Quickly scan the “In The News” and “On This Day…” sections, or even the Featured Article. If something catches your eye, use it as the spark for today’s story.
The Prompt
Grab a story spark from the front page of Wikipedia
Tips
- Don’t spend more than 5 minutes trying to find a story that sparks your interest
- Don’t pick something that requires lots of specialist knowledge unless you a, work in the field or b, are comfortable blagging.
- Try to concentrate on the characters and their reactions more than the facts. This might be inspired by an encyclopedia entry, but you shouldn’t sound like you’re writing one!
To see how some of last year’s participants used this prompt, check out the comments on this post.
Go!
I managed to get out a 2k word story today (although not using this prompt.) I’m not sure I even saw a computer over the weekend, but I wrote a couple of random things on post-its. I’ll call this 3/6 for now. Hey, I never said I was aiming for 100% 🙂
Found a great prompt (one a few other writers picked too, I think) and then barely used the actual “thing” in my story. But I love the end result.
5 of 5 heading into Week 2. 🙂
Here’s the day 5 story. I passed on the prompt and decided to create a piece instead on my first few hours in New York state, based on the lingering thoughts from Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes that I read yesterday. http://guptacarlsonshortstories.blogspot.com/2013/05/coming-home.html
Mine is a bit silly too: http://starvingactivist.wordpress.com/2013/05/05/story-a-day-5-famous-fantastic-mysteries/
We’ve been having some internet problems here, but finally got it working. My Wikipedia foray provided a link to an idea that has been rattling around for a while. Not necessarily contemporary but I think relevant. We’ll see.
I might have skimmed four Wikipedia front pages until I found that one detail, that I could write the story about. But I finished.
Needed something silly! Here it is!
http://www.hunterthehorrible.blogspot.com
Alas, that gave me a spark for a protest, personal point of view, memories, no story from it so far.
“Same sex marriage and adopting voted in France”