StoryADay September is just around the corner!
Perhaps you’re not sure you can make it through a month of short story writing; or perhaps you’d just like a little extra help.
This week’s Write On Wednesday writing prompt is a chance for you to warm up AND to get a taste of what you’d experience as a StoryADay Superstar.
Continue reading “[Write On Wednesday] Get Some Extra Help”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.
Write a story in which a character tells the same story at three different times in their life.
This week I’m encouraging you to flip the order of your story to help you think differently about the storytelling process.
Start your story with the character walking away from a situation (figuratively-speaking) and then go back and explain how he/she got there.
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.
Think of a character who wants something really, really badly. Put an obstacle in your way and let them react to it
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!)
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.
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?
This month’s prompts are all designed to help you warm up for StoryADay May. This week, an opportunity to think about what it means to be a writer.
Write A Story About A Writer
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?
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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’.
Give it a try.
Download the Short Story Framework and brainstorm a story
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
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.
Write a story that starts at the end. The story must include a flower.
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
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.
Write a story in a cypher: where the first word of each sentence is the REAL message
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.
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
This month’s theme at StoryADay is “Triumph!”
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.
Write 100 words about a character who is famous or infamous for one moment in their life.
You can read some 100 word stories here to get inspired.
You’ll have to work hard to pack an emotional punch into 100 words, but I know you can do it!
You can read the tips I’ve posted previously for 100 word stories here, here, or here
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
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.
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.
Write the story of an inanimate object
The Prompt: Write a story with a pivotal scene where your a character tastes a food they haven’t tasted since childhood.
Write a story with a pivotal scene where your a character tastes a food they haven’t tasted since childhood.
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.
Write a literal or figurative Mirror Moment into the middle of your story.
All the prompts this month are designed to stand alone or support your novel habit! Use them to spark standalone stories or to unstick your work-in-progress.
Just because it’s short doesn’t mean a story can’t be complex.
Write a story in which the protagonist and antagonist are two sides of the same coin.
This month’s writing prompts all acknowledge the fact that November belongs to novelists. Whether you write longer fiction or you don’t you can use this month’s prompts to nudge you forward in your writing practice.
Take an idea you have thought “I could write a novel about that” and test it as a short story
Two characters (or more if you wish) are spending their first night in a new home (or apartment, hotel, dorm…you decide).
And the first character says, “You know, they say this place is haunted…”
This week’s prompt comes from writer and artist Marta Petrine-Bacon, a self-professed fan of all things October-ish. You can find her novel, her art and her beautiful handmade notebooks (with appropriately spooky art) in her Etsy Shop WhereWordsAreStudio
If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
Today I’m taking you right back to the beginning…the very first StoryADay May prompt, from May 1, 2010.
Today it’s another post from the archives, one of my favourites. And this time you get a peek into the kind of content the Superstars group gets throughout the challenge– perhaps you’ll be able to join us next time!
Write A Story As A Series of Letters/Tweets/Memos
Today I dug into the StoryADay archives for a favorite prompt and came up with this one. Those of you who’ve been around for a while may remember it, but I’m betting whatever you come up with for it this year will be COMPLETELY different from how you used it last time.
Today’s prompt was, er, prompted by a brief literary feud.
A TV critic took issue with the latest episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock, complaining that our hero was more James Bond than Conan Doyle’s Holmes. The episode’s writer wrote a response in verse, then the critic wrote back with his own poem. BUT, in the last couple of lines of the poem, he pointed out that he had embedded a hidden message in his words (the second letter of the first word of every line spelled it out).
I was so tickled that I’m stealing the idea (which he stole from Conan Doyle, so I don’t feel bad).
Write a story with a hidden message
Write a human-experience short story about a homeless person during the Covid-19 outbreak.
JONATHAN MABERRY is a New York Times best-selling and five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author, anthology editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator, and writing teacher/lecturer. He is the creator of V-Wars and the Joe Ledger series.
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!
Wake With Clouds
Matty Dalrymple writes, podcasts, speaks, and consults on the writing craft and the publishing voyage as The Indy Author™, and is a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors. You can connect with The Indy Author™ via Facebook and Twitter.
Matty is also the author of the Lizzy Ballard Thrillers Rock Paper Scissors, Snakes and Ladders, and The Iron Ring; the Ann Kinnear Suspense Novels The Sense of Death and The Sense of Reckoning; and the Ann Kinnear Suspense Shorts, including Close These Eyes and Write in Water, and the new writing handbook, Taking the Short Tack:
Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction which she co-authored with Mark Leslie Lefebvre.
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!
Make list of 10 things that you noticed about your day already.
Even if you woke up at 4 am there are certainly things you noticed.
Try to be as precise and sensory as possible and try to avoid metaphor.
And then, at the end, connect those pieces together to make a story.
Tammy Breitweiser is a writer and teacher who is a force of nature, an accidental inspirationalist, the keeper of the little red doors, and a conjurer of everyday magic who is always busy writing short stories. Her flash fiction has been published in The Ninja Writers Monthly, Spelk, Clover and White, and Elephants Never. Her essay is in the I Wrote it Anyway anthology. You can connect with Tammy through Twitter @TLBREIT or through her medium page.
Sign up for her newsletter here.
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!
“I weighed this against the odds that I was doing something incredibly stupid, and I went ahead anyway.”
Fleet Sparrow writes queer fan fiction, queer flash fiction, and queer novels. Generally, things are pretty odd in Fleet’s world.
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!
![[Write On Wednesday] Nostalgia Foods](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/bill-craighead-rYLpb6COS_I-unsplash-2.jpg)