Day 30 – Looking Back & Looking Forward

The Prompt

Write a story about someone who has just completed a huge challenge. What have they learned? What did they sacrifice? Was it worth it?

The Author

Julie Duffy has hosted 12 StoryADay Mays and almost as many StoryADay Septembers. That’s quite a lot.

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Day 29 – Three Sides of the Same Story

The Prompt

Write a story in three sections, each section recounting the same event from a different character’s point of view

The Author

Julie Duffy is the author of several guides for writers, available on Kindle. She is also an occasional columnist for WriterUnboxed.com

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Day 28 – Leslie Stack Objects To This Marriage

Leslie Stack writing prompt

The Prompt

“Loretta’s face was hidden by the wide brimmed hat boldly covered in ribbons and one rose. Rising slowly from the fourth pew, she raised her chin towards the minister and declared, “I object.”

The Author

Leslie Stack

Leslie Stack is a writer, musician, camper, and teacher who loves being on the water or in a museum. You can usually find her doing research behind dark glasses on a park bench. She lives in a house  with her husband where the books are plotting a takeover.

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Day 27 – Miriam Laundry Cites The Golden Rule

Miriam Laundry writing prompt

The Prompt

Write a story for children. Prompt is “The Golden Rule,” treat others are you wish to be treated.

The Author

Miriam is a best-selling children’s author who loves to empower children to believe in themselves. She does this through her own books and by helping other authors write and publish their books.

Learn the formula Miriam uses for outlining every single one of her award-winning books:

The Children’s Book Blueprint [free training & PDF]
www.miriamlaundry.com/blueprint

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Day 26 – A Story In Memos

Jul0ei Duffy Writing prompt

The Prompt

Like the list story, this prompt encourages you to break the narrative rules. Let the story unfold through a series of updates, memos, social media posts, a technical manual, or some other document that creates gaps the reader must fill in.

Remember that each memo will be written in real time, reporting on an event, before the character experiences the next ‘episode’ and writes about it.

The Author

Julie Duffy’s Gallup Strengths finders results accuse her of sometimes making logical leaps that other people find it hard to follow…

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Day 25 – Anita G. Gorman Is Mysterious

Anita Gorman Writing prompt

The Prompt

Someone finds two dates listed on a piece of paper. The dates are in their own handwriting, but they do not know what the dates mean. They have to find out what the dates signify.

The Author

Anita G. Gorman grew up in Queens and now lives in northeast Ohio. Since 2014 she has had 85 short stories and 20 essays accepted for publication. Her one-act play, Astrid: or, My Swedish Mama, produced at Youngstown Ohio’s Hopewell Theatre in March 2018, starred Anita and her daughter Ingrid.

Anita’s website is anitaggorman.com

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Day 24 – Fleet Sparrow Sings A Song

Fleet Sparrow writing prompt

The Prompt

I love concept albums, albums in which a singular story is told throughout the tracks. Some are silly, some are deep, but all of them are fascinating. Write the story that comes to you out of this lyric from Eagles’ Desperado album:

“The towns lay out across the dusty plains like graveyards filled with tombstones waiting for the names.”

The Author

Fleet is a queer trans author usually found hanging out around the DC fandom waiting to be picked to write comics. Zie also does original work, some of which zie posts on Archive of Our Own (AO3). When not writing, zie can be found reading, thinking about writing, or slipping slowly into madness in Southern California.

Original work can be found here:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleetSparrow/works?fandom_id=2692

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Day 23 – I’ve Got A Little List

Julie Duffy Writing Prompt

The Prompt

Two options today: write a story in the form of a list, OR use this list of words in your story: gallery, contemplated, identity, point, behind, tastes, followed, forty, like, generations.

The Author

Julie Duffy loves to make lists.

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Day 22 – Soleah Sadge Turns Tarot Cards

Soleah Sadge writing prompt

The Prompt

The banging on the cabin’s door is incessant. Your character throws the soufflé into the oven and rushes to open the door. No one is there, but on the floor, they see three antique brass keys and a Tarot card (JUSTICE, MAIDEN OF CUPS, or any other card). Write what happens next.

