The Prompt

Correct an injustice in a story someone else wrote

Things To Consider

We’re writing fan-fiction today, which is, technically, a derivative work.

There are legal issues around playing in other people’s worlds, for profit, but most artists and creators (and Intellectual Property owners) have learned to be cool with people writing fan fiction for fun.

For example, if you grew up reading a series of novels and felt strongly that the hero ended up with the wrong person as their life partner, take that as the starting-point for your story. Write the story of how they encounter the right person and realize this is their soulmate…and what steps they take to make that happen.

If you loved a particular film but one of your favorite characters is killed off, write a story of how that death was actually a sham and give your favorite character a new adventure, after that moment.

If you watched a long-running TV show and had a ‘head-canon’ idea about what happened to a side character later in life, only to have the show writers bring that character back and give them a different outcome…write your version!

With all of these ideas, you do not have to start the story with backstory about the original. Just put your character in an interesting situation and, at some point in the story you may choose to have them make an allusion to, or offhand comment about the ‘wrong’ that this story is ‘righting’.

Or you may not. Likewise, all of these ideas will be rich with novels’-worth of potential, but what you are trying to write today is a short story. Remember everything you’ve learned about short stories so far:

• Center the story on one incident

• Limit the scope (in characters, settings, time) and choose your details for maximum impact.

• Aim for an emotional impact, not an immersive, novel-like experience.

If you discover that you love writing fan fiction and haven’t yet discovered the site Archive of Our Own (AO3) you might want to check it out. It might, of course, massively distract you from your other writing, so treat it with care 😉

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The Prompt

Write a story in fewer than 250 words. Somewhere in the story use the phrase “the moment everything changed”

Things To Consider

A story in 250 words? Really?

Really!

But you’re going to have to leave a lot out, imply a lot, and trust the reader to fill in the gaps.

When we get down to this kind of word limit it is important to think about the essential elements of a story.

If you are trying to write a story and not just an aphorism or meditation, there are some elements you’ll need:

• A character (or two)

• A situation that conflicts with their wants or needs in some way

• An action that they take or plan to take

• A sense, for the reader, of consequences, and how that will change the reader.

I know, it’s unsubtle of me to ask you to include “the moment everything changed” in the prose, but it’s a great reminder, as you’re shaping the story, that readers like it when something changes in a story, whether it’s the character’s state or simply their understand of the character/situation.

Further Reading

If you’re not familiar with micro fiction, it can be helpful to read a few examples. (Just don’t use up all your writing time, reading!)

Microfiction Monday Magazine

O Magazine’s Microfiction feature

Vestal Review: the longest-running Flash Fiction publication on the planet:

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The Prompt

Write the Story of a Song (Title)

Things To Consider

Art inspires art and there’s nothing wrong with borrowing from other creatives, so today you’re going to write the story of a song. You don’t actually have to write the story of the song, of course.

You might:

• Write a response to the song from another character

• Simply use the title and write a story that has nothing to do with the song (don’t worry, you can’t copyright a title. They’re fair game!)

If you choose a song that has a story built in (A Boy Named Sue, or Copacabana, for example—guess who grew up in the 1970s?!) you could choose to tell a story that serves as a prequel or sequel to the story.

I love the idea of a prequel because it should slowly dawn upon the reader that you’re leading into the story/song they already know.

Here are a couple of resources

An A-Z of Song Titles

Tulsa Library System’s Song Index

Fantasy Song Title Generator – for those of you who like to play fast-and-loose with the rules

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The Prompt

Choose one of these photos and tell a story based on it
Winslow Homer – Metropolitan Museum Gift of Mrs. William F. Milton, 1923
Paul Cézanne – Metropolitan Museum Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960
Léon Bonnat – Metropolitan Museum Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887

Things To Consider

Using inspiration from other artists is a time-honored tradition (and helpful when it comes to marketing your version: fans of the original will be interested, whether they love or hate it!)

Images are helpful prompts for short stories because they capture a moment.

