The Prompt

Use the Short Story Framework to help you write a story about a person who lives a life quite like yours but does not behave the way you do

Things To Consider

I hope you kept your copy of the Short Story Framework handy after yesterday’s prompt because we’re going to use it again today, to prove to you that, though it is a framework, it doesn’t have to produce formulaic stories.

Start with a character who lives a life like yours because it will take you less time to invent the surroundings of the story, this way.

Choose a situation that might enrage, frustrate, or delight you.

Give it to a character who seems like you, at first glance, but who reacts in ways you suspect you never would.

This can be an opportunity for you to be delightfully naughty or admirably honorable.

Make sure to disguise yourself a little bit, in case you ever show the story to anyone 😉 Use the short story framework and really dig into the ‘and because of that’ portions, making sure your character reacts in ways that you would not or could not.

What possibilities does that open up? What will be the consequences for your character?

On Keeping The Story Short

Along a highway near my house, some enterprising homeowner once planted a stand of bamboo to shield their yard from the traffic roaring by.

Sadly, nobody had warned the homeowner about bamboo’s insanely aggressive spreading habit.

Now a huge swath of the highway is bordered by a fragile forest of waving stems that ‘escaped’ from the original yard. The bamboo wreaks havoc on the traffic patterns every time Pennsylvania’s harsh winters flatten portions of it with wind storms or heavy snow.

If only someone had told the original homeowner to plant their bamboo in a sunken concrete tub that woud have contained the ravenous rhizomes and stopped the spread!

Likewise, stories we intend to write as short stories have a strong tendency to want to grow into novels. The best way to keep this from happening is to set some firm boundaries around your story idea.

Here are some boundaries that may stop your story from turning into yet another novel-in-progress

• * Limit the central incident of the story to one moment in one day in the life of one particular character
• * Limit the number of characters who appear ‘on screen’ or who need their relationships to the main characters explained. Two or three characters who appear in the story are plenty.
• * Limit the number of locations your story occurs in. The more locations you include, the more description you need, and the longer the story will need to be, and the more distracted the reader will become (remember, short story readers assume every detail is important. If you introduce five locations they will begin to become overwhelmed)
• * Choose your details like a minimalist. Choose few, but very specific objects, smells, tastes and sights. Oddly, the more specific you are about a couple of details, the more realistic the story feels (yes, even if it’s happening in an alternate, futuristic, universe!)

Did you have fun with your story?

Leave a comment and let us know how it went!

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The Prompt

Write a story that begins with a character buying tickets at a ticket booth

Things To Consider

Is it really possible to write a short story in 40 minutes?

Yes!

It might not be a fully-drafted short story. It might not be a good short story. Or it might (I’ve certainly seen people turn out a draft that flowed beautifully and needed minimal tweaks to fix. Sometimes racing to the end is exactly what a brain needs!).

However, the point of today’s story is to teach you to push through the messy middle and get to the end, and appreciate how that process makes all the different in your sense of achievement, and your ability to revise the story later.

Here’s how to structure your 40 minutes

• Use the Short Story Formula to help you brainstorm.
• Set a timer!
• Spend 5 minutes, using the Short Story Framework. Brainstorm ONLY up to the FIRST “and because of this. Who is your character. What do they want from the ticket booth and is that part of their desire or just something they’re doing while they plan the next part of their story? Where and when is this taking place? What is keeping them from today’s greatest desire? (Remember, their greatest desire really can be ‘a glass of water’ or ‘comfortable shoes”. It doesn’t have to be something life-changing!)
• Spend 5 minutes writing the set up you just mapped out. You should have reached the first ‘and because of that’ and allowed them to DO something. • Now turn to the next ‘and because of that’. As you were writing the first part, you likely started to have ideas about what this might contain. Make some quick notes and then…
• Spend 25 minutes writing two more complications (“And because of thats”). Remember, everything grows out of character and the logical consequences of the actions they take. Are they making it easier or harder to get to their goal? Are they going consistently in one direction or taking two steps forward and one step back? • During this time you’ll start to have an idea of endings. Pick the one that sounds the most fun to you (fun can be ‘horrific/depressing’!)
• At some point during this 25 minutes your writing will begin to flow and you’ll start to understand what this story wants to be. It won’t be perfect yet, but you can make notes about these insights and come back to them, later. • At the end of that 25 minutes, set a timer for 5 more minutes and write your climax and resolution. (You may have to type ‘[transition to ending]’ and move along, if you’re running out of time and haven’t written everything you wanted to write.
• Tips for the ending: Do you want it to be a happy ending or a sad ending? If the character achieves their goal, it might be a sad ending, but not necessarily. If the character desired something that was wrong for them, and doesn’t achieve it, that could be a happy ending!
• Make sure there is a moment in the story where the character makes a big choice that exemplifies the change that they’re making through this story.
• Spend 5 minutes wrapping up the story in a sentence or two, then spend the final 5 minutes thinking about your opening and ending lines. Do they feel like they belong to the same story? Can you tweak them now to hint at the theme?
• Then take the rest of the day off! Seriously, it’s really important to celebrate reaching the end of your story and letting yourself off the hook for the rest of the day. You can, of course, work on other creative writing projects if you wish, but sometimes it’s worth savoring the win for a while. You know you’re coming back tomorrow, right?

