This is it. We’ve come to the end of StoryADay May 2013.

Thank you so much for being a part of it. I would love to hear how you’ve got on, what you have learned. If you post on your own blog about your experience, please leave a link to it here. If you’d be willing to be interviewed (for future articles here at StoryADay.org), leave a comment here and let me know.

The Prompt

Write about an ending (and what happens next)

Tips

• Perhaps your main character is graduating from school or college. What is she feeling? What doors will open for her? How will what he wants be affected by what he has to do?
• People leave our lives in many ways. How will your main character fill the void when someone important leaves their life?
• Just for fun, what if your main character is a writer, or other artist, finishing up a project? What if he/she has had a work rejected? What other doors will open for them next?

Don’t forget to come back on June 3 for the 7DayStory challenge! And keep an eye on your inbox for next week’s regular Write On Wednesday writing prompt.

Most of all, keep writing!
Julie

Don’t miss this news about a new week-long challenge to keep you writing in June — and this one comes with a built-in revision component!

The Prompt

Take an event/experience from your own life and fictionalize it

Last year, at a writer’s conference I was struck by the reaction of a panel of agents every time someone asked them a question that started, “I’m writing a memoir, and…”

They rolled their eyes. They groaned. They composed themselves and gently tried to dissuade the writer from getting their hopes up about being able to publish a memoir. The reasons?

• Everyone is writing a memoir. Competition is huge and truly compelling memoirs are few and far between
• Even if you’ve had a tragic life event, that’s not enough to sell your story. By all means write it, but don’t expect to sell it unless you have a bigger story: how you triumphed after the tragedy; how someone else can learn from your experiences; how you met/become/already were a celebrity (OK, that last one’s a bit cynical, but not far from the truth).

The best piece of advice I heard was not ‘stop writing memoir’ but “why not take your story and turn it into fiction, with compelling characters, rich scenarios, drama, comedy, all the things that make for a great novel?”

The Prompt

Take an event/experience from your own life and fictionalize it

Tips

• Use the truth of your emotions, reactions etc., to inform the story but use this chance to have your character be wittier/smarter/weaker/more vulnerable than you were.
• Write a better ending than the one life gave you.
• Use an often-told family story as source material if you don’t want to write about your own experiences (e.g. the story of how my grandparents courted and eventually married is a wonderful one that I fully intend to mine for a story one day)
• Remember that you are not cataloguing history. You are weaving a story that will share some experience in a visceral way with readers. Go deeply into the emotions and/or the details at least once during the story. Make us feel it.

Write A Child’s Story

This is ‘the story of a child’, not necessarily a story for children’s story

Tips

• Children are adventurous. They are open. They are surprisingly insightful. They see the world in bright colors, not moral greys. They are, in other words, great hero material.
• Children are inexperienced in the world and therefore, generally, not paralyzed by potential consequences. This makes them great hero material AND great villain material (Lord Of The Flies).
• Around the age of ten children are aware of themselves, have some empathy for others, a growing facility to play with the more sophisticated language they hear from adults, and a fairly well developed ability to survive without an adult’s help. They are developing an awareness of their own personality and its affect on others and their ability to choose what they do with that. This is why so many great child-characters are written at this pre-teen stage. Consider making your protagonist this age
• If you don’t have much exposure to children right now, consider writing a story in flashback, where your older character tells the story of themselves as a child (as Rob Reiner did in Stand By Me).

Today is a big day for last week’s Guest Prompter Simon Kewin: It’s the day his publisher is revealing the cover of his upcoming novel. Show him support and pop over to his blog to take a look at the cover. Leave him a comment to say ‘congrats’.

