[Prompt] – May 22 – Third Person Limited

This week’s prompts are all about point of view and narrative voice.

Write a story from the third person limited POV.

“Third Person, Limited” means that, unlike yesterday, your narrator never says “I did this”, rather you talk about “he went to the door”, “He opened it.”

The ‘Limited” part means that all the judgements and assumptions, all internal thoughts are limited to those of the character through whom you are telling the story. No popping out of Dave’s head to jump across the room and tell us what Mandy is thinking as she looks at him. The only thing we’re privy to is what Dave thinks Mandy might be thinking about him.

Within this framework you can still play with the form: your limited persona can be like Nick Carraway, reporting on Jay Gatsby’s life, rather than telling us about his own adventures. You can give your limited persona the ride of her life through a whitewater canyon and let us see it all from her perspective.

Third person limited is great for short stories, because it lets us – the readers – identify with one character, and ground the story somewhere. You don’t have much space in a short story and the last thing you want is to confuse your readers (unless, of course, the whole point of your story is to confuse your readers!). Letting them get to know a character by showing their reactions to events, puts you half way to rooting for (or against) the protagonist.

Go!

 

[Prompt] May 21 – 1st Person

This week’s prompts are all going to focus on Point Of View.

 

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, writing in third-person, or first person, or inside or outside your character’s heads. So this week we’re shaking things up. Ready?

Write A Story Using The First Person Voice

The whole thing should be told in the “I” voice, and preferably should be a story about something that happened/is happening to the person telling the story.

Go!

[Prompt] May 20 – Revenge

I saved this one for last (in the plot prompts series) because it has the potential to be the most fun of all!

If you’re a writer, the chances are you think a lot (too much?) about everything that happens to you. And you probably remember every little slight anyone has ever perpertrated upon you.

Now’s your chance to have your revenge.

Today you will write a revenge story. (Use examples from real life if you like!)

If you want to keep your main character sympathetic, make sure they’re seeking revenge for something outrageously unfair and that the bad guys are really bad. And make sure that your main character doesn’t just slide through the revenge process unchanged.

Of course, it doesn’t have to end well for your main character. Maybe they start out nice-but-wronged and end up avenged-but-twisted. Or maybe your protagonist is a real bad apple, to start with.

As usual, keep the scale of your story small: focus on one incident – probably the moment of confrontation. Start right in the action and show the backstory in dialogue, allusions, images. Bring the story to a climax and show us how it has affected your main character as s/he walks off into the sunset.

Write A Story of Revenge

Go!

Thanks to James Scott Bell for a week’s worth of inspiration. Check out the StoryADay.org exclusive interview with JSB, his Plot & Structure book, or any of his suspense novels, zombie legal thrillers (who could resist?!), historical romance or books for writers.

[Prompt] May 19 – The Quest

This week’s prompts are inspired by ‘plot patterns’ from James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure.

Today your hero is restless. S/he can’t simply live the way everyone else does. Your hero needs to go on a quest.

Whether this quest (and what they seek) is literal or figurative, make sure the goal is something absolutely critical to their survival, and the obstacles huge.

(In a short story you may only be able to give them one obstacle as the set-piece but you can use the action & dialogue to

  • Imply a whole lot about who they are,
  • Explain why they are here and
  • Show the scale of the quest before and after this point,

If you pay attention to doing this, you’ll end up with a complete  story, not just a trailer for a novel

Send Your Character On A Quest

Go!

[Prompt] May 18 – The Loner

This prompt is inspired by ‘plot patterns’ from James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure.

Your prompt today revolves around a protagonist who holds him/herself apart from the rest of their society. Perhaps they are an anti-hero, perhaps a loner, perhaps an introvert in a family of extraverts.

Make something happen to tempt/force this person out of their alone-ness. Will they step into their society during the action of the story? When all is resolved will they stay involved or retreat once again?

Write a story about a loner/anti-hero

Go!