Most importantly of all: if you are starting the challenge today, or have ‘missed’ a day, DO NOT GO BACK AND ATTEMPT TO CATCH UP, today. If you have written a story today, you are winning. Enjoy it.

Leave a comment and let us know how it went!

If you enjoyed the brainstorming exercises today, get more like this when you:

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Get the Challenge Handbook, with helper videos, audio and text PLUS daily warm ups and brainstorming exercises designed to jumpstart your writing, daily.

Write with us during May or go at your own pace.

Access immediately. (Will stay online as long as I’m running StoryADay!)

Only $31 during the challenge. Price increases to $97 on June 1, 2024

Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday

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The Prompt

Limit your story to two characters. Each wants the same thing, but for different reasons

Things To Consider

Have you ever sat a a dinner table and listened to two relatives argue, only to discover, when you listen carefully, that they’re actually arguing the same point, just from marginally different angles?

(In my experience this happens with fathers and sons a lot. They agree on the big points but nitpick the expression of them to death, until everyone else slinks away from the dinner table and hangs out with mom and her box of wine, in the kitchen).

In this moment of what seems like deep divisions in our politics, if you dig deeper you mostly find that humans want the same things, they just differ about how to get there: we want to feel safe, to have love in our lives, to have some degree of autonomy, to do rewarding work, to make a difference.

But writing a story about such lofty ideas is not terribly compelling, so let’s bring this down to a more mundane level. Perhaps your characters both want a healthy meal but are bickering about whether that means a deep-fried, but vegetarian meal or one that includes grilled meat and seared vegetables.

As they walk and talk and try to pick a restaurant, their conversation might reveal other, deeper problems—or joys—in their relationship. Perhaps your characters are trying to break out of a locked room they’re stuck in.

Both have strong opinions about the best way to do that. This could be a simple puzzle (how will they escape?) or, again, you could reveal more about each character and their relationship to each other, based on the options each puts forward or in the way they physically approach the eventual escape.

I’m asking you to write this story with two characters for a couple of reasons

1. If you only have one character in a story it can become very passive, with lots of internal though and very little action, which makes it hard to engage a reader and make them care….unless your character has a strong and quirky voice (and we’ll be talking about that later this month);
2. The energy of a story is conflict. This can be conflict between what a character wants and what they are currently qualified to achieve, but when you introduce a second character you have many more types of conflict available to explore.

Plus, when you have characters interacting physically and verbally, you have built-in action to keep the reader interested and feeling like this is a thing that actually happened, in an actual physical space, and not simply an intellectual exercise or essay that they’re reading.

Other things to think about:

Don’t give us too much backstory. Short stories often work best when grounded in the moment, with only hints about the larger world the characters inhabit.

Give them one problem to deal with or bicker over, and then end the story. Remember, you’re coming back tomorrow to write again, right?

Leave a comment and let us know how it went!

Upgrade now to the Online Challenge Handbook

Get the Challenge Handbook, with helper videos, audio and text PLUS daily warm ups and brainstorming exercises designed to jumpstart your writing, daily.

Write with us during May or go at your own pace.

Access immediately. (Will stay online as long as I’m running StoryADay!)

Only $31 during the challenge. Price increases to $97 on June 1, 2024

Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday

Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version