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!
Write A Story Inspired by This Painting
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!
Write A Story Containing These Words
distinct, weak, volunteered, slow, coming,
time, duress, suspected, shimmy, listened.
If you’re feeling brave, post the story in the comments, or on your own blog and link to it (like so many of you have been doing already).
Underline or bold the key words, or just let us read the story without noticing them.
This is a silly exercise designed to lower the bar on your expectations. But you may be surprised at what you manage to do with this prompt!
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!
Write A Story Where We Only Hear One Side of The Conversation
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!
Write A Story In The Form Of Letters
An epistolary story is one that is written in:
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!
Write The Same Incident From Three Different Perspectives
Use this exercise to sink into character: how would different people tell the story of the same incident? What are their motivations? Who are they talking to? What are they hoping to achieve?
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 worry: you don’t have to know anything about poetry and you don’t have to make this rhyme!
That’s it!
(Sometimes different forms can be surprisingly freeing so if you hate this idea, try it anyway!!)
If you know about the different types of sonnets (or want to research them) you could echo the thematic ‘rules’ that sometimes apply.
But don’t waste to much time worrying about that. Just write a story in 14 sentences.
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!
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!
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!
What can you do in 100 words? A surprising amount.
Just don’t be surprised if today’s story takes just as long as yesterday’s. Short and sweet isn’t necessarily quick!
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!
Short stories are short. One of the ways to stop them from creeping out of control is to limit the number of characters.
Stick to two characters today (yes, your characters can refer to other people, but nobody else appears in the story.)
If you usually write in third person, try first.
If you usually write adult women, try a boy, or an alien, or a grown man.
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!
We often get stuck writing in the same point of view or from the same perspective. Make an effort to write a story, today, that is different.
If you usually write in third person, try first.
If you usually write adult women, try a boy, or an alien, or a grown man.
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!
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!
Don’t spend too much time on your opening.
Brainstorm for five minutes, spend the next five on an opening and then give yourself 20-25 to dig your characters into a hole and let them start to climb out of it.
Try to start wrapping it up when you have about five minutes left on your timer. Even if you have to write some brief notes [“this is where they make their great escape”], put an ending on the story.
This will make it so much easier when you come back to revise it later.
Go!
You’re here! We’re here! And StoryADay September is definitely here!
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!
The StoryADay Superstars are seeing enhanced versions of these prompts all month, plus a year of monthly meetings and support.
You can still sign up for Superstars until midnight tonight!
September is almost here, and with it comes a hint of the changing season, maybe the start of a new school year, and…
StoryADay September!
This is your chance to spend a month figuring out how to put writing back at the center of your priorities, so that you can write more, write better and finally become the writer you were mean to be.
Are you in?
Sign up now and I’ll send you prompts every day in September, PLUS the StoryADay care package to help you prepare for the challenge and track your progress.
Can’t see the sign up box? Click here!
Continue reading “StoryADay Sept’19 Sign Ups”
The problem with doing something hard (like writing) is not that you aren’t good. It’s that it’s hard to know how long to work before you decide that you really aren’t any good.
(Hint: It’s longer than you think. And you may never be able to tell!)
How to keep going when you’re not sure if you should.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
My author interviews at NaNoWriMo’s blog: http://blog.nanowrimo.org/
Jerry Jenkins: http://jerrysguild.com
DIYMFA’s 101 Course: https://members.diymfa.com/101-course/
The first week of StoryADay May 2018 is drawing to a close. In this episode I tell you about
The webinar I did with NaNoWriMo’s Young Writer’s Program, Marya Brennan: http://stada.me/ywplive
The Superstars program, and how you can still join (today): http://stada.me/superstars
Here’s where you can find all the prompts for StoryADay May 2018: http://stada.me/may2018
And I answer a question about burnout and revision during May.
In this episode I give you my top three tips for a successful month of writing an introduce the new StoryADay Superstars program: https://storyaday.org/storyaday-superstars
(membership comes with a month of free access to Duotrope, my favourite online source for writing markets)
OK, so this is Day 5 of the challenge and if you haven’t missed a day yet, the chances are strong that you will. Soon.
So here’s my advice, based on five years of May challenges, a couple of StoryADay September challenges and the writing courses I run.
Let the unwritten stories go and write again tomorrow.
Seriously. This is not so much about turning out 31 complete stories as leaning to turn up every day, even when you feel like a failure. I encourage people never to try to catch up with days they’ve missed. That creates far too much baggage. (You can always keep writing into June if you want your 31 stories!)
The other point of a challenge like this is to try to do more than you think you can do, and to watch where it is hardest and where/when it was most fluid. Then, when you go back to your normal writing schedule you will have all these experiences in your tool kit. You’ll know that Saturday is maybe not a day to expect to get much writing done. And you’ll know that 11-midnight is prime time. Or you’ll know that it’s easier to write when you have a plan (or not).
Don’t worry too much. Just keep turning up, keep breathing and keep watching all the ways your inner demon tries to sabotage your writing life. Say ‘Huh, that’s interesting, demon. Nice try, but I’m still turning up again tomorrow”.
If we are going to write for the rest of our lives (and lets face it, we are), all we can do is keep learning!
Back in 2012 (my third year) I decided I was no longer going to commit to writing on Sundays. I COULD, I just didn’t HAVE to.
Between running the site and having two small children and a husband that I quite like to spend time with, something had to give. Sundays were it, for me.
This is fine. If you decide not to write EVERY day in May that’s cool.
BUT do try to assess your progress on a week to week basis rather than waking up each day and thinking “I wonder if I should write today”. (You should).
Stop now and see how your first five days (which include a weekend) have gone. Decide what you’ll commit to for the next seven days.
Of course, I thoroughly encourage you to write an actual StoryADay unless the thought of it is making you truly miserable. If you’re miserable, change the rules. But keep writing.
As our month wraps up and we move on to new challenges (editing? submissions? contests?) I’d love to hear your takes on this prompt:
Go!
Today’s prompt is a stanza from “The Lake At Dusk” by Robin Robertson (from Swithering, Harcourt 2006)
Rinsed after the rain,
The forest is triggered and tripwired;
When I pause for a bird call
The silence takes time
To reassemble around me
Like a dream retrieved.
No-one will find me here.
Go!
Today bring another of Cid‘s graphic prompts and it’s my favourite so far:
For instructions on how to play see the instructions page.
Thanks Cid!
…of course it doesn’t have to be a man and it doesn’t haven’t to be anything to do with a boat, but here’s today’s prompt:
Go!
It’s that time of year again.
I spent the evening watching my kindergartener receive a certificate and getting ready to move into First Grade. He’s already been at the same school for three years, and is moving on to…the same school, but next time in 1st Grade.
Still, it was an ending, a moment of transition, a biggish deal (mainly because the grown-ups made it that way).
So today’s prompt is:
Go!
The only qualification to be a ‘Superstar” is a desire to write and support your fellow writers.
A supportive group of committed writers, who meet virtually, support each other’s efforts, and inspire each other.
Registration for 2024 open now-June 8, 2024
A 6-part journey through the short story.
Starts Jan 3, 2025
![[Daily Prompt] May 27 – Graduation](https://storyaday.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/StoryADay-Classic-Logo-stenciled.png){kind=logo}