The Write On Wednesday story prompts are designed to prompt quickly-written stories that you can share in the comments. It’s a warm-up exercise, to loosen up your creativity muscles. Come back every Wednesday to see a new prompt.
This week’s prompt was conceived as a character study, but the more I think about it, I realise it can focus on descriptive writing, point of view, or almost anything!
Write a story where the main (or only) character is trapped, literally or figuratively.
Literal traps can be prisons, a locked room, the side of a mountain, inside an alien spaceship, a bear trap, a maze, anything you can imagine! (Personally, I’d love to see someone write a claustrophobic locked-in-a-box story with only one character, and see how you manage to sustain that — great opportunity for character and description!)
Figurative traps could be anything from a bad marriage to con and could be a fairly conventional short story that lets you work on your dialogue or plotting.
What will you write?
Tips
Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.
The Rules:
You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!
Optional Extras:
Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook
Some tweets/updates you might use:
Don’t miss my short story: Trapped #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is a cool old map! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA
Come and write with us: Trapped! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA
See my story – and write your own, today: Trapped! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA
If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.
OK, you’re thinking of embarking on a big creative challenge.
How’s that making you feel? Feeling some resistance? That’s normal. Feeling a cold rush of terror? Not unusual. But I’ll bet you’re feeling something else too: a little thrill at the idea. (C’mon, you’re a writer. Of course you’re tempted.)
Sharing your creative efforts is a risk and taking a risk requires bravery.
And sometimes, taking that risk leads to something completely unexpected.
Let me tell you a story about what happened when I met Chris Baty, the founder of National Novel Writer’s Month, an insane creativity challenge I in-no-way-ripped-off when I started StoryADay.
How I Absolutely Did Not Rip Off NaNoWriMo
In the late 1990s, when the Web was young, I had a writer friend who was a real sucker for collaborative creative challenges: Illustration Friday, Livejournal memes and, eventually, this crazy new thing called National Novel Writer’s Month.
It was the first time I had entertained the idea that writing might be anything but a solitary endeavour.
Over the years, I tried a few of these challenges (100Words.net, NaBloPoMo) and even came close to signing up for NaNoWriMo in 2009. I had read NaNoWriMo founder, Chris Baty’s book “No Plot, No Problem” and loved his ‘creativity for all’ outlook — but by this time I had I had two small kids and my creative life had contracted to the point where I was reduced to drafting critical analyses on Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends (I have a whole thesis on Gordon’s daddy issues, and Percy? Classic victim mentality.)
So I chickened out. Again.
What Do You Do When You Hit Rock Bottom?
The winter dragged on and I sank into a deep slump.
I was grumpy with everyone all the time. I needed a creative outlet but every time I started anything, even my beloved short stories, I failed to finish.
You know that feeling when you’re scared to start because you might let yourself down again?
One memorable day in March 2010 I hit bottom. Driving along a bleak country road in Pennsylvania – the bare tree-limbs reaching out to claw out the last shreds of my creative soul as we sang along to “Cranky, He’s The Dockyard Crane” – I snapped. That’s it, I thought. I have to do something really scary to jolt myself out of this. I’m going to write a story a day for a month. I can do a story a day, right? I’m going to finish each one, and I’m going to tell everyone about it, so they can shame me if I stop writing.
It was terrifying.
So I did it.
See? “Inspired by” NaNoWriMo. Not “Ripped Off From”.
Fast forward to this January.
With two years of StADa under my belt I was ready to stretch my wings. My wonderful husband practically pushed me out the door to the Writer’s Digest Conference in NYC (If you haven’t been to a conference, I can recommend it: being surrounded by professionals and passionate would-be-professionals has a powerful effect on your motivation and self-respect, never mind what the workshops do for your skills).
The keynote speaker was to be NaNoWriMo’s own Chris Baty, which was a bit thrilling, but I wasn’t actually going to, you know, meet him or anything. (Not if I could help it, anyway.)
The first evening was a whirl: so many ideas, so much inspiration, so many notes to take, so much preparation to do for the Agent Pitch Slam (like speed dating, with literary agents). I was up so late preparing my pitch than I hardly slept.
I Blame Sleep Deprivation For What Happened Next.
I stumbled into the wrong session. After ten minutes, I ducked out early to look for the right session. As I wandered past the author area, my heart gave a little lurch. There was a tall, bald man sitting behind a stack of Chris Baty’s books. And I’d just made eye contact with him. It couldn’t be, could it?
The long moment stretched. My internal thermostat went crazy. I think I did that darty-eyed thing small animals do when cornered.
What would I say? Would he be mad at me? And would he even understand me, now that my tongue had swollen up to three times its normal size and my mouth had turned to sandpaper?
The next thing I remember, I was standing in front of the great man (really. He’s very tall) handing him a card and confessing my sins.
He looked at the card.
He looked at me.
“Is it free?” He asked, somewhat unexpectedly.
“Um yes, yes!” I said. “I mean I have some courses and ebooks people can buy if they want, but the challenge? Oh yes, totally free. They don’t even have to sign up at the site. I just think its so important to encourage people to be creative and…”
I was babbling and breathless.
“Huh,” he said, looking up at me (he was sitting down). “This is so GREAT!”
He beamed.
I beamed.
We started ranting about creativity and the importance of people giving themselves the permission to write. We raved about community and the other creative challenges on the web (he gave me generous, concerned advice about running a challenge), and we shared typical-writer-insecurities. We talked about the thrill of writing and the joy of having a hand in other people’s growth as writers. We promised to stay in touch. I may have started to refer to him as “m’new-boyfriend-Chris-Baty” (it’s OK, the wonderful husband understands). I walked around on a cloud for the rest of the weekend.
The last person I saw, as I wheeled my suitcase out into the New York streets, was m’new-boyfriend-Chris-Baty, sitting in the lobby, tapping away on his laptop. He looked up and waved. I had a new ally and it felt wonderful.
Confront Your Fears And Wonderful Things Can Happen
Starting StoryADay was scary.
Walking up to Chris Baty was scary.
Sitting down to write every day is scary.
But pushing yourself to do the scary thing is almost never a bad idea. (Unless that scary thing involves heights. Or venemous snakes. Don’t do them.)
You Can Do This – Today
I cannot stress strongly enough the value of:
Making a commitment to your writing,
Taking a chance on yourself,
Reaching out to a wider community of writers,
Being open to support and encouragement from unexpected sources.
StoryADay May is one way you can do all those things. Sure, the aim is to write a story a day, but I’ve always maintained that you should set your own rules. Some people aimed for 3 stories a week and hit that challenge. Some people aimed for 31 but their lives got complicated and they came out of the month with ‘only’ 12 stories … and were still thrilled.
But you don’t have to wait for May and you don’t have to travel to New York to confront your fears.
Every established writer has a tale to tell about being asked that question.
Some of them lie and tell people they order them from an Idea store. Some wearily answer that they think really hard until the ideas come. Still others joyfully shout that ideas are everywhere, what are you crazy? Don’t you see them?!
The truth is, the more you look for ideas, the more you’ll see them. But you do have to look
The Prompt
This week’s prompt is not a writing prompt, but a prompt-prompt. This week you’re going to look for Story Sparks.
We’re just over a month away from StoryADay May. You’re going to need at least 31 ideas (more in case a few don’t work out). I’m not talking about outlining your stories, or even coming up with great ideas, just about writing a list of sparks for stories, or places you can find those sparks.
Ray Bradbury in Zen In The Art of Writing, talks about one method of gathering what I’ve come to think of as “story sparks”:
“I began to gather long lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These nouns were provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface.”
Today, set a timer for as long as you can manage (ten minutes? 20? Half an hour?) and then use that time to write down as many Story Sparks as you can.
Write down:
Lists of nouns (things that scare you, matter to you, frustrate you)
Your favorite colorful metaphors. (Consider them as titles for a story)
Aphorisms you can play with (“See No Evil” “A Bird In The Hand”)
The names of the weirdest people you have met in your life (or a quick description if you can’t remember their real names)
Lyrics and lines from poetry that have stuck in your brain for years
The titles of your favorite artworks
The most striking places you’ve visited (potential settings)
Historical tidbits you’ve learned on trips (or in your own town)
Extra Credit
Capture three more story sparks every day for the next week: eavesdrop, read obituaries, browse the front page of Wikipedia, bookmark quirky photographs, read poetry, delve into medical textbooks, looks, listen, smell, breathe in the world around you. Capture three sparks from all that living you do every day.
After reading the first few lines of “The Door” by E. B. White [1. found in Fifty Great Short Stories, Milton Crane (Ed.)] my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s all over the place! White is breaking his own rules with flagrant , jaw-dropping abandon!
Everything (he kept saying) is something it isn’t. And everybody is somewhere else. Maybe it was the city, being in the city, that made him feel how queer everything was and that it was something else. Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the names of things. The names were tex and frequently koid. Or they were flex and oid, or they were duroid (sani) or flexan (duro), but everything was glass (but not quite glass) and the thing that you touched (the surface, washable, crease-resistant) was rubber, only it wasn’t quite rubber and you didn’t quite touch it but almost.
OK, so there aren’t actually many disregarded rules there, apart from possibly some missing quotation marks – but still! What an odd and unbalancing opening that is.