It’s Memorial Day here in the US. Unofficially that marks the start of the summer season. We get a day off work and school, and people have barbecues and open up their beach houses and generally goof off. Of course, the origins of this holiday are quite different:

Formerly known as Decoration Day, it originated after the American Civil War to commemorate the Union and Confederate soldiers who died in the Civil War. By the 20th century, Memorial Day had been extended to honor all Americans who have died while in the military service[3]. It typically marks the start of the summer vacation season, while Labor Day marks its end.
Many people visit cemeteries and memorials, particularly to honor those who have died in military service. Many volunteers place an American flag on each grave in national cemeteries.
From Wikipedia

The Prompt

Write a story that takes place on a holiday/special occasion where things do not follow the traditional or ideal path

Tips

• Use this prompt to write a story centered around a holiday, with a view to submitting this story to publications. Many publications, such as EveryDay Fiction are actively looking for seasonally-appropriate holiday stories (for Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, any holiday).
• Write about a holiday that has just passed and is fresh in your mind. Put a note in your calendar to submit it to markets nine months from now (a month or three before the holiday comes around again)
• You could write an Independence Day story where celebration and independence are NOT what happen
• Family-centered holidays like Mother’s Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas or other religious holidays, are fraught with tension and opportunities for comedy, drama and subversion.

Alternate Prompt

In honor of Memorial Day, write a story featuring a member of the armed forces

After this week’s post about jumping into the middle of a story, I thought I’d go the whole hog:

The Prompt

Start At The End
Start your story with the character walking away from a situation (figuratively-speaking) and then go back and explain how he/she got there.

Tips

• Think of TV shows that start with a funny/dramatic scene and then jump back to “eight hours earlier”
• Feel free to use stage directions like that, if it helps
• Maybe you could tell the entire story backwards (“three hours earlier”, “three hours earlier still”). It might not work, but it could be interesting

I get mad sometimes. I mean, properly fuming about things. I won’t tell you which things, because that doesn’t matter, but I’m betting you do too.

Neighbors’ dogs barking too much? People in the street being inconsiderate? Politicians doing nothing (or the wrong thing) about an issue you care about?

Take that energy and use it in a story.

The Prompt

Mentally travel ten years into the future. What if [a hot-button issue for you really care about] has come to pass/been squelched. What does that mean for everyday life? What will your hero face/do about it?

Tips

• Use an issue you really, really get annoyed about.
• Promise yourself you won’t post/publish this anywhere if the idea of being ‘outed’ on this issue makes you uncomfortable.
• You don’t need to set the whole story in the future. You can set it in the past or in an altered present where this issue is different (examples: what if gun laws had been radically changed ten years ago? What if catastrophic climate change was already being played out in a way that no-one could ignore? What if, ten years ago, your government had decreed girls could no longer go to school? What if aliens had arrived a decade ago and imposed world peace?)
• You can go all dystopian as Margaret Atwood did in “The Handmaid’s Tale” or positive as in the Star Trek universe created by Gene Rodenberry.
• You can use satire if you don’t want to go too dark, but still get enraged on an issue. See: Terry Pratchett, Jonathan Swift, South Park…
• It doesn’t need to be a ‘world’ issue. If it really is ‘dogs barking incessantly’, just channel your rage about that and set a protagonist loose on the problem. Go where ever your story takes you. Then go a little further.

Go!

Simple prompt today from a song title:

The Prompt

Write a story prompted by the song title Beyond The Blue Horizon

Tips

• This song was written in the golden age of the popular song, by Leo Robin, W. Franke Harling and Richard A. Whiting. If you want to write a 1940s period piece have a listen to this very evocative clip, for inspiration.
• You could use the full lyrics for inspiration or
• Ignore the ‘prior art’ and simply let the title take you off in any direction.

Go!

Simple task today (ha!):

The Prompt

Write a story that opens, “On the edge of the mountain, silhouetted against the setting sun, there is a small ramshackle cottage made of wood.”

Tips

• This sounds, at first blush, as if it has to be set in a fantasy or fairy-tale world, but I bet you can turn it around to fit the setting you’re most comfortable with
• Prompts like this can be really effective because of the constraints they place on us; constraints that force us to reject the first idea we have and go digging for something better, twistier, more ‘me’.
• If you really want to, you can dismiss this pretty quickly with comic effect (“but that’s part of a different story”) or you could refer to it but move your characters away to the city (or space) if that’s more to your taste.
• Or you can write a story that fits this opening line perfectly. And I am still willing to bet money that no two stories written from this prompt will sound alike.
• In case you haven’t guessed yet, this is an exercise in proving to you that your writing voice is unique and even writing to a shared prompt, you needn’t worry too much about trying to write something original. Write from your heart, your experiences, your truth and your concerns, and you can’t help but be original.

Go!