The Prompt

When you arrive at your vacation rental for a much-needed getaway, you are so tired from your travels you collapse into bed without unpacking and without looking around. Next morning, you look out your window and see this:

 

Tell the story of what happens next using only a series of text messages or phone calls. Before starting, you may want to consider which rental belongs to your character and who planned the vacation, likewise whether they’re travelling alone.

OR,

Tell the origin story of this remarkable town. You may want to tell it through a series of magic spells, or you may want to consider making the town your protagonist. Or maybe let the whale narrate. Do you see it to the lower right, rising from the ocean?

(*This gorgeous print was created by writer, artist, and fellow StoryADay Superstar Marta Pelrine-Bacon and hangs beside my desk.)

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Michele Reisinger

Michele E. Reisinger’s work has appeared in Across the Margin, Stories That Need to be Told, Sunspot Literary Journal, Dreamers Creative Writing, and others. She studied English and Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University and received an MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. She lives near Philadelphia with her family and never enough books. Find more of her writing her online at mereisinger.com.

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The Prompt

Write a single or series of journal entries in first person where your character is exploring something in a set time period – hours in the day, a week, a few years. The entries must end on a note where she/he/they find out or realize that things have never been what they seemed.

The journal is an intimate space where a character’s voice reveals itself easily. It also provides a window into the desires, fears and masks of a character. How they interact with or perceive their environment, who they feel may end up reading these words, how they express themselves when they are sure they will incinerate the pages as soon as they are done makes for different people and different motivations.

Popular non-fiction examples are travelogues like journals of King Akbar who traveresed a lot of land with his army when he was in his teens, Vasco Da Gama’s famous journeys by ship etc.

Your character can be any age or profession, as long as they are exploring something, writing it in their journal and find at the end that their world is not what they thought it was.

For example, you can choose to write a space ship lieutenant’s journal during an 18-day space war or a fashion designer’s notes during their all-important fashion show week. How does the war end? How does the week end?

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Neha Mediratta

Neha Mediratta Chaudhuri is an independent writer, editor and consultant based in Mumbai. For more about her visit: www.nehamediratta.com

Managing home, hearth, and work, she writes about things she has mulled over for more than two decades. Her latest book is a collection of short stories, Death Chips and Love Fries .

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: I don’t recommend posting your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

The world remade.

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Emma Burnett

Emma Burnett is a researcher and writer. She has had stories in Nature:Futures, Mythaxis, Northern Gravy, Radon, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, Utopia, MetaStellar, Milk Candy Review, Roi Fainéant, JAKE, and more. Her favourite story this month is Rebirth of the Rain by Vivian Chou in Penumbric.
You can find Emma @slashnburnett.bsky.social or emmaburnett.uk.

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Remember: I don’t recommend posting your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Retell your own story.

Pick a story you’ve already written and write again but change at least two things. They live happily ever after? Break them up. They gamble their money away? Let them win big.

What if you changed the gender, the age, the location or season? What if you changed the point-of-view or the verb tense? What changes do you have to make throughout the story to make these changes work?

Do the changes improve the original story or reveal anything new about your characters or plot?

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Marta Pelrine-Bacon

Marta is an author and artist who fuels her imagination with coffee and naps.

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: I don’t recommend posting your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Write a stroy about a character who is desperately trying to catch a flight, but who has been stopped in airport security because of some unusual items in their carry-on luggage. This exercise is an opportunity to practice revealing character through physical objects. The items in the character’s carry-on—and the character’s defense of those items—will provide information about the individual in question.

This scenario is also an opportunity to practice making a scene, in a literal and a figurative sense. There is a conflict baked into the initial premise: the character needs to catch a flight, but their need is blocked by an obstacle. This offers a tremendous possibility for escalating tension and narrative surprise. How can your character’s decision making both move forward the story and move forward a reader’s understanding of your protagonist?

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Allegra Hyde

Allegra Hyde is the author of the story collection THE LAST CATASTROPHE, an Editors’ Choice selection at The New York Times and a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award. Her debut novel ELEUTHERIA was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Prize, and featured on Late Night with Seth Meyers. Her first story collection, OF THIS NEW WORLD, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award. Hyde has also received four Pushcart Prizes and the O. Henry Prize. She currently lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Smith College.

For more, visit: https://www.allegrahyde.com/

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: I don’t recommend posting your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Context: this prompt is based on a prompt that I gave in my last taboos class (during which the class listed things that workshops or teachers have warned them against). We analyzed why it is a taboo, and then they wrote a scene leveraging the taboo.
Taboo: Bathrooms
Taboo Reasoning: the ICK factor and discomfort that people feel about bathrooms and/or bodily functions such as vomiting; vomiting as stereotypical catharsis; bathrooms as private places that don’t generally involve other people and have prescribed functions.

Opportunities: bathrooms as a place to explore the spontaneous (a sudden breakup, for example); vomiting as something that does not equate to easy catharsis; the claustrophobia of a small space creating unexpected tensions or character revelations; bathroom being used for something completely unexpected/outside its usual function; strangers meet in a public bathroom; embrace the ICK factor!

Instructions: the prompt is wide open, but the goal should be to write a scene that avoids the taboo traps that bathrooms are known for and to instead embrace the opportunities. This can be used to start a new story or as a way to think about adding a scene to a work-in-progress.

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Lori Ostlund

Lori Ostlund is the author of Are You Happy? (Astra House, May 2025). Her novel After the Parade (Scribner, 2015) was a B&N Discover pick, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and a NYTimes Editors’ Choice. Her first book, The Bigness of the World (UGA, 2009; Scribner, 2016), received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Best American Short Stories, the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, ZYZZYVA, and New England Review, among other places. Lori has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and was a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She has served as the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award since 2022 and is on the board of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in San Francisco with her wife, the writer Anne Raeff. www.loriostlund.com

 Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: I don’t recommend posting your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.