The Author

Soleah K. Sadge is a contemporary fantasy author. She enjoys traveling to places tied to legends and folklore that she can use in her stories.

She resides in the United States where she reads, writes, knits, and teaches. Her work includes flash fiction and short stories.

For more information, visit Soleah’s website at https://soleahkennasadge.com

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Day 21 – C McKane is Reflective

C. McKane writing prompt

The Prompt

Write about the boy you see on either side of the reflection.

The Author

C.McKane writes flash fiction, enjoys Italian poetry, and blogs about herbalism and aging. You can find her at @cmckane on Twitter or at https://cmckane.com.

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Day 20 – Windy Lynn Harris is Making Me Peckish

Windy Lynn Harris writing prompt

The Prompt

Food can trigger visceral memories and strong emotions. Think of your favorite thing to eat and also your least favorite. Today, write a story inspired by food. Maybe your character is at a grocery store, or maybe they’re cooking at home with the kids. Maybe they’ve come across a fruit stand on the side of the road. The item you choose can be of central importance to the story or not. Anything goes!

The Author

Windy Lynn Harris

Windy Lynn Harris is the author of Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays: The Essential Guide to Getting Your Work Published (Writer’s Digest Books). She’s a prolific writer, a trusted mentor, and a frequent speaker at literary events. Her long list of short stories and personal essays have been published in literary, trade, and women’s magazines across the U.S. and Canada in places like The Literary Review, The Sunlight Press, and Literary Mama, among many other journals.

P. S. A little bird tells me it’s Windy’s birthday today, so feel free to celebrate in the comments! – Julie

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Writing & selling short stories and personal essays by windy lynn harris book cover

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Day 19 – Michele E. Reisinger Sends You Thrifting

Michele E. Reisinger Writing prompt

The Prompt

Venture into an unfamiliar thrift shop or antiques market and find an object you’ve never seen before. Even better–one whose function you can only guess! Then, tell a story in which that object plays a key role. Perhaps you can explain how it arrived there; perhaps it’s a lost heirloom or the key to unimaginable power. Or perhaps the object itself isn’t as important as how it brings two strangers together–or sunders a seemingly impenetrable bond.

The Author

Michele E. Reisinger’s short fiction has been featured online and in print, most recently in editions of Stories That Need to be Told, Sunspot Literary Journal, and Dreamers Creative Writing.

She studied English and Political Science at the Pennsylvania State University and received an MA in English Literature from the University of Delaware. She teaches senior and AP English at a New Jersey high school and lives near Philadelphia with her family. You can find her online at mereisinger.com.

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Day 18 – Rin Chupeco Talks to Llamas

Rin Chupeco writing prompts

The Prompt

There is a llama sitting on the seat beside you, drinking coffee. No one else finds this odd. He turns to you, about to speak.

The Author

Rin Chupeco has written obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talked people out of their money at event shows, and done many other terrible things. They now write about ghosts and fantastic worlds but are still sometimes mistaken for a revenant. They are the author of The Girl from the Well, its sequel, The Suffering, and the Bone Witch trilogy. Find them at www.rinchupeco.com.

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Day 17 – Robin Stein Helps Your Character Escape

Robin Stein Writing Prompt

The Prompt

Here’s a prompt from Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem Travel:

. . . there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.

Create a character who cannot wait to leave their town. Why do they want to leave? What or whom will they leave behind? Will the decision to start anew prove to be a good one?

The Author

Robin Stein writes fiction and memoir in Newton, MA. Her inspiration comes from music, family and nature. For information on her children’s book, My Two Cities, and her workshops, please visit robinsteincreative.com.

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Day 16 – Janine Griffin Gives You A Sign

The Prompt

Janine Griffin writing prompt

It’s a sign!

This prompt idea came from an episode of Valley 101, a podcast about Arizona This episode was about who writes their funny highway signs, the history of them and what sort of messages they deliver. The idea of constraints appealed to me, often it drives creativity in unexpected directions.