Your story can build up to or away from this moment (or both, placing the picture’s scene smack-dab in the middle of your story)

You do not need to honor the artist’s original inspiration for the story.

You can totally ignore the title of the picture. You can transpose these characters into a totally different setting (useful if you like to write futuristic or fantasy stories).

No matter what you choose to ignore, consider what is interesting about the moment captured in the picture.

Why did you pick this one? What stories does it suggest?

You might choose to give your story the same kind of mood suggested by the art style and color choices.

Further Reading

A StoryADay prompt about pictures (with video lesson)

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The Prompt

Rewrite a story that you wrote over the past few weeks

Things To Consider

If you’ve done the “Same Story, Different Perspective” prompt, this will feel similar, but this time I’m inviting you take a story that you wrote and tell it all over again in a completely new way.

You can re read the story and decide to tell the story from the perspective of a different character, but you could also choose to try and tell it in a completely different format.

If you told a narrative story, you could see what happens if you rewrite it as a list story. If you told it as a Hermit Crab, could you write it again today as a traditional, narrative story?

This prompt makes it easier for you o write because you don’t have to come up with a whole new plot and cast of characters.

The challenge today is to make remake it in a new way.

For an interesting twist on this experience: rewrite a story you wrote recently without rereading it first.

After you write this draft, compare the two and see what they have in common and what was missing/added to each version. (Hat tip to Stuart Horwitz for this idea)

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For more examples of how you can work with this prompt, plus a warm up and brainstorming exercise:

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The Prompt

Start your story at the end. Write about a character who must do something they really, really don’t want to do in order to get out of a sticky situation.

Things To Consider

For readers of a certain age, I can simply cite the opening of the Tobey Macguire Spiderman movie (Falls off a building. Freezeframe, voice over: “Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation…”).

Starting at the moment of peak drama and then jumping back in time to tell the rest of the story is a great and time-honored way of telling a story, and probably the easiest to do on a day like this, when you only have one day to craft the story. S

ome other options for telling a story backwards include literally telling it backwards.

In Courttia Newland’s 2017 story “Reversible”, the narrator shows us the victim of a crime and then tells the story as if it was a film, running in reverse (people back away down the alley and get into cars and reverse away at high speeds).

It’s a clever technique and ends up packing a huge emotional punch as we follow the victim back through his morning and into an average morning. (This is an idea that will take a bit of time to work out, so if you don’t have a lot of time to write today, file this idea away for later!)

Another clever-but-potentially-time-consuming idea, is to tell a palindromic story, in which you tell the story once in one direction and then reverse the direction and tell it again, but in the other direction.

Further Reading:

Here’s an example of a palindromic story and here’s a children’s story that does this very effectively

Here’s a collection where you can read Courttia Newland’s “Reversible”.

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The Prompt

Tell the story of an incident. Then tell it from another point of view. Then tell it a third time from another point of view.

Things To Consider

The great thing about this prompt is that you don’t have to come up with a large and complex plot to start.

Just write an incident (it could be someone observing a traffic accident, or a young mother interacting with her kid).

Then tell the story from someone else’s perspective.

The second versions should add to our understanding of what’s going on (or how people perceive events).

The third perspective tells the same story again but differently.

As with everything in life perspective matters.

One person’s insult is another person’s compliment. Blame can be assigned easily, but when the know more details, the ‘black and white’ of a situation can quickly become grey.

This is a wonderful opportunity to tell a story in a way that encourages readers to check their knee-jerk reaction to events they encounter in the world. You can use any point of view you want.

All three sections could be first person (“I saw an incredible thing today”) or you could play with the various third person perspectives (limited, omniscient) or even venture out in to second person (“You are walking down the street when”, or “We see the car slew towards the old woman and…”)

Further reading

You And Them

The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum of Its Parts – a prompt from Neha Mediratta

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The Prompt

Write a story in which your main character tries to unravel a mystery, but write it as a series of letters, social media updates, or memos – or a mix of forms

Things To Consider

The ‘epistolary novel’ had its moment in the sun in 18th Century British literature.

