This week all the prompts are going to focus on Character. Here’s the first:
REWRITE A CHARACTER FROM YOUR PAST
Pick a character, a real person, from your past. Put them into a story. Be as kind or as cruel as you like (you might want to change their name…)
Use a real character.
Go!
PICK A SONG TITLE AND USE IT AS YOUR STORY’S TITLE
Scan this page quickly and pick a title that leaps out at you. Browse around a bit if you need to but use the rule of three: if you haven’t found something on the third page, tough. You’re stuck with it. Pick one and write the story.
Use the title as the title of your story. (It can be very, very tenuously connected to your story.)
Steal someone else’s title for your story
Go!
STEAL A LINE FROM AN OVERHEARD CONVERSATION
Dialogue and story sparks are all around us. Today, listen for a line in a conversation (if you spend the whole day alone at home, turn on the TV or the radio for three minutes). Pick a phrase that you hear. Use the line somewhere in your story today.
This morning I overheard a woman say,
“Karen, have you been to the new Casino yet?”
I might write about the casino or about Karen, or about a coffee shop in a small town with a regular cast of visitors – one of whom is a street person on her regular round of public spaces.
What will your eavesdropping yield?
Go!
Get A Graphic Prompt From Flickr
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Pah! I say pictures need us to tell their stories.
Flickr’s “Explore” page is a great place to find arresting images that suggest a scene or a character or a story. Click around, refresh the page, until you find an image that stops you in your tracks. Look at it for five minutes. If, at the end of that time, it hasn’t suggested at least one story or character you could love, move on to another image.
But you can only do this three times. The third time, if you still don’t love the image…tough! You’re stuck with it. Write your story using that picture anyway.
Go!
What would it be like to meet your hero?
Write a story where you main character gets to investigate the answer to that question. This can be as realistic or as “Twilight Zone” as you like.
What if you met your hero?
Go!
Go to the front page of Wikipedia.
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.
For example, on the day I’m preparing this prompt I saw “In the News…Two Trains Collide”. That could be a spark for a story about two people on the trains and how they experienced the crash; the story of an investigator sifting through the wreckage – what’s his story?; someone waiting at a station for a passenger who never arrives; a thriller about sabotage.
In “On This Day…” it happened to be the anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant. That sparked these ideas for me: school children in a small northern European country who aren’t allowed out to play one afternoon after the explosion because of contamination fears; rescuers going into hell; a researcher walkign through the nature-reclaimed exclusion zone 20 years later; a local, being interviewed. What it did to her life; the power plant’s thoughts as the disaster unfolks; what if it had gone differently: worse?; a satirical story about a disaster at a solar or wind plant instead…
Grab a story spark from the front page of Wikipedia
Go!
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