Arizona’s highway sign messages are three lines long, with up to 18 characters per line. You can have commas, spaces, apostrophes, and dashes, which all count toward the 18 character limit. Now 18×3 characters isn’t long to tell a story, but it is long enough to deliver an important message. So the prompt is this:

Your character is in the middle of doing something mundane when they see a message that causes them to change course. The message could be something they see on a highway sign, a sign on the window of a store, a dashboard displayed in an office, or even a text message, but the limit is 18×3 characters and the message causes the character to change what they were doing/going to do.

The Author

Janine Griffin writes fiction and non-fiction, and things that fall in between.

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Day 15 – Halfway House

Julie Duffy Writing Prompt

The Prompt

At the midpoint of May, I want you to write a story where your character is half way between one thing and another — at a transition. This can be literal, emotional, or metaphorical.

The Author

Julie Duffy is a writer and the founder and host of StoryADay. She sounds Scottish to her American friends, and American to her Scottish friends. Everyone else assumes she’s Canadian, which is no bad thing…follow her on Twitter and Instagram @storyadaymay

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Day 14 – Caroline Kim Conjures Ghosts

Caroline Kim Writing Prompt

The Prompt

Your character is doing something innocuous and habitual like washing dishes or driving in a car or picking up dry cleaning or taking a walk in the neighborhood when a ghost/spirit appears to them. Whether it is human, animal, or other, what is it saying and why has it appeared to the character at this moment?

(This is good for dredging up something from the character’s subconscious and also for throwing your character off track with something unexpected.)

The Author

CAROLINE KIM was born in Busan, South Korea but moved to America at an early age. She has lived on the East Coast, Midwest, and Texas but now makes her home in Northern California with her family.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, Pleiades, Porter House Review, MANOA, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Spinning Jenny, Meridian, Faultline, Pidgeonholes, Cosmonaut’s Avenue, Ms. Aligned 3, and elsewhere. Her collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, won the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.

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Day 13 – Monique Cuillerier Shifts Your Perspective

Monique Cuillerier Writing prompt

The Prompt

Write a story from the perspective of a character that is not a human or other animal.

The character could be something from nature, like a rock or a puddle or a tree, or it could be something built (for example, a lamp or a shoe or a fountain pen).

To consider:

How does your character think? And what do they think about it?

What is most important to them?

What happens to them and how are they able, or not able, to react?

How do they feel about this?

The Author

Monique Cuillerier is a science fiction writer living in Ottawa. When not writing, she likes to run, knit, garden, and get angry on Twitter (@MoniqueAC). Her most recent story was published by Diabolical Plots this month. Past work can be found at NotWhereILive.ca

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Day 12 – Michael X. Wang Challenges Your Character To Survive

Michael X. Wang Writing Prompt

The Prompt

“One Thousand and Two Arabian Nights.” Story as survival: Your protagonist tells a story within a story in order to avoid some kind of disaster.

The Author

Michael X. Wang is the author of FURTHER NEWS OF DEFEAT: Stories, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize. His novel, LOST IN THE LONG MARCH, is forthcoming from The Overlook Press. Find him on Twitter: @MichaelXWang3

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Day 11 – Write a Story in 100 Words

Julie Duffy Writing Prompt

The Prompt

Write a story in exactly 100 words

The Author

writer code lesson 1

Julie Duffy is a writer and the founder and host of StoryADay. She juggles and knits, though rarely at the same time.

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Day 10 – Deesha Philyaw Encourages Letter-Writing

Deesha Philyaw writing prompt

The Prompt

Write a letter to your 14-year-old self. Address that young person’s fears, concerns, questions, and insecurities. Offer reassurance based on what you now know as an adult.

The Author

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES, won the 2020/2021 Story Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow. Learn more at deeshaphilyaw.com.