And I loved it. Because the words are doing exactly what the writer intends to convey: they are confusing and disjointed and all out of kilter. They are slightly beyond comprehension. Just likethat we are in the same emotional space as the main character.
You couldn’t do this without a good command of the norms of writing, so perhaps E. B. White is exactly the right person to be writing this story!
Why The Story Works
This was a trying story on a first reading. I was never really sure what was going on, although I have my own ideas. It was like reading a stream-of-consciousness Beat poem.
But it hung together. It worked even though little in the story is explicit.
Some reasons it worked:
It was visceral. The writer takes us right inside the head of someone who is disorientated and out of step with the world. He keeps us off-kilter with his language. We are never explicitly told what is up with the main character (they way we may not know what’s up with ourselves when we are ‘out of sorts’). We do, however, feel what the character is feeling, through this helter-skelter narrative.
We are inside his head, though it is not all first-person. The story switches point of view without fanfare, so sometimes we are in first person and sometimes not (“Maybe (he kept thinking) it was the name of things”).
The author sets up a metaphor at the beginning, that of rats in a scientific experiment, “…trained to jump at a square card with the circle in the middle of it…”. It is a clear and coherent part of the story. He then takes this metaphor and alludes to it throughout the story, using the phrase ‘the one with the circle on it’ in various places to let us know he’s talking about frustrated expectations or unexpected changes — about life changing the rules, just when we’ve got the hang of them — whether or not we know what’s going on in the particular moment (and on a second reading, these moments become more clear).
The story (and the protagonist) travel somewhere. At the end, I’m still not exactly sure what is going on, but I know more than I did at the beginning. The protagonist is moving on.
The ending has a finality to it, a sense of actually being an ending. The author ties everything up in a bow by bringing back some metaphors from earlier in the story, the way a modern stand up comics will bring us back around to a joke from the start of their routine, before taking their bow.
This was an oddly satisfying story.
I think it is made more difficult by reading it at a time (and as part of a culture) very different from the the one in which it was written. Life was changing for the protagonist in ways that reflected the times. Now, 70+ years later, it’s hard to catch all the cultural allusions (without studying more deeply).
The style feels very modern (or possibly “Modern”) in its form and ambition. In fact, I was stunned to find it was originally published in 1939. I think it would still prove a bit too avant garde for many readers.
But it was anything but boring.
Writer’s Tips
If you are uninspired by a story that you are writing, maybe it’s because you are sticking too closely to the rules, to a formula.
Try taking a leaf out of E. B. White’s book and mess with your readers a bit.
Try a different style.
Say less — or more.
Drop the dialogue attributions.
Throw out the quotation marks.
Write run-on sentences — or write in fragments.
Tell the story out of order.
Try to make your language sound less like you and more like the inside of your character’s head. Let the words race, if your character is running; or make them lugubrious if she is weary.
Allow yourself to take some chances.
After all, words are just squiggles on a page, and even the most experimental squiggles can be erased and re-written.
My nine-year-old son recently volunteered that he hates “I” stories, because you can’t know the main character’s name until someone else says it.
I found it interesting that he finds this lack of information about a character annoying. Perhaps I did, at age nine. Now, however, I enjoy the gaps in a short story, in the descriptions. I relish the mystery, the sense of discovery. Sometimes the discovery is simply the true character of the protagonist. Sometimes, the character turns out to be not human at all.
The Prompt
Write a story in which the reader does not know a key piece of information about one of the characters. It can be as simple as making the story a first-person narrative, or you can offer a twist in the tale.
Tips
Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.
The Rules:
You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!
Optional Extras:
Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook
Some tweets/updates you might use:
Don’t miss my short story about the a mysterious character: #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ
This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is “the ambiguous protagonist”! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ
Come and write with us: #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ
See my story – and write your own, today: #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ
If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.
This week’s story is “Live From The Continuing Explosion”, taken from Perfect Circles, a collection of previously-published short stories by Simon Kewin. (Full disclosure, Simon is a former StoryADay participant and co-founder of Write1Sub1, a year long writing and publishing challenge that I highly recommend you check out. The new collection is available on Kindle and, at the time of publication, is priced $0.00!)
Live from the Continuing Explosion is a Big Ideas story.
When I was writing about Dorothy Parker’s “The Standard of Living“, I spent some time talking about how short stories are fabulous for taking a tiny moment and using it to create characters and events that stay with the reader, regardless of scale.
This week’s story, Simon Kewin’s “Live From The Continuing Explosion” is, by contrast, a Big Ideas story. Yes, it starts with – and stays with – a moment in time, but the moment contains a huge, earth-shattering event that shapes not just the lives of the participants but grips the whole world in its fall-out.
