The Prompt

Today I want you to write a story in 40 minutes. To help with that, we’re going to take away some of the invention you would otherwise have to do, by writing fan-fiction.

Choose a story, character or world invented by someone else, take a couple of their characters and mix things up. You might want to take an incident or ending that you hated and change it.

Remember that when you’re writing fan fiction it’s not the kind of thing that can be published without the original rightsholder’s permission (at least, not commercially), but there’s a long and proud tradition of artists copying other artists’ work to figure out what makes them…er, work. If visual artists can do it in their sketchbooks, then we can definitely do it in our practice.

Fan fic is common in sci-fi and fantasy worlds, and in the ‘fandoms’ of TV shows and movies, but there’s nothing to stop you writing a fan fic based on something by the obscure literary fiction writer that only you seem to love…Whatever you can summon up some unreasonable enthusiasm for is fair game.

To help you with the timing, I recommend

• brainstorming for five minutes,
• taking 5 more minutes to write your opening,
• then spending the meat of your time complicating things for your characters,
• leaving five minutes at the end to pull it all together in some kind of ending (even if the rest of the story is not exactly ‘finished’ Trust me, it’ll help, when you come back to it, or stumble across this little oddity on your hard-drive in two years and wonder what you were trying to achieve with it…)

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Fan Fic In Forty

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. Her first recurring characters, at age 11, in no way ripped off the friendship in “My Best Fiend” by Sheila Levelle (thanks, Sheila!)

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Write a story that revolves around an heirloom toy.

This might be a single character’s reminiscence of a beloved toy; a character’s discovery of an heirloom toy that changes everything; or perhaps you want to follow your heirloom toy through several ‘lifetimes’ in a series of short flash or micro-fiction pieces.

This can be a delightful story…or delightfully horrific, or anything in between.

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A Toy’s Tale

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. She recently made an accidental pilgrimage to the Merrythought Teddy bear factory in the town of Ironbridge, that made her beloved child bears…and brought home a new friend. Because if we can’t play, what’s the point?

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Where film and television can give us rich soundscapes and nuanced visuals, only the written word allows us to access the whole range of human senses. The challenge: write a story that uses touch, smell, and/or taste, and avoids visual and audio descriptions.

Delve into some of the other senses if you wish: proprioception / body position, nociception / pain, or internal senses like hunger, thirst, suffocation, or nausea. Give your character a more exotic sense like echolocation or the ability to feel magnetic fields, extrasensory perception or knowing, but limit or eliminate sound and vision.

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Elizabeth Twist

Elizabeth Twist (she/her), untames a garden and teaches meditation in Hamilton, Ontario. Lately she’s been writing about sacred pacts, systems of power, and fungi. Her stories have appeared in Dracula After Stoker, Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight, and Unfettered Hexes. Her latest piece appears in Agita Magazine:

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Take a story that you’ve written (maybe this month? Maybe from a longer or older work?) and rewrite an important incident, from the point of view of your main character’s nemesis.

Your beloved main character does need some flaws in order to allow readers to relate to them. Writing a story about them, but from the point of view of someone who is supremely irritated by them, gives you a chance to explore all the ways in which your character might not be perfect…

Try to make the story you write today complete, with no need for the reader to have any outside knowledge of these characters. Practice setting everything up, dripping out backstory, raising the stakes…you know, all the good stuff stories need. All while playing with your existing characters in a new way.

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Hero of Their Own Story

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. Her writing really took off when she learned to be mean to her characters. For an example of that, see ‘Amel and the BRIDE’ in the May/June 2026 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Sand.

It can be experienced positively or negatively and either type of scenario is fertile ground for description.

Enjoy a brief brainstorming session! Pros and cons of sand. Happy memories versus frustrations with sand. Types of sand. Colors of sand. Uses of sand. Shake out those possibilities.

Find one that works for you and write a story that incorporates sand and some of its gritty glory.

Pressed for time and energy? Consider a drabble.

All the time in the world? Many successful stories incorporated vast deserts of sand.

Whatever you choose to do, hope you find joy in writing a story today.

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Ruby G. Dubois.

Ruby writes wherever she is, whenever she can, wonders what Freddie Mercury would sing if he were still alive, and hopes her attention span and the stars will align so the world can, one day, read her stories.

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

 

The Prompt

Who prepared most of your meals when you were a child?

What objects, smells or flavors bring back these memories?

Write a story in the form of a grocery list, and make sure to tell us the story of a character who has memories like yours…either in what you include in the list, or what you leave out.

Wondering how to make a story out of a list? Listen to me talk about that here along with an example of a list story.

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Brenda

Brenda writes short stories and a fun, upbeat newsletter – Thru the Window

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Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.