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Day 9 – JEM Wildfire Keeps Things Short

JEM Wildfire prompt

The Prompt

Write a six-word story complete with a beginning, middle, and end. Classic example from Hemingway: “Baby shoes for sale. Never worn.” Suggested prompt word: May. Could be the month, a person, a permission request, a game (e.g. Mother May I?). Or use another word. Bonus points if every word starts with the same letter.

The Author

J.E.M. Wildfire danced on the edge of creative writing throughout her life, culminating with lawyerly briefs and memorandums filled with facts presented as creatively as possible while remaining truthful.

After retiring, she decided to dispense with facts and concentrate on creativity. She discovered that the diversity of StoryADay May prompts sparked her late-blooming talent and led down writing paths she would not have stumbled upon otherwise. Most recently, her work has appeared in the April 2021, issue of “Love Letters to Poe.”

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Day 8 – Premee Mohamed Steals Souls

Premee Mohamed writing prompt

The Prompt

In a mysterious valley, two rival abbeys of nuns and monks serving the same strange god play a secret game unbeknownst to their superiors. When the stakes for the game become souls, how can the game be ended — and the debts to the demon of chance be paid?

The Author

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She is the author of speculative fiction novels ‘Beneath the Rising’ (2020), ‘A Broken Darkness’ (2021), and novellas ‘These Lifeless Things’ (2021), ‘And What Can We Offer You Tonight’ (2021), and ‘The Annual Migration of Clouds’ (2021).

Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues and she can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

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Day 7 – Roxane Gay Wants You To Be Happy

The Prompt

writing prompt from Roxane Gay

Write a story that doesn’t use unhappiness as its narrative catalyst. That is to say, write a happy story, one that is textured, interesting, not overly sentimental, but that is at its core, a happy story, however, you choose to imagine that.

The Author

Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others.

She is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She is the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, the New York Times bestselling Bad Feminist, the nationally bestselling Difficult Women, and the New York Times bestselling Hunger. She is also the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She has several books forthcoming and is also at work on television and film projects. She also has a newsletter, The Audacity.

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Day 6 – Julie Duffy wants you to Interview Your Character

The Prompt

writing prompt from Julie Duffy

Write an interview with a character who invented something that changed the world…years after the change took place.

The Author

Julie Duffy is a writer and the founder and host of StoryADay.

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Day 5 – Marta Pelrine-Bacon Makes Your Character Lose Something

The Prompt

writing prompt from Marta Pelrine-Bacon

A character has lost an object that is of great value to someone they love.

The Author

Marta Pelrine-Bacon is an artist and a writer. You can buy her art in her Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/WordsAreArtStudio

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Day 4 – Neha Mediratta Gives You An Ending

The Prompt

writing prompt from Neha Mediratta

Write a 1000 word flash fiction story that ends with the line: “That’s how a small cut in her finger led to the end of the world.”

The Author

Neha Mediratta is a freelance writer and editor based in Mumbai. Her interests include swimming, tai chi along with studying natural and human systems of organization. Check out her writing at https://www.amazon.com/Neha-Mediratta/e/B08CJSLD2H

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Day 3 – Matthew Salesses Looks Back

The Prompt

writing prompt from Matthew Salesses

This prompt comes from thinking about point of view and you could use it to write the whole story in two parts.

For the first part create a character who does something that you did during that week: e.g. go to the grocery store and you buy oranges. now. Now write about it in the third-person perspective and fictionalize it.

In the second part move your story 10 years into the future. Change perspective to make it a first person perspective. And it turns out that that non-momentous moment from your life (e.g. going to the super supermarket and buying oranges) ended up being extremely important to this character.

Don’t forget to include how the world has changed from 10 years ago to now and how the character’s world has changed, how they think of the world, and how they move through the world differently.

Would you like to wake up to a video pep talk and writing lesson from me every day during the challenge AND be invited to writing sprints with me and the Superstars during May?
Get a sneak peek of what you’re missing here.

The Author

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of the bestsellers The Hundred-Year Flood, an Adoptive Families Best Book of 2015, and Craft in the Real World, an Esquire Best Book of the 2021, which explores alternative models of craft and the writing workshop, especially for marginalized writers.