It was a form that allowed an intimate glance into the thoughts and emotions of characters ‘just like me’, at a time when expressing yourself publicly could be awkward, if not dangerous.

It was a titillating alternative to omniscient narrators and religious or political tracts that circulated more commonly, which, I imagine, accounted for the popularity of the form!

Epistolary writing goes in and out of fashion, but it does always come back around and is really fun to play with.

(My friends and I were obsessed with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (which really wasn’t a children’s book!).

You might have been moved by the 19th century photo-Blair-Witch-Project that was Bram Stoker’s Dracula – treasure trove of ‘found documents’ from letters and journal entries to newspaper clippings and telegraph messages (pretty cutting edge stuff, in Stoker’s day).

This is another form where short fiction triumphs, because short stories don’t have to play by Big Narrative’s rules.

Further Reading

A one-sided conversation

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The Prompt

Write a story in a cypher: where the first word of each sentence is the REAL message

Things To Consider

It helps to write out the message you’re hiding in the story first.

Then, simply write a story and find a way to start each new sentence with the next word of your hidden message.

You can choose to hide the message in the second or third word of each sentence if you find that easier, or the last word (though I think that would be hard to pull off, unless you like dangling participles).

You can see my tips on a previous iteration of this prompt here

As an alternative to this you might try Grant Faulkner’s prompt from a StoryADay 2022….

When you have finished do something to celebrate. It can be as simple as grinning for five seconds, or doing a little dance (I like a victory dance, myself).

The important thing is to take a moment to revel in the good feelings you get from meeting your goals.

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The Prompt

Write a list of rules that tell a story

Things To Consider

What is a list story and why write a list of rules?

I’m glad you asked.

A list story is literally that: a list of things that, as the audience reads further into it, hints at a bigger narrative taking place outside the words on the page.

Why a list of rules?

Because we all know what that looks like and we all know that the person/people who make the rules have a very distinct agenda that may or may not conflict with the needs/desires of the people the rules seek to control. (And conflict, as you remember, is key to keeping a story interesting)

List stories are one of my favorite forms because they force us to break the way we think about storytelling and they allow us to practice misdirection, two extremely useful skills, as a writer.

But that hting I love the most is that they force us to trust readers, to recruit readers and make them partners in the storytelling experience.

If your story is written solely in the form of a list you have to allow that the reader is going to read between the lines and supply the rest of the story. And this is something we should be doing in our writing all the time.

If you’re writing novels you have vast acres of territory that you can fill with explanations, but should you?

Sometimes readers appreciate it if you let them feel smart because they worked out what was going on, even if they had to, you know, work a little.

The list story is the perfect way to practice this. The example I always recommend for how to do this well is

To Do by Jennifer Egan (the same technique is also used in this darkly comedic scene from the TV show Superstore.)

Note: You do not have to be plotting murder for this prompt to work.

Further Reading

A Catalogue of Complaints

Lists As Stories

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The Prompt

Write a flash fiction story. Limit it to 1000 words. Your character finds and everyday object that changes their understanding of their past.

Things To Consider

Flash fiction emerged as its own form of short story in the 1970s and 80s.

As well as being shorter than the average short story being written at the time, flash fiction required something extra, a ‘flash’ that left an after-image in the mind’s eye. It’s an incredibly useful form for writing when you have an urge to make an impact, and are impatient with all the set up and backstory that you feel you ‘ought to’ provide in a longer story.

Flash fiction tends to

Revolve around a single moment in a character’s life, a single question or realization

Contain compressed, almost poetic language that packs a punch Feels crafted, but not contrived

Here’s my favorite explanation of how to think about Flash Fiction:

“ A novel invites the reader to explore an entire house, down to snooping in the closets; a short story requires that the reader stand outside of an open window to observe what’s going on in a single room; and a short short requires the reader to kneel outside of a locked room and peer in through the keyhole. –

Bruce Holland Rogers The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

In keeping your story to 1000 words you’ll probably find that your first draft is significantly under or over that number. If it come in under the word count, great! You get to add more sensory detail to the story. If it comes in over, wonderful! You get to practice cutting words and choosing more effective ways of saying what you wrote in the first draft.

