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.
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
Read A Book, Support An Indie
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!
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?
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.
Have you ever lost an afternoon reading all about how to market your novel…before writing the novel, never mind figuring out how to revise or publish the thing?
Or figuring out if you should take part in the latest writing challenge all your friends seem to be doing?
Or maybe you spent way too much energy deciding whether to invest in a new writing workshop or class instead of buckling down and practicing our creative writing skills.
Yeah, me too.
Instead of trusting that the work we’re doing will inevitably lead to progress, we get distracted by Shiny Object Syndrome!
But going down endless rabbit holes will leave us no closer to our goals than we were before.
In fact, it can leave us overwhelmed, discouraged and stalled.
How can we make the courageous choices that really lead to progress in our writing life? And how can you decide if that new writing course, challenge or book is Shiny Object or a Shiny Opportunity?
What do you hope for when you open a new book about writing, sign up for a course, or embark on a new writing project?
You don’t just hope to complete the course, or the book or the challenge.
When tempted to try a new Shiny Object, you probably build an image in your head of Future-You, a you who has unlocked something with a magical key that is this Shiny Object.
What does Future-You look like? Happy? At ease?
When they sit down to write, does it feel inevitable that they will write and write well?
Hope motivates us to learn that new thing, take that new course, or start that new project: the hope that we will become the writer we’ve always wanted to be.
And that this Shiny Object will be the one that gives it to us.
And it maybe it will be, if we do it properly
(Download the workbook for some tips on how to do that).
But sometimes it backfires and we end up discouraged, and no closer to our goals than we were when we first caught sight of the Shiny Object.
The ABCs of Learning The Writing Craft
We can’t absorb everything at once, nor can we progress faster than we progress!
When considering how to learn the craft of writing, we should do it with care.
ASSESS
What are you trying to achieve?
Be specific.
Ask yourself when do you want to achieve it by/when you will reassess and see how much progress you’ve made?
BRAINSTORM
Ask yourself what resources you already have on tap? A bookcase full of books on writing? The StoryADay site’s prompts, feature articles and podcasts? Online courses that you have signed up for but not completed? Course notes from conferences and courses you took in the past?
What wealth is hidden in those treasure chests?
Might you find the answer to ‘how should I show that my heroine’s heart is breaking, without saying that?” in one of those resources?
CELEBRATE
Sometimes we’re tempted by Shiny Objects because of our own lack of confidence.
Can you become your own best cheerleader and give yourself permission to keep working on what you’re working on now?
Ask yourself:
What do you already know how to do well?
In writing – what are you doing when writing seems easiest?
In life – and how might those skills support your writing. Are you already an expert organizer? Can you schedule (and stick to) writing/learning time on your calendar? Are you excellent at connecting meaningfully with other people? Can you use that to write powerful emotional scenes? Or are you the one people trust to set up writing dates, for accountability?)
Now that you’re feeling secure in the skills you already possess, you should be able to more clearly assess whether or not you really need the Shiny Object and whether it’ll really help you, right now.
A Process For Investing In Yourself
Sometimes, of course, a great opportunity comes along: a teacher you’d love to work with, a writing challenge that seems exciting, a book recommendation that you can’t stop thinking about.
Sometimes taking advantage of those opportunities is the right thing to do.
How can you tell which Shiny Objects are actually Shiny Opportunities?
Don’t stress, I’ve got you covered. Here’s the StoryADay Shiny Object Decision Flowchart. Go through it any time you need to make a decision. But, before you go, download the free workbook that goes along with it and expands on each of the flowchart questions.
Download the StoryaDay Shiny Object Workbook now (with bonus Decision Flowchart!)
Download this flowchart and the accompanying workbook now
Leave a comment: what Shiny Object/Opportunity were you most recently wrestling with? How did you make your decision? How did it work out?
If you’re serious about your writing, doesn’t it seem like you should be working on your novel or the story-you-want-to-get-published rather than messing about with writing prompts?
Respectfully, no.
Using writing prompts has many benefits, if you’re getting good prompts and you know how to use them.
Immodestly, I’ll dispense with the first point quickly: search the writing prompt archives here at StoryADay. Most of them are not frivolous, and all of them are aimed at giving you a push to write complete, crafted stories.
