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[Prompt] May 6 – Eavesdropping

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!

[Prompt] May 5 – Flickr

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!

[Prompt] May 3 – Wikipedia

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Use Wikipedia’s Front Page To Spark A Story

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!

[Prompt] May 2 – Memories

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Write From Your Memory

Take an incident from your past – one shining afternoon; one horrible moment — and give it to a character (like or unlike you).

 

Play it out as it happened or as you wish it had happened. Take it from the beginning through the middle to the end. Make us see it. Make us care.

Relive a moment in time.

Go!

[Prompt] May 1 – Keep It Short

Daily Prompt LogoHere we go: May 1, the start of StoryADay May!

It’s always tempting to get excited on Day 1 and launch in to a really long, involved story. Or maybe your story-telling muscles are out of shape and you end up writing a long, rambling story because you don’t have a framework and the story runs away from you.

Either way, biting off more than you can chew on May 1 can be a bit discouraging. Especially when you wake on May 2, work the cramp out of your fingers and your brain…and realise you have to do it all again!

So today’s prompt is a simple one:

Write a story of not more than 1,200 words.

That gives you 100 words for intro, 100 words for summing-up (or for the twist) and 1000 words to play with in the middle. (Hint: something should have happened by the time you’re 400 words in, to make me want to keep reading.)

 

That’s it. Happy writing, and see you tomorrow!