[Prompt] May 17 – The Chase

This week’s prompts are all inspired by ‘plot patterns’ from James Scott Bell’s Write Great Fiction – Plot & Structure.

Write a story in which your protagonist is being chased by someone or something. If you choose to show what/who the hero is running from, make sure that pursuer has a vested interest in catching the hero (make it their obsession). Will your hero get away? Stay on the run? Find a safe haven? Convince their pursuer it’s all been a terrible mistake?

Write A Story About A Chase

Go!

[Prompt] May 16 – Love Story

Daily Prompt LogoOne of the nine plot patterns highlighted in James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure is:

The love story.

(A billion romance readers can’t be wrong!)

You don’t have to write a traditional romance to be writing a love story. There’s a love story embedded in almost every story you read or watch. From Homer’s Odyssey to Homer and Marge Simpson, love is in the air.

All that is required for a love story is for two protagonists who are in love, and an obstacle to that love. Resolving the obstacle, one way or another, is the plot of your story.

To avoid writing a schlocky, saccharine formulaic romance, “one or other of your lovers [should] grow as a result of the pattern,” says Bell.

Write A Love Story

Go!

[Prompt] May 15 – Fairy Story

Whether you like the Disnified Happily Ever After versions or the grim Grimm originals, fairy stories are a great source of inspiration for a writer.

You can rewrite the tales with a modern twist, or a funny one, or you can simply take the morality-play form and use it for your own story.

I come back to this prompt idea again and again because it is such fertile ground and because EVERYONE knows a fairy story or folk tale (if you need a reminder of some, go here).

Alternatively, you could choose to write an allegory (think: Narnia, or Animal Farm). If you do write an allegorical story, however, bear in mind this advice from James Scott Bell’s book Plot & Structure:

“Allegory is difficult to do well, since it may just come off as merely preaching in the guise of an imaginative tale…Make the characters real and not just stand-ins for your ideas.”

Rewrite a fairytale/folk story or Get Allegorical

Go!

 

[Prompt] May 14 – Fish Out Of Water

After last week’s character focus, this week’s prompts are going to focus on different plot archetypes.

First up: the fish out of water story.

This ties in nicely with the focus on character, since the fish out of water story lays a great emphasis on the characters – either the alien character, or the ones who are trying to deal with having him in their lives. Think: Mork and Mindy, The Wizard of Oz, Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy… It also allows you scope to have fun with descriptions, point of view, dialogue, belief systems, you name it.

Write A Fish Out Of Water Story

Go!

[Prompt] May 13 – What Your Character Wants

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

-Kurt Vonnegut

A concrete way to ensure that you are writing a story — not a scene or a character sketch — is to make sure your character wants something. Give your hero a want or a need, then move them towards or away from that thing. Et voilà! You have a  story.

There isn’t much room in a short story. You can’t afford to give your main character two or three things she wants (unless it’s two things that are diametrically opposed). She will have other things that matter to her, of course. It’s just that now — at this moment in her life, the one we’re spying on — she has one overriding want or need that she must resolve.

Secondary characters have wants and needs too, but you don’t have much room to talk about them. If your secondary character is the antagonist (or villain) you can spend more time on their ‘wants’ since exploring them is probably part of explaining why your hero isn’t getting what she wants yet. Otherwise, mentioning their dream in one sentence can be a great way to flesh out secondary characters.

Make Your Characters Want Something

Today, write a story in which you give a character a very specific want or need (you don’t have to spell it out at the start). Move them towards their goal, put rocks in their path, grant or deny their wish.

Give every secondary character a specific need too – even if it never makes it into the story, be sure you know what that person’s dearest wish is.

For more inspiration on this subject, check out Nathan Bransford’s post on the subject.

[Prompt] May 12 – Other Than Human

WRITE ABOUT A NON-HUMAN CHARACTER

Can you write a non-human character without making it react like a human? How would a table/tree/robot/alien think? How would it speak? How would it react compared to the reactions of someone born and raised in the West in the 21st Century?

