Peg Alford Pursell WRITING PROMPT From Dear Silence by Victoria Chang “When unrelated aunties and uncles came over for dinner parties, I envied the laughing as they Reunite wine, ate steaming fish and tofu. When they left, they took…
Browsing: #febflash Prompts
Jennifer Martelli WRITING PROMPT Listen: someone is crying in the other room. Who is it? Why are they crying? Are these tears of joy? Grief? What are tears, anyway? Are they trying not to cry? Is there something…
Sarah Herrington PROMPTS AND CRAFT TIP Craft Tip + Prompt: The Writer’s Altar “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal…
David Ryan EXERCISE: FLASH AND TORQUE This might work best with an idea you’ve already had in mind—some single, relatively simple idea that seems strange and interesting in some way. It might be something that happened to you…
Tara Laskowski WRITING PROMPT Visit the Merriam-Webster Time Traveler site [link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler] and choