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[Write on Wednesday] Write Your Own Prompts

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!)

Photo by Gift Habeshaw from Unsplash.

The Prompt

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.

Tips

  • If you’ve been taking part in the WRITER Code workshop, you should have been collecting Story Sparks for several days by now. You can use them for this exercise
  • When writing prompts I like to write prompts in categories that feel different such as
    • Limits – word count, time limits, form restrictions (e.g. acrostics), write a whole story in a single sentence
    • Genres – rewrite a particular fairytale; fan fiction; short mystery; romance, sci-fi adventure; monologue…
    • Topics – things that made me angry, things that delight me
    • Memories – the first time; the last time; holidays; ages;
    • Details – Challenge yourself to write a story using particular types of details throughout (one sense; one color; metallic imagery;
    • Titles – Write the story of a favourite song, or mash together two book titles and write that 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!

Discussion: Bonus points: share your prompts here (don’t worry: even if someone else ‘steals’ your idea, your stories will be completely different. Every year, I hear about people who’ve written stories to one of the StoryADay prompts and different stories from the same prompt have been published in different places because what the authors did with those prompts was so unique!)

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