(NB You don’t have to do these things today. This might be a task for after the challenge, but makes some notes today, before you move on, so you remember what you were trying to achieve.)

I’m asking you to write today about a character finding an everyday object, because so much of human experience comes from moments like this.

Yes, sometimes it’s great to get swept up in galactic adventures and politics, but even in those stories it’s the small, human moments that let us connect with the characters.

Some examples: Your character finds a picture of their family, with an extra person in it who nobody has ever mentioned. Your character finds a piece of jewelry that had been lost Your character drops a mug and it smashes on the tile floor

The moment with the everyday object can occur at the beginning, middle, or end of your story

Further Reading

The StoryADay Flash Fiction Primer, with links to example stories

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The Prompt

Write a Hermit Crab story – that is a story which is told in another form. Write a story about a character who has just received some unexpectedly good news.

Things To Consider

For years, here at StoryADay I used this prompt without knowing that someone had given a name to it: the hermit crab.

The hermit crab is a crab that remains a crab while making its home in any outer container seems like the perfect name for the type of story I want you to write today. Not quite sure what I mean yet? Well, I’m talking about stories that emerge from things like a series of crossword clues or from a series of footnotes, or a series of interview responses , a recipe, the questions in a quiz, or an academic review paper (complete with footnotes).

Today I’m promoting you to write a story about a character receiving good news because often, when reaching for the dramatic, we immediately think of negative disruptions to a life.

But that often leads us to write a story that’s more of a downer than we really wanted to write.

Good news can be dramatic and disruptive too (I remember shaking after seeing my degree results and after seeing a positive pregnancy test. Both of those things were dramatic in the moment, and had a dramatic impact on the rest of my life, for sure!

Even smaller things like a successful audition for a local amateur dramatic production, or hearing ‘yes’ to any kind of request, can be a profound and interesting moment in a character’s life.

What good news will you give your character today? Remember to come back and post your ‘victory dance’ letting us know what you wrote about and how went.

Further reading:

a poem with the ‘story’ in the first words of each line

Browser History – a prompt from Gabrielle Johansen

Last Will – a prompt from Michele Reisinger

Recipe for Magic – a prompt from Carey Shannon

A Story In Memos

–Multiple choice test

Review of Jennifer Wortmann’s story “Theories of the Point of View Shifts In AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’”

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The Prompt

Write a story outline and argument, where one character enters the space, and once character leaves at the end.
Write the outline like this: [Name] is in [place] doing [verb], [Name 2] comes in in, obviously [in this mood]; then this happened, then [Name] said; then [Name 2] said; then this happened…and so on.
Look for the moments of highest impact (drama, humor, action) and rewrite those moments, showing as much of the action as you can.
Then polish the ‘telling’ parts of the story to make them a little smoother.

Things To Consider

“Show, Don’t Tell” is useful advice for reminding authors that readers want to be ‘in the moment’ with the characters, but if every moment of our stories is written like that it would exhaust your readers.

Our job, as writers, is to direct the reader’s attention to important moments (and sometimes away from them, if you’re trying to surprise them or keep a mystery going). “Showing” is really useful for that.

“Telling” is great when you want to speed up the action or misdirect the reader.

Let me give you an example from Shirley Jackson’s classic story, The Lottery

The first part of this paragraph is very much in the narrator’s voice, telling us what’s happening.

Then, Jackson slows us down and takes us into the moment by following the actions of Bobby Martin:

“The children assembled first, of course. School was recently over for the summer, and the feeling of liberty sat uneasily on most of them; they tended to gather together quietly for a while before they broke into boisterous play, and their talk was still of the classroom and the teacher, of books and reprimands. Bobby Martin had already stuffed his pockets full of stones, and the other boys soon followed his example, selecting the smoothest and roundest stones; Bobby and Harry Jones and Dickie Delacroix—the villagers pronounced this name “Dellacroy”—eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square and guarded it against the raids of the other boys.”

Notice how the details become more specific as she moves into painting the picture for us. We can feel the stones, see the pile, picture the boys ‘guarding’ it. The ‘important’ part of this paragraph is not that the children are off school or that they are talking about school.

The important part it that they are gathering stones, so that’s where Jackson directs our attention, by using much more descriptive language than before. This is what I want you to do for a select few piece of your story, today.

When I say “polish up the ‘telling’ parts of the story”, I mean take the places where you wrote “And then [x] happened” and make them just a little more conversational or literary. (“She ran to the door” not “she stepped carefully across the shiny oak floor towards the closed French doors, careful to avoid the specific planks that she knew, through long practice, would reveal her presence with a telltale squeak underfoot.”)

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The Prompt

Write a story about a character with a big decision to make. Write it in a point of view you don’t often use.

Things To Consider

I’m giving your character a big decision to make. You get to decide how much backstory the reader needs (and when they need to know it), but I will make a plea for NOT starting your story with any of that information. Start us in the middle of the action: during a conversation, or as they enter a new room. (need more on openings? Review this)

On Point of View

Many of us default to a particular point of view in our writing — “I don’t know what to say.” (First person), or “She didn’t know what to say.” (third person).
Today, I want you to write in a point of view you don’t often use, or that you find awkward. (Yes, I’m asking you to get comfortable with discomfort!)

A quick review of points of view

Each point of view brings with it restrictions and possibilities. If you frequently write in the same point of view you may be limiting yourself and run into trouble when a particular story idea seems to call for a different ‘voice’.

Try to focus on the opportunities that this new perspective offers. If you’re shifting from third person omniscient to a limited/first person perspective, really dig into the opportunity to access the characters’ thoughts and emotions. In these more limited perspective there’s no excuse for “Telling Not Showing”. Everything can be written as if we’re riding along on the perspctive-character’s shoulder, experiencing everything with them.

If you’re moving from a limited perspective to a third person omniscient, celebrate the fact that you can now see things from different peoples’ perspectives. The most effective, least confusing way to do this is to have scene breaks between each head hop in the short story. (You probably don’t want to do it more than a couple of times in a short story, but it can be quite fun to have most of the story told one person’s perspective then have a line break and give another character’s perspective as the conclusion of the story revealing a lot about the truth of the situation that, perhaps, the first character didn’t know.)

If you hate moving away from your favorite point of view that’s fine. You don’t ever have to do it again. Sometimes creative failures are essential to teach you what to avoid in future.

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The Prompt

Write a story that starts when your character enters a new environment with a plan to achieve something that matters to them…and immediately faces an obstacle.

When you have finished writing, go back and put a new opening on your story.

Things To Consider

Have you ever felt unable to start a story even though you want to write today?

You’re not alone.

Often writers get stalled at the start, because we’re aware of how important those opening lines are.

After all, a good opening should:

1. Introduce the main character
2. Set the scene (time and place – relative to  the reader)
3. Set the tone.
4. Hook the reader (ways to do this: intrigue, dialogue, surprise, contradictory information, introduce a mystery, start in the middle of the action, seduce the reader with the language, 
5. Establish the story question or problem

That’s a lot of pressure.

So for today’s story, start writing in the middle of the action. Your character has just arrived somewhere new, in order to pursue something that matters to them, and they run into an obstacle within the first two sentences. 

You can do this with dialogue (“Well, that’s a problem.”) or with a little bit of scene setting, “She heaved the ornate oak door open and saw…a solid brick wall.)

Get your character into and out of trouble a couple of times until they have achieved their desire or otherwise changed in a satisfying way.

For added symmetry, end the story with your character leaving the environment they entered at the beginning.

NOW, look at your story and write a new opening for it that hits all five of the points listed above (it won’t take you five sentences to do this. You may be able to repurpose what you’ve written already).

Here are some possible opening line templates:

As [character name] [active verb][setting], they [verbed] a [noun]. [Image]. [Transition]

e.g. As Joanne fled the crowded pub, she lobbed what remained of her lemonade over her shoulder. With one last look over her shoulder she saw it arc through the air–globules caught in the security lights like fireworks–and spray across the faces of her three meathead pursuers, momentarily slowing them down. She put on a burst of speed. How had it come to this?

[Vivid details about something disastrous]. And to think, just [time period] earlier, everything had been going so well…

or

A [profession] in a [setting] doesn’t usually end up with [unexpected result], [conjunction]

Things To Consider

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The Prompt

Write a story that starts with your character in one place. Then they go through a series of events or experiences that leads them to a moment where everything changes for them.

Then let us follow them back through a series of events that mirror those that happened before, and show us how the world looks different to the character now.

Things To Consider

I’m suggesting this structure because it offers one way to create a clear path through the ‘muddy middle’ of a story.

The best illustration I can give you for this, is the Hans Christian Anderson story ‘The Ugly Duckling’. Here’s how that story goes:

• The Duckling starts off in a farmyard with his loving mother but siblings who reject him, but he doesn’t give up. He goes off into the world to seek his place. He leaves home determined to find his place in the world, and wild ducks are mean to him
• He goes to a farmyard where some of the animals are so mean to him he has to leave He goes to a peasant’s house and is chased by the children.
• He goes to the river, and sees the swans who are so beautiful he is willing to risk his life to go and tell them how gorgeous they are, even if they peck him to death for his audacity.
• They say: dude, look in the mirror. He’s a swan!
• He heads out and some children see him and throw bread and cake into the water, talking about how beautiful he is, balancing out the other children’s action.
• If I were rewriting this story, I’d be tempted to take the duckling on another journey, back past the peasant’s house and the farmyard, and to his home, reversing the initial journey and allowing him to see the word anew.

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The Prompt

Write a story about a character who is engaged in a contest that matters very much to them. You may or may not reveal the result, at the end. Your choice.

Things To Consider

A lot of writers struggle with ending a short story.

This comes down to one of a few problems

1. They don’t know when the story is ‘over’
2. They are afraid of tying things up too neatly in a bow and seeming cheesy

The solution to problem #1 is to figure out what the central point of your story really is.

It’s easy to keep writing, introducing new characters and new situations, but at some point you have to start making decision and shutting down your characters’ options, driving them down a funnel towards the ending. (I know, I know, making decisions is hard. But that’s what we’re doing, as writers: making a series of decisions for all of our characters. No wonder this is exhausting work!!)

When you know the point of your story, you can decide how to end it.

For example,

Winning And Winning Some More: in many movies about sports teams, especially underdogs, the team is engaged in a final contest. For a moment it seems like all is lost, until they rally and then, at the final buzzer, someone throws/hits/kicks/lobs a ball that lands exactly where it needs to, to put them over the top for a win.

This is a neat, happy, and rather cliched ending, but you can pull it off if the reader is invested in the characters and their success.

Similarly, romance stories end with the main couple getting together, but the inevitability of this ‘neat’ ending, doesn’t spoil the ride because we are rooting for each character to get out of their own way and let themselves accept love.

Failing (but also winning): SPOILER ALERT, the end of the Star Wars universe movie Rogue One is far from a traditionally happy ending, but it was a deeply satisfying ending. The characters we cared about made a huge sacrifice for the greater good, and along the way resolved a bunch of their personal demons.

If this movie had ended with everyone escaping to live happy, uncomplicated lives, I would have thrown my popcorn at the screen.

The Unresolved Ending: More SPOILER ALERT: in the finale of the long-running series Angel, the main characters have overcome a lot of squabbling to come back together as a team. They face the final conflict against terrible odds: cornered at the end of an alley facing down a bunch of demons. They’ve got out of this kind of situation before, but this one seems particularly dire.

Because this was the last time we were ever going to hang out with these characters the stakes were particularly high. Instead of creating a neat ending that would satisfy some viewers and enrage others, the writers had the characters rally as a team one last time, grin at each other and charge into the fight…at which point the end credits rolled. It was satisfying because the larger story of the series been wrapped up, but the final outcome was left to our imaginations.

