small Circle of Friends.” Narrator, trapped in a game of Monopoly with friends, hates the game. If the friends had answered their phones instead of focusing on the game, they might have prevented thefts and deaths. I had fun with the ringtones.
Interesting.. NOTE I feel the ‘though not a good one’ might being a bit harsh on yourself.. we can be our own worst critics..
I agree with Andrew on this one! Especially since you write, “I had fun with ringtones!” Clever!
Ooo! You are going dark this month!
No good ideas were entering my brain for this prompt and I thought about giving up on it. Then I decided that my MC, who is a writer, needed some kind of physical problem and with that my story took off. That made me realize I need to give my characters more distinctive personalities than just say, for example, “she’s a writer and she doesn’t want distractions,” as I started off with in this story. I also incorporated a “bog” from Julie’s ten word prompt into this story. I created a bottleneck thriller, something I didn’t know I was capable of. Maybe the more difficult prompts give the best lessons.
Great realization. I hope it continues to bear fruit.
I tell you what, Poetry is hard. This is the prompt I started with:
#67 — The Unread Diary
A poem in which each stanza speaks from a different unread diary — private lives never witnessed, voices silenced by time, dust, or indifference.
This is what I landed, give it a go – best read out loud:
https://afstoryaday.blogspot.com/2026/05/more-words.html