How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Today we’re continuing our theme of weird story forms.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
This is part of a week of prompts designed to get you to play with form.
TIPS
Remember: short story readers like puzzles and gaps. Let them figure out why they are reading this list, as they go.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
This begins a week of prompts designed to get you to play with form.
Short stories are not mini-novels and they needn’t read that way.
Jump around between characters in this one. Jump around in time. Do whatever you need to, to give your story three distinct sections and three different emotions.
Make sure to make your characters sound like real people, not actors on a stage reading soliloquies.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
This is an antidote to yesterday’s description-heavy story.
Make sure to make your characters sound like real people, not actors on a stage reading soliloquies.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Don’t forget to still have a story with character, desires, conflicts, but play with the amount of description you use:
Slow things down and raise the tension by describing the scene in detail
Speed things up by painting a sketchy image of the scene.
Play with all five senses, to evoke emotions in your readers
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
This is when the challenge gets really tough: the novelty has worn off and the end of the month seems a long time away. But keep going! If you keep writing through this week, you’ll still be writing at the end of the month and that is going to feel really good.
Lean on the support in the comments, to spur you on!
Today’s exercise owes a lot to Donald Mass’s book The Emotional Craft of Fiction.
Yesterday I challenged you to write about an incident earlier in the life of a character you’d come back to, today.
Today I want you to bear in mind the inner struggle of that character, once they’ve had time to create some damaging behaviors based on the incident in yesterday’s story.
Now, pick an action, a physical act, that they can perform in this story. Make it significant to the character.
My example: in Die Hard, when John McClane picks up a photo of his family (back when they were a happy family), he winces, and it shows us everything we need to know about what this character wants, and what’s standing in his way (hint: it’s his own behavior).
Add a moment like that to your story today. No inner-monologue. No telling the reader why it’s significant. Just use all our senses to pull us into the moment.
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Today’s story owes a lot to Lisa Cron’s book Story Genius, in which she talks about how childhood beliefs can become problems for adult characters.
Behaviors that protected your character as a child (for example, an abandoned child’s tendency to keep people at a distance, or conversely to be too clingy, doesn’t serve them well as an adult.)
Every character needs an inner conflict, to make them interesting.
Today write a vivid story about something that happened early in life to a character you’ll come back to, tomorrow.
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Without conflict you don’t have a story, you just have a series of things happening.
Be sure to put your protagonist in a situation today, where they need to do something they really don’t want to do, talk to someone they really can’t stand, or run from something they’d rather stay and do.
Conflict can be car chases or it can be the story of an alcoholic trying to resist taking that first drink in 25 years.
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
Chances are, most of the stories you’ve written so far would qualify as Flash Fiction if all we meant was “under 1200 words”.
But Flash is more than that. It is deliberately taut, vivid, and short. It should contain one or two vivid moments or images that stay with the reader long after they’ve gone.
Write your story of 1000 words today, and work on making it flash.
Steve Almond, Stop
Erin Morgenstern, The Cat and The Fiddle
Ariel Berry, Useless Things
Naomi Kritzer, Paradox
Josh McColough, Meteor
Jennifer Wortman, Theories of the Point of View Shift in AC/DC’s ‘You Shook Me All Night Long’
Rachel Engelman, Joan of Arc Sits Naked In Her Dorm Room
Julie Duffy, The Girl Who Circumnavigated The Earth In An Act of Her Own Making
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
How did you get on yesterday? Did you write a story?
Remember, set your own rules, and stick to them. If you miss a day, don’t try to catch up. Just keep moving forward!
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut.
Writing in a different genre (or mashing two genres together) can be a wonderful way to freshen things up.
So what are you going to write today? A romance? A mystery? A Sci-Fi-Punk-Rock-Thriller?
Go!
Check back every day for more prompts, and don’t forget to come back and leave a comment to celebrate your writing successes, every day!