Further Reading:

Three Ways to End a Story

The StoryADay Podcast episode 145: Ending Strong

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The Prompt

The characters in your story today are stuck and need to work together to escape

Things To Consider

If character is the emotional heart of a story, conflict is the engine of the plot. Conflict doesn’t have to be something huge and traumatic.

It can be as simple as a disagreement about whether the coffee should be decaf or whether the person suggesting that is a monster caffeinated.

Every conflict is an opportunity to explore the motivation and values of your characters, and to point up the differences between them.

This is another great opportunity to take characters from another work-in-progress and dig deeper by putting them into a story.

One of the things that can easily get lost in a novel—especially after we fall in love with our characters—is conflict. We can spend so much time exploring their inner lives that we forget to torture them just a little bit.

Use today’s story to make life a little uncomfortable for your character. Sources of conflict to mine:

* Communication difficulties – misunderstandings, talking at cross purposes, someone not saying what they mean, linguistic difficulties…have you ever sat at dinner with your father and your brother and marveled at how they can argue over the minutiae of a how to talk about problem even though they agree on the bigger issue? (Asking for a friend…)

* Conflicting approaches to getting a task done – two characters may both want to escape the ravine they’ve fallen into, but one may want to follow the river until it reaches an outflow while the other wants to scale the cliff and get back on track as soon as possible.

Or, in a more mundane example: you take a wrong turn on the way to a party. You and your companion still both want to get to the party, but whereas your companion wants you to make a u-turn, you’re sure you can find an alternate route if you keep going forwards. Both of you are determined to do it your way. Why does it matter so much to each of you? What does it say about you as a character and about your relationship?

What else is feeding this conflict? What happens when you take that right turn down a quiet street, and how do each of you react to a, the events that greet you and b, the decision that led you there? Can you see how the story begins to emerge as you introduce conflict?)

* Conflicting wants/needs – perhaps one of your characters is less motivated to escape than the other. Why? Are they honest about it with the other character (or themselves) or not? * Lack of resources – conflict doesn’t always have to be interpersonal. It can be about a group of people in conflict with their environment. It’s easy to escape from a locked room if you have a key, harder if it’s barred from the outside.

Don’t forget, however, that it keeps things extra spicy if there is also interpersonal conflict, as stress levels rise.

Further Reading

A mundane situation 

Conflicting habits: 

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The Prompt

Write a story in which your character interacts with three other characters, one who has power over them, one whom they have power over, and one who is on an equal footing with them.

Things To Consider

Character biographies and archetypes are all very well as a starting point, but a person’s character is not fixed, nor does it ever fit one archetype. People are complex and and society even more so.

People show different parts of themselves in different situations. A useful way to decide which aspects of your character to show in a particular scene is to think the power dynamics in that scene. And remember: power can be psychological, physical, or the power of the group.

Our characters react based on who has the most power in an interaction. This dictates which masks they use to fit into a situation (or sometimes, to stand out) or whether they can be raw and vulnerable. Psychological Power

There are a bunch of old sayings like: you can judge a person’s character by what they do when no-one’s looking, or by how they treat ‘the staff’ (which, these days, tends to mean waitstaff, valet parkers, grocery store clerks or anyone they perceive as having less power than them in a given situation).

And this is true to a certain extent that these action reveal a person’s character and values.

But none of these interactions reflect how that character always acts. Nobody always acts as their best or worst self. And few people remain unchanged throughout their lives.

Physical and Social Power

In The Expanse series by James S A Corey one of the most interesting characters is Amos Burton, who is always, phsyically, the most powerful person in the room and the most comfortable with violence as a solution. In a room full of violent thugs, he is absolutely at ease.

Over the course of the series we don’t see his values change, but we do see him learn how to act in different situations, based on his desire to stay with the crew. It doesn’t feel insincere because his actions are not always dictated by his values and that feels very human.

He still has no problem with violence but he knows his captain does. He masks that part of himself because the captain of the ship has power over him, and the collective power of the rest of his crew is greater than his individual power (even though he could beat them all to a pulp if he felt so inclined).