His latest novel is the PEN/Faulkner Finalist Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, Matthew was adopted from Korea. In 2015 Buzzfeed named him one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers.

Matthew is an Assistant Professor of English at Coe College, where he teaches fiction writing and Asian American literature and studies.

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Day 2 – AT Greenblatt Wants You To Go Somewhere New

The Prompt

writing prompt from AT Greenblatt

Write a story or a scene in a setting you have never used before. It can be somewhere you have been or somewhere you have always wanted to go. It can be real or imagined.

The goal is to try something new.

The Author

A.T. Greenblatt is a mechanical engineer by day and a writer by night. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments.

She is a graduate of Viable Paradise XVI and Clarion West 2017. Her work has won a Nebula Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt

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Day 1 – Fran Wilde Crosses A Bridge

divider

The Prompt

There is a point, in the distance, that your character very badly wants to reach. What is it?

What is the point from which they’ve started out, what are they willing to do to get to that point in the distance? What will they sacrifice?

The bridge is the point between those two places. The bridge is where what they must do to get there, what they’re willing to sacrifice, and the consequences of those decisions coexist.

Write their story, on the bridge.

Are we ready? Today is Day 1 of StoryADay  2021!

Today’s prompt is  from Fran Wilde. Fran is a wonderful short story writer among other things, and she writes weird little stories, but weird little stories that win awards…so let’s pay attention to what she’s asked us to do. 

Fran has asked us to write a story where your character is on a bridge. 

It’s a wonderful metaphor for where characters are in short stories. A short story can be just that moment on the bridge where they can see what they want and they know where they’ve been. 

But they have to do something.

 They have to do something they probably don’t want to do to get to the next step, to get where they want to go. 

Your character wants something and it’s over there. Something is stopping them from getting there. If they’re the three Billy goats gruff, it’s a troll. If it’s a fantasy story, maybe there are rogues on the bridge. If it’s an adventure novel, maybe the bridge is rickety. If it’s a family drama, maybe their spouse is trying to tell them not to go any further….

So many possibilities, but all of them will keep you focused on the fact that, in a short story, a character has a choice to make and they have an action to take. And all the story needs to be is about that. 

You don’t need to do much setup.

You don’t need to really tie it up with a bow. 

You just need to tell us what happens and why it matters. 

So good luck with Day One!

This is a fairly meaty prompt, but on Day One you’ve got lots of energy. You’ve planned for this. You haven’t used up all of your good ideas yet. (That actually is never going to happen)

Go out there and get your teeth into this prompt.

I’ll see you back here tomorrow, but before that,  stop by and let me know what you wrote, how it went and just leave a quick comment for us when you’re done today.

Good for you for showing up. I’m very proud of you. 

Keep writing.

Would you like to receive this kind of enhanced content every day during May AND get to attend Zoom writing sprints with me and the Superstars?

Challenge Plus

The Author

Two-time Nebula winner Fran Wilde writes science fiction and fantasy for adults and kids, with seven books, so far, that embrace worlds unique (Updraft, The Gemworld) and portal (Riverland, The Ship of Stolen Words), plus numerous short stories appearing in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Nature, Uncanny, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies.

Her work has won the Eugie Foster and Compton Crook awards, been named an NPR Favorite, and has been a finalist for six Nebulas, three Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, three Locii, and the Lodestar. Fran directs the Genre Fiction MFA concentration at Western Colorado University and writes nonfiction for NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

Check out her latest work at https://www.franwilde.net/

Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!

Day 30 – Plagiarize Yourself

The Prompt

Take a story you wrote earlier this month, and write it again in a different way.

The Author

Julie Duffy is a fan of not making things harder than they need to be.

Read A Book, Support An Indie

Reads & Company Logo

This year’s StoryADay May official bookseller is Reads & Company, a privately-owned indie bookseller in Pennsylvania. Any purchase from the site this month supports Reads & Co.

Leave a comment and let us know how you used the prompt, and how you’re celebrating!