I’m reluctant to say too much because this story unfolds gradually, but at its heart is a terrorist event and its effects on one person and on the world.
Kewin manages to share his big ideas while creating characters that grow more and more real throughout the story. He uses the event to talk about ideas as personal as the relationship between twins and as vast as philosophy, global politics and the nature of mankind.
The Dangerous World Of The Big Idea
This story, if categorized at all, would fall into the ‘sci-fi’ bracket. One of the attractions of sci-fi is its ability to deal with big ideas, even more than the appeal of technology, spaceships or characters in tight-fitting jumpsuits (only one of those three sci-fi staples appears in this story, and it’s not the jumpsuits!).
The danger of the big idea, however, is that it can hijack the story – that the author’s voice leans over your shoulder and lectures like a pompous professor. It’s hard to insert thoughts about gods and politics into a story without jumping up on a soapbox.
One of the ways “Live From The Continuing Explosion” deals with this danger is by giving various characters a virtual soapbox as part of the story. Right at the end, for example, one character makes a speech about “what has been learned”. It doesn’t jar, however, because it is an actual speech, in front of a crowd. As reader, you’ve come along on the journey with that character as she moves from by-stander to reluctant figure-head, and you have a lot of sympathy for her. A lot of the action before the end is sketched out, implied, and I was happy to have the character tie everything together at the conclusion. Plus, that’s not the end of the story…
Beyond The Big Idea
If this story dodges the danger of using big ideas it is because the author spends time building up the characters, even the minor ones. He concentrates at times on descriptive writing so that the reader can *see* the set-pieces and isn’t just being lectured to. He does that with vivid descriptions – not of the height and weight of his characters, by how they move, what they look at.
The two children run, screaming with delight. Around the legs of the adults in the crowd, legs like planted trees. They run in easy harmony as they veer left or right, speeding up or slowing down together without needing to watch each other. They laugh so much they can barely breathe. They hold hands, letting go only at the last moment as they split off to go around someone before reuniting.
A dog, watching them, barks excitedly, wanting to join in.
They run as if they have practised the whole set of manoeuvres beforehand. They run almost as one, a single being with two halves.
It’s a lovely, vivid moment and — given what follows — a really great opening to the story.
Staring Down A Cliche
It’s hard to describe the world in terms readers understand without stumbling into cliches. Of course it is. Cliches become cliches because they are good desciptions that we identify with.
Kewin deals with one of these in a way I really liked: he jumps on the cliche and expands it until it is no longer a cliche but an image that is all his own. He uses words that work exquisitely well to do this. When talking about an explosion Kewin takes the cliche “the blossom” of an explosion and expands it:
… vast, obscene flower billowing forth at demonic speed, black stigma deep inside red and yellow petals.
(By the way, use of ‘stigma’? In this context? Love it!)
He also takes the the idea of someone being inside a bubble and ‘owns’ it: making it the universal name for a phenomenon, not just a literary device. People all over the world begin calling the phenomenon ‘The Bubble’, as naturally as if someone had officially named it.
Short Story or Novel?
The other danger of the big idea is that you must devote so much space in your story to the ideas that the action and character development happen too quickly and the reader is left wishing the story had been a novel instead.
I think this story suffered a touch from this — which is not the worst thing anyone could say about a story 😉
Writer’s Lessons
If you can’t see a way around using a familiar image, try using one of Kewin’s techniques: expand the cliche with a clever twist, or weave it through the story so that it becomes natural.
If you ever feel that you have no ideas that are big enough to merit writing down, remember this. For the short story, tiny truths are even often just as valid, if not more, than big ideas.
Have you written stories with Big Ideas behind them? Are they easier/harder to write? Do you feel they worked as well as stories based on smaller moments?
Find out more about the StoryADay
Superstars
The only qualification to be a ‘Superstar” is a desire to write and support your fellow writers.
A supportive group of committed writers, who meet virtually, support each other’s efforts, and inspire each other.
![[Write On Wednesday] Story Sparks](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/7018767343_f0a94fe139.jpg)
![[Tuesday Reading Room] The Door by E. B. White](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/EB_White_cropped.png)
, Milton Crane (Ed.)] my immediate feeling was one of outrage: here I am reading a story by the author of a book that has generations of writers in terror of writing something the ‘wrong’ way (The Elements of Style by Strunk & White), and it’s all over the place! White is breaking his own rules with flagrant , jaw-dropping abandon!![[Write On Wednesday] – The Ambiguous Protagonist](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/I-eye.jpg)
, a collection of previously-published short stories by Simon Kewin. (Full disclosure, Simon is a former StoryADay participant and co-founder of 