Power Dynamics for Writing

In each scene of a story, in each interaction, we are seeing a snapshot of your characters. How they act in general is not necessarily how they will act in this moment.

But how to decide?

If you’re not sure what to do with a character in a scene, look around.

Who else is in the scene, and how much power does your character have, relative to them?

How does that affect how your character acts?Do they hold themselves differently? Do they speak differently? And how does that affect their mood and actions going into the next scene, where they might interact with someone with a different power relationship.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re being insincere in any of those situations. Rather, they are operating on a high-level understand of social dynamics. (Being human is complicated!)

Further Reading on character:

• Give Your Characters A Voice

• Character Counts (podcast)

• Creating Compelling Characters – StoryADay Essentials Series

• Great Character Writing with Angela Ackerman (podcast)

• How I Met Their Father (or: Characters Are People Too)

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The Prompt

Write a short story in which the title is longer than the short story itself

Things To Consider

Sometimes contents and anthologies call for stories of a very particular word count. I am often asked if the title counts towards the limit.

It does not.

Therefore, if you’re feeling cheeky, it can be fun to write a story with a ridiculously long title.

In fact, this year I heard of a contest that called for exactly this: a story with a title longer than the body of the story. In this case you may find yourself playing with the premise of a story for a while before you begin to compose the finished article.

You may need to get up and pace around or go for a long walk, or, if you happen to read this at the start of the day, mull over it all day before you sit down to write. Sometimes that’s how writing goes.

The title you end up with will probably do the work that’s usually done by the opening paragraphs of a more traditional story: establishing the setting, the tone, the character, their desire and the obstacle to that desire.

The story itself will probably take the form of an ‘answer’ to the puzzle you set up in the story. I’d aim for a title that uses up 2/3 of the total word count, and a ‘story’ that is no more than 1/3 of the words. Here are some examples of short stories pretty long titles, but I think we could take similar ideas and expand them in interesting ways.

My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened to the Lion Tamer – Brendan Matthews

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven – Sherman Alexie

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver

These are novels, but I hope they’ll give you a sense of what I’m looking for today:

No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again; A Symphonic Novel – Edgardo Vega Yunqué

Or how about this well-known novel that are rarely given its full title?

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery – Charles Dickens

And my absolute favorite:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates – Daniel Defoe

Could you write a title like that and a quick one-sentence riposte as the body of the story?

One of my favorite things about short stories is their ability to defy expectations.

See what you can do with this challenge today. Leave a comment and let us know know how you got on. Was this faster than usual? Slower? Fun? Annoying? Join the discussion!

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The Prompt

Write a word story containing each of these 10 words

Why
Misery
Consternation
Pallor
Orchestra
Forgive
Paper
Entry
First
Grandmother

Things To Consider

I expect many people reading this prompt to have a viscerally negative reaction. “How am I supposed to write anything good with a list of random words?!”

Answer: you’re not.

Today’s prompt is an exercise in coming to your desk, writing something awkward and keeping going away.

There will be many, many days as a writer when you need to write a scene or a story that just isn’t flowing the way you want to.

The ability to keep writing anyway is an essential skill. We all need to practice allowing the first draft to be janky, awkward, a little bit ugly…and finishing it anyway.

It’s easy to say, but harder to do. So today, I’m intentionally setting the bar low. Of course you’re not expected to write a masterpiece with a collection of words I plucked randomly from a book (“The Art of the Short Story”, Dana Gioia & R. S. Gwynn, Pearson Longman, 2006, in case you’re interested).

If you’re not entirely sure how to use a particular word, let one of your characters use (or misuse) it.

Their use of that word—or how they react to being corrected—can more effectively show us the character than any explanatory note from a narrator’s voice. Remember words can be used in metaphorical ways, not just literally.

If you are resisting this prompt, make doubly-sure to give this one a try. In my experience, the prompts people resist are the ones they learn the most from. Sometimes they even end up with stories they love!

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