You can tell the difference between a good prompt and a ‘meh’ prompt, because a good one pushes you to think about the character and a reason for why they’re doing what they’re doing. A good writing prompt offers some tips about how you might work with it.
‘Meh’ writing prompts can be random collections of ideas that don’t help you craft a story. Sure, there’s some fun in thinking “how on earth can I get a postal worker onto a beach holding the antidote to a deadly toxin?” but the ‘person, place, thing’ kind of prompt can make it hard to find something to care about in the story — for you and the reader.
The Benefits of Working With Prompts
So, here I am, warning you that sometimes working with prompts can feel like a waste of time and yet I’m still encouraging you to work with prompts. Why?
Because writing prompts
Force you try out new ideas
Allow you to try out new voices
Inspire you to experiment with form
Encourage you to write even when you don’t feel like you have any good ideas
Allow you to practice getting to ‘the end’ – a storytelling essential skill
Lower the bar – prompts allow you to dismiss your ranting inner critic with a simple ‘yes, I know it’s silly, but it’s not like I came up with the idea….”
Limit your choices – too much choice is tyranny and it’s paralyzing!
Give you confidence that you can write, even when you think you can’t
Every year, I hear from writers who are delighted to find themselves writing every day, on topics and in styles they never would have tried otherwise. Their confidence in their abilities soars, and — more often than you might suspect — I hear from them, months later that a story they drafted during StoryADay is about to be published.
How can you get this experience, working with prompts? I have some tips:
Tips
Don’t be too literal – you’re allowed to use the prompt as a springboard. It’s not a contest where you have to use every element of the prompt. If the prompt suggests your character is standing in a doorway, it is entirely appropriate for that doorway to be metaphorical — a mystical portal between two worlds; the threshold between two parts of their lives….
Get emotional – find a character who fits into the scenario and ask why they care. Then ask who might care about them?
Lean in to the prompts you resist – Every year I hear from writers that the prompts they really, really didn’t want to try (to the point of getting grumpy and maybe storming off for part of the day) are the ones that sparked the most interesting stories. In some cases, this experience has led to stories that ended up published. So if you hate a prompt, consider trying it anyway. Set a timer, promise yourself a reward, tell a friend you’re writing…whatever you have to do to get yourself working.
Work in shifts – sketch out a few ideas as soon as you see the prompt, then go about your business until later in the day when you can devote another stretch of time to actually putting words on the page.
Make it a story – the problem with some writing prompts is that they don’t prompt actual stories. They might set up an interesting scenario (you are walking along the road and meet a dragon. What happens next?). That prompt is likely to spark a whacky series of ‘stuff that happens’ but there’s no necessity to have a story connecting the pieces. In the StoryADay Challenge you’re trying (at least I am) to write stories. That requires some cause and effect (remember, from the Short Story Framework: a character makes a decision and because of that… repeat to end). So do think about your character and why they care, and why they react they way they do…and because of that what happens next?
Treat them like origami – Origami is supposed to be transitory, of the moment. Working with writing prompts is often best approached the same way. A prompt may spark a story that’s not necessarily anything you had planned to write. It can dredge up some long-forgotten memory, or uncover a subconscious issue you didn’t know you were carrying around with you, or simply send you off on a little flight of fancy for 40 minutes. You may find that you’re writing about the same kinds of characters and issues in prompted writing that you write about in your more ‘serious’ work, but it may not.
Try to treat prompted work as a vacation. It’s lovely, but it’s not meant to last.
If you end up with something you want to work on, great! But let’s not put that expectation on prompted stories. Let’s treat them like more-effective writing exercises than simply writing a scene or describing a feeling. You’re still crafting complete stories, but hold them lightly. It’s OK if they only ever exist while you’re writing them.
Use writing prompts to help you break through the perfectionism that often ends up becoming writer’s block. Use them to experiment. Use them to prove that nothing bad happens if you write a ‘bad’ story. And, most importantly, use them to remind yourself that yes, you can craft a story, any time you want, and that yes, writing can be fun.
Do you relish or resist prompts? What additional tips do you have? Leav a comment!
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we build characters (both in real life and in fiction). So much of what we ‘know’ is based in the stories we tell about ourselves. That’s what this week’s prompt is all about.
The Prompt
Write a story in which a character tells the same story at three different times in their life.
One of the fastest ways to find your way to the plot of a short story is to come up with a character who wants something and see how they pursue that desire.
The Prompt
Think of a character who wants something really, really badly. Put an obstacle in your way and let them react to it
Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!
Post your goals for this month and let us know how you got on with last month’s goals.
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
Finish first draft of story and write 3 articles for my school paper. – Courtney
Write on seven days this month – Clare
Extend my reading and to read with a ‘writers eye’- Wendy
write 10,000 words – Mary Lou
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends!)
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
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!
It’s that time again: make your writing commitments for the month with the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group
Welcome to the Serious Writers’ Accountability Group!
Post your goals for this month and let us know how you got on with last month’s goals.
I’m pretty sure I know what ONE of your goals might be this month 🙂
Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.
(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)
Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months
Finish first draft of story and write 3 articles for my school paper. – Courtney
Write on seven days this month – Clare
Extend my reading and to read with a ‘writers eye’- Wendy
write 10,000 words – Mary Lou
So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)
(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends!)
With StoryADay May just around the corner, I’m taking an opportunity to do something different today: prompting you to create some back-up writing prompts of your own, for days when the official StoryADay prompt leaves you cold (it happens. I’m not offended!)
The Prompt
Write several lines that might work as writing prompts for stories during StoryADay in case there are days when the official prompt doesn’t speak to you.
On this day in 1972 John Young and Charles Duke were the 9th and 10th humans to land on the moon. They weren’t the first crew to touch down, nor were they the last (that was the mission after theirs). What they did was still mind-blowingly complex, but didn’t garner nearly as much attention.
The Prompt
Write about a character (or duo) who is doing something new and difficult, but they’re not the first to achieve it. What does that do to their attitude to the task, to their relationship with each other, to their relationship with the people around them?
As we come into April I’ll be sharing prompts designed to help you warm up for the 12th Annual StoryADay May (can you believe it?!). This week: what can you capture in a flash?
The Prompt
Write a Flash Fiction story in 500 words, inspired by a vivid moment like the one in the photo, above.
I saved this prompt for last because it tends to be the one that we modern writers, raised on TV and movies, reach for first and are most reluctant to demote.
My hope is that, after four weeks of writing in the other senses, you’re a little disappointed to be invited to concentrate on what your characters can see this week. My hope is that you’ll be open to using sight in more creative ways than you might have been last month.
The Prompt
Your character is searching for something…and time is running out.
Touch is a sense that some writers naturally use often and others, hardly ever. I mean obviously if you’re writing a romance, there’s going to be some touching, but there are other ways to use this sense that will pull readers into your story. Let’s give it a try.
The Prompt
Your main character has been deprived of a wide range of touch for some reason (a medical crisis? A custodial sentence? Some otherworldly reason…) and re-enters a life where they can touch and be touched. They have anticipated this day for so long. Does it go the way they expect?
This month is all about encouraging you to engage with the setting of your story by using your senses. Last week I asked you to use sounds in your descriptions; the week before that we explored the close association between smell, memory, and emotion.
This week your story is going to explore taste.
The Prompt
At a key point in your story, your main character is given momentous news, over dinner.
Last week’s prompt encouraged you to describe everything in terms of smell. It was tough, wasn’t it? But I’ll bet you discovered some things about your go-to style of description and how you could branch out a little.
This week is, I think, a little easier, focusing as it does on sound. It’s a sense that we often see represented on the page, but I’m going to encourage you to move beyond cliches like ‘rolling thunder’ and ‘the squeal of tires on asphalt’.
The Prompt
Your protagonist is hiding from someone. The stakes are high. They must not be discovered.
One of the most common (and most overlooked) pieces of writing advice is to use the five senses.
This month I’m going to use the five weekly writing prompts to encourage you to get more sensory detail into your writing by focusing on one sense per week.
The Prompt
Write a story in which a non-assertive character is stuck in a situation with other people who know less than they do and keep proposing the wrong solution to a problem. Make as many of your descriptions and metaphors smell-based as possible.
I know, people feel really strongly about whether or not to outline, but today—whether you’re a planer or not– I’m going to encourage you to think of your writing session as a road trip.
Road trips are fun, but usually we have a destination in mind. When, in the middle, with whoever is in the backseat complaining, and the last of the sandwiches eaten, it helps to know the answer to the question “are we nearly there yet?”
Traditional, western narrative stories have a structure, and here is a model for that.
Using the framework to brainstorm your story will help you both get to the end and, just when you’re getting sick of the story, figure out if you are indeed ‘nearly there yet’.
In keeping with this month’s theme of Achieving Wins and Celebrating, limit yourself to 1000 words for this story and just get it done.
The Prompt
Write a story that starts at the end. The story must include a flower.
Tips
I’ve given you the restriction of including a flower, because when we have too much freedom it is paralyzing. I bet as soon as I said ‘flower’ your mind starting turning over how it could get a flower into a story.
Starting at the end is a fun way to tell a story. It’s a fun for the reader, as they try to unpick the puzzle of how your character ended up *here*. It’s good for the writer because we aren’t tempted to write a story-with-no-point. We know it’s going somewhere and we have to figure out how to get there!
All our stories should be about something, should hvae a point, should make the reader say ‘ah, yes, I must keep reading to find out why…”. Often, in the process of writing our ideas, we forget this, or get lost in the details. Telling a story in reverse (or at least starting at the end and jumping back in time) is a great exercise to cure us of this.
Brainstorm some ways your story could start that would intrigue a reader. Is your character standing on the roof of a building looking over the edge? Are they running? Are the police leading them away? Are they laughing gleefully as someone plunges a knife through their heart? (Yes, more Star Trek references! Bonus points if you can identify the episode.)
Following on in last week’s vein of celebrating wins (and making wins easy to achieve), this week’s prompt is to write an odd little story.
It’s hard to imagine how to make this challenge work well, so just get it finished! (You might surprise yourself)
Then celebrate.
The Prompt
Write a story in a cypher: where the first word of each sentence is the REAL message
Tips
It helps to write out the message you’re hiding in the story first.
Then, simply write a story and find a way to start each new sentence with the next word of your hidden message.
You can choose to hide the message in the second or third word of each sentence if you find that easier, or the last word (though I think that would be hard to pull off, unless you like dangling participles)
When you have finished do something to celebrate. It can be as simple as grinning for five seconds, or doing a little dance (I like a victory dance, myself). The important thing is to take a moment to revel in the good feelings you get from meeting your goals.
Mindset is incredibly important in the life of the writer, and that means we need to celebrate every little win.
The fastest way to do that, is to make it easy to get to the win. So, today’s prompt is to write and finish a story in 100 words and I know you can do it.
The Prompt
Write 100 words about a character who is famous or infamous for one moment in their life.
Culture infuses everything about our world, so ‘world-building’ is an important part of our writing. Today’s prompt encourages you to build a story around a cultural oddity.
Man dressed as a 1920s ganster in police line up
The Prompt
Think about a cultural norm in the world of your story and explore its ramifications for your characters.
The Prompt: Write the story of an inanimate object.
This prompt was inspired by a conversation with a StoryADay Superstar who had been waiting for a package to arrive for weeks. We speculated about what it had been up to on its travels, and now it’s your turn.
It managed to be about magic and death and unrequited love and #metoo and revenge and yet have a lightness and beauty that I often find missing in modern stories, and which is hard to pull off with those themes.
Without a strong emotional story about WHY we are doing it, it’s much, much harder to get through that uncomfortable part in the middle. It’s much more comfortable to scurry back to the way we’ve always done things (of course it is!).
To make meaningful changes, you need to embrace the ugliness of the times you’ve failed in the past, and the emotional reason you want to move forward to a bright, new shiny place.
Use the StoryADay Annual Review Bundle to help you write that emotional story about each goal you set this year AND keep track of your motivation and progress throughout the year.
In the bundle:
Annual Goals Overview Worksheet (set your motto and top goals for the year)
This time last year I wrote about middles with the aim of helping you master your mindset.
This year I’m thinking more about the actual writing: how to write the middle of a story.
The inspiration for this prompt is unashamedly borrowed from James Scott Bell’s immensely readable ebook Write Your Novel From The Middle. It’s well worth the few dollars to pick up a copy of this book.
Even if you don’t have your copy yet, you can use Bell’s revelation that the middle of a story often involves a moment of introspection, to strengthen your short story writing today.
The Prompt
Write a literal or figurative Mirror Moment into the middle of your story.
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