Can you write a truly non-human character?

Go!

[Prompt] May 11 – Delayed Appearance

DELAY THE APPEARANCE OF THE MAIN CHARACTER

Sometimes it’s a problem to create enough suspense in a short story to keep the reader engaged. An interesting way to do this is to delay the appearance of your main character until quite far into the story. This follows on from yesterday’s prompt where you kept your protagonist off-sceen. This time, however, you can build them up and then allow them to take the stage.

How does this feel? Better? Did you keep the tension going even after the character appeared?

Keep Your Main Character In The Wings

Go!

[Prompt] May 10 – Offstage

NEVER LET YOUR CHARACTER APPEAR

Write a story in which the main, most interesting character never actually appears ‘on-stage’.

Everything the reader learns about the character should come in opinions, comments and conversations between other characters in the story. What do we learn about them? How important do they become? How difficult is it to keep them ‘off-stage”?

The Hidden Protagonist

Go!

[Prompt] May 9 – Chatty Cathy

LET YOUR CHARACTER TALK

Tell a story where everything we learn about the character comes from the things they say.
Does what they say match up with what they mean? Iin what ways do they lie about themselves when the speak? How do people react?)

Tell Us About Your Character Through Their Voice

Go!

[Prompt] May 8 – Character From Your Past

This week all the prompts are going to focus on Character. Here’s the first:

REWRITE A CHARACTER FROM YOUR PAST

Pick a character, a real person, from your past. Put them into a story. Be as kind or as cruel as you like (you might want to change their name…)

Use a real character.

Go!

[Prompt] May 7 – Title Recall

PICK A SONG TITLE AND USE IT AS YOUR STORY’S TITLE

Scan this page quickly and pick a title that leaps out at you. Browse around a bit if you need to but use the rule of three: if you haven’t found something on the third page, tough. You’re stuck with it. Pick one and write the story.

Use the title as the title of your story. (It can be very, very tenuously connected to your story.)

Steal someone else’s title for your story

Go!

[Prompt] May 6 – Eavesdropping

STEAL A LINE FROM AN OVERHEARD CONVERSATION

Dialogue and story sparks are all around us. Today, listen for a line in a conversation (if you spend the whole day alone at home, turn on the TV or the radio for three minutes). Pick a phrase that you hear. Use the line somewhere in your story today.

This morning I overheard a woman say,

“Karen, have you been to the new Casino yet?”

I might write about the casino or about Karen, or about a coffee shop in a small town with a regular cast of visitors – one of whom is a street person on her regular round of public spaces.

What will your eavesdropping yield?

Go!

[Prompt] May 5 – Flickr

Get A Graphic Prompt From Flickr

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Pah! I say pictures need us to tell their stories.

Flickr’s “Explore” page is a great place to find arresting images that suggest a scene or a character or a story. Click around, refresh the page, until you find an image that stops you in your tracks. Look at it for five minutes. If, at the end of that time, it hasn’t suggested at least one story or character you could love, move on to another image.

But you can only do this three times. The third time, if you still don’t love the image…tough! You’re stuck with it. Write your story using that picture anyway.

Go!

[Prompt] May 3 – Wikipedia

Daily Prompt Logo

Use Wikipedia’s Front Page To Spark A Story

Go to the front page of Wikipedia.

Quickly scan the “In The News” and “On This Day…” sections, or even the Featured Article.  If something catches your eye, use it as the spark for today’s story.

For example, on the day I’m preparing this prompt I saw “In the News…Two Trains Collide”. That could be a spark for a story about two people on the trains and how they experienced the crash; the story of an investigator sifting through the wreckage – what’s his story?; someone waiting at a station for a passenger who never arrives; a thriller about sabotage.

In “On This Day…” it happened to be the anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear power plant. That sparked these ideas for me: school children in a small northern European country who aren’t allowed out to play one afternoon after the explosion because of contamination fears; rescuers going into hell; a researcher walkign through the nature-reclaimed exclusion zone 20 years later; a local, being interviewed. What it did to her life; the power plant’s thoughts as the disaster unfolks; what if it had gone differently: worse?; a satirical story about a disaster at a solar or wind plant instead…

Grab a story spark from the front page of Wikipedia

 Go!

[Prompt] May 2 – Memories

Daily Prompt Logo

Write From Your Memory

Take an incident from your past – one shining afternoon; one horrible moment — and give it to a character (like or unlike you).

 

Play it out as it happened or as you wish it had happened. Take it from the beginning through the middle to the end. Make us see it. Make us care.

Relive a moment in time.

Go!

[Prompt] May 1 – Keep It Short

Daily Prompt LogoHere we go: May 1, the start of StoryADay May!

It’s always tempting to get excited on Day 1 and launch in to a really long, involved story. Or maybe your story-telling muscles are out of shape and you end up writing a long, rambling story because you don’t have a framework and the story runs away from you.

Either way, biting off more than you can chew on May 1 can be a bit discouraging. Especially when you wake on May 2, work the cramp out of your fingers and your brain…and realise you have to do it all again!

So today’s prompt is a simple one:

Write a story of not more than 1,200 words.

That gives you 100 words for intro, 100 words for summing-up (or for the twist) and 1000 words to play with in the middle. (Hint: something should have happened by the time you’re 400 words in, to make me want to keep reading.)

 

That’s it. Happy writing, and see you tomorrow!

[Write On Wednesday] – Leap

Today’s prompt is, rather appropriately, about the moment before something big.

It’s the breath before the scream; the crouch before the leap; the blink before the resolute stare; The moment with her hand on the door frame before she leaves for good.

The Prompt

LEAP!

IMG_1614

Tips

• Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).

2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.

3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.

4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Leap!  #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-leap

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is the deep breath before the plunge! #storyadayhttps://storyaday.org/wow-leap

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-leap

See my story – and write your own, today: Leap at #WriteOnWed #storyaday https://storyaday.org/wow-leap

 

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

[Write On Wednesday] Location As Character

Sherlock Holmes has Victorian London.

John Irving has New England.

John O’Hara’s short stories couldn’t work without their small-town Pennsylvania backdrop.

Even fantasy settings need to feel real in order to succeed (think Middle Earth, or Earthsea, or Deep Space Nine). So today we’re going to practise writing stories in which the location is as vivid as any character.

 

And in this age of Google Maps, Wikipedia, Flickr, Pinterest, a billion hobby blogs and online tourist information sites, there is no excuse for writing a thin, anemic version of any place you can imagine. (Even if you write fantasy, you can base the details in something real.)

The Prompt

Simcoe St in Toronto

Simcoe St in downtown Toronto, ON.

  • Pick a place you have never been (preferably somewhere you have a friend – online or otherwise).
  • Spend no more than 30 minutes researching it. Use Google Street View, search for blogs based there and ‘listen’ to how its residents talk, scan newspaper archives and obituaries, look at the high school and local library’s websites.
  • Set a story in the location you have learned about. Paint a vivid picture of the place; weave it through your action; salt your character’s dialogue with local flavor.
  • Then ask your long-distance friend how close you came to getting it right? What bloopers did you make? What slang did you get wrong? Was it too generic? Was it spot on?

Tips 

  • Remember to tell a story about characters in your location. This is not a travel brochure.
  • Write fast. It’s just a fun exercise.
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Location, Location, Location!  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is to write in a concrete location! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

See my story – and write your own, today: Location As Character at #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.


[Write On Wednesday] – Style Switch

The Write On Wednesday story prompts are designed to prompt quickly-written stories that you can share in the comments. It’s a warm-up exercise, to loosen up your creativity muscles. Come back every Wednesday to see a new prompt.

This week’s prompt was inspired by yesterday’s Tuesday Reading Room story, The  Sellout by Mike Cooper. In that story, the author uses traditional hard-boiled detective tropes, but his detective is investigating… accounting fraud.  

The Prompt – Style Switcheroo





Write a story where you use a familiar style of writing (Romance, space opera, Western, literary fiction, YA paranormal, political thriller, whatever you’re most familiar with) but use it to treat a subject that is outwith the normal subject matter  for that genre.

(Think: Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, or Tom Clancy trying to write a bodice-ripper, FF. Scott Fitzgerald on a space station…)

What will you write?

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it. 
  • Do feel free to cross over into parody or be ridiculous. It’s just a fun exercise.
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: [style] meets [subject]  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is a style switch! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb 

See my story – and write your own, today: Style Switch at #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-qb

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

[Write On Wednesday] Trapped

The Write On Wednesday story prompts are designed to prompt quickly-written stories that you can share in the comments. It’s a warm-up exercise, to loosen up your creativity muscles. Come back every Wednesday to see a new prompt.

If you’d like more accountability, support and structure as you warm up your writing for StoryADay May 2012, why not join the Warm-Up Writing Course?  Click here for details.

This week’s prompt was conceived as a character study, but the more I think about it, I realise it can focus on descriptive writing, point of view, or almost anything!

The Prompt – Trapped

Trapped #1
“Trapped #1” by Waltimo

Write a story where the main (or only) character is trapped, literally or figuratively.

Literal traps can be prisons, a locked room, the side of a mountain, inside an alien spaceship, a bear trap, a maze, anything you can imagine!   (Personally, I’d love to see someone write a claustrophobic locked-in-a-box story with only one character, and see how you manage to sustain that — great opportunity for character and description!)

Figurative traps could be anything from a bad marriage to con and could be a fairly conventional short story that lets you work on your dialogue or plotting.

What will you write?

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: Trapped  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is a cool old map! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA

Come and write with us: Trapped! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA

See my story – and write your own, today: Trapped! #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-pA

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

[Write On Wednesday] Story Sparks

“Where do you get your ideas?”

Every established writer has a tale to tell about being asked that question.

Some of them lie and tell people they order them from an Idea store. Some wearily answer that they think really hard until the ideas come. Still others joyfully shout that ideas are everywhere, what are you crazy? Don’t you see them?!

The truth is, the more you look for ideas, the more you’ll see them. But you do have to look

The Prompt

This week’s prompt is not a writing prompt, but a prompt-prompt. This week you’re going to look for Story Sparks.

book with sparks in glasses photo by Julie Duffy

We’re just over a month away from StoryADay May. You’re going to need at least 31 ideas (more in case a few don’t work out).  I’m not talking about outlining your stories, or even coming  up with great ideas, just about writing a list of sparks for stories, or places you can find those sparks.

Ray Bradbury in Zen In The Art of Writing, talks about one method of gathering what I’ve come to think of as “story sparks”:

“I began to gather long lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These nouns were provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface.”

Today, set a timer for as long as you can manage (ten minutes? 20? Half an hour?) and then use that time to write down as many Story Sparks as you can.

Write down:

  • Lists of nouns (things that scare you, matter to you, frustrate you)
  • Your favorite colorful metaphors. (Consider them as titles for a story)
  • Aphorisms you can play with (“See No Evil” “A Bird In The Hand”)
  • The names of the weirdest people you have met in your life (or a quick description if you can’t remember their real names)
  • Lyrics and lines from poetry that have stuck in your brain for years
  • The titles of your favorite artworks
  • The most striking places you’ve visited (potential settings)
  • Historical tidbits you’ve learned on trips (or in your own town)

Extra Credit

Capture three more story sparks every day for the next week: eavesdrop, read obituaries, browse the front page of Wikipedia, bookmark quirky photographs, read poetry, delve into medical textbooks, looks, listen, smell, breathe in the world around you. Capture three sparks from all that living you do every day.

Need a way to capture sparks?
Download three printable logs now!

Share in the comments a source of story sparks that you discovered or found most productive.

Need more help? Get the ebook that grew out of this article: Breaking Writers’ Block, A StoryADay Guide

[Write On Wednesday] – The Ambiguous Protagonist

I/Eye illustrationMy nine-year-old son recently volunteered that he hates “I” stories, because you can’t know the main character’s name until someone else says it.

I found it interesting that he finds this lack of information about a character annoying. Perhaps I did, at age nine. Now, however, I enjoy the gaps in a short story, in the descriptions. I relish the mystery, the sense of discovery. Sometimes the discovery is simply the true character of the protagonist. Sometimes, the character turns out to be not human at all.

The Prompt

Write a story in which the reader does not know a key piece of information about one of the characters. It can be as simple as making the story a first-person narrative, or you can offer a twist in the tale.

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story about the a mysterious character:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is “the ambiguous protagonist”! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ

Come and write with us:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ

See my story – and write your own, today:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-oJ

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

Write On Wednesday – The Unknown

I came across this delicious map in an online archive, instantly started thinking about story-writing.

Map of North America by George Willdey , 1715

Not only do our stories often start out this way (we can see, maybe as far as Cleveland, but beyond that it is terra incognita), but the whole frontier idea is rich with story possibilities.

The Prompt

Write a story that involves the unknown, the unknowable, a frontier (physical or metaphysical). It could be set any time or place in this world or another universe.Take the idea of that unknown portion of the map from 1714 and find a way to work it into your story’s landscape.

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story about the Unknown:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-o7

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is a cool old map! #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-o7

Come and write with us:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-o7

See my story – and write your own, today:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday http://wp.me/p1PnSG-o7

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

[Write On Wednesday] How to Use Pinterest To Write A Short Story

Don’t even think of telling me you can’t think of anything to write.

Not with a site like Pinterest at your fingertips.

How To Use Pinterest To Help With Your Writing

What is Pinterest? It’s a virtual scrapbook where people grab and save images from the web, all neatly categorized and ready for your browsing pleasure. It’s like looking over the shoulder of everyone in the world, but being able to choose only the topics that you’re interested in right now.

This week we’re going to use Pinterest to create the elements of a story that you will write.

The Prompt

First, your setting. Choose a picture of an interior or an outdoor vista, and use that as your setting.

Next, characters. Click here to find the face of your characters in the story. Choose at least two (one can be minor, one should be your major character). If you choose a celebrity, just steal their face for your story. Look at their features, forget about the persona. Use their features in any descriptions in your story.

Now that you have your character and setting, something needs to happen. Browse this eclectic page until a picture jumps out at you, and suggests a question or an event. I found this picture of a teacup and saucer and immediately saw an opportunity for a story  — some kind of inter-generational story with the teacup coming down to a young woman from an elderly relative; the story behind it; life lessons; redemption; who knows? But it’s a spark on which to hang a story.

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my Pinterest-inspired short story:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday bit.ly/xk1FwJ

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is all about Pinterest! #storyaday bit.ly/xk1FwJ

Come and write with us:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday bit.ly/xk1FwJ

See my story – and write your own, today:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday bit.ly/xk1FwJ

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.

 

[Write On Wednesday] Digital Story Cubes

OK, so I’ve used my real-life Story Cubes to generate a prompt once before, but now the cute game has an even cuter app, and who am I to resist?

So, behold: this week’s story prompt comes from the Rory’s Story Cubes app.

 

storycubesapp

I’ll leave it up to you whether you use ALL the cubes, but I think I have to insist that you use at least five. Good luck!

(P.S. With a shooting star, a magic wand, a turtle and a world, how many of you are going to be writing Discworld fan-fic?)

 

Tips

  • Don’t worry about your audience and who might read it
  • Make sure your story travels from start to end: don’t just write a scene, make someone or something change between the first word and the last.

The Rules:

  1. You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
  2. You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
  3. Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
  4. Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my StoryCube-inspired short story:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is dice-based! #storyaday

Come and write with us:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday

See my story – and write your own, today:  #WriteOnWed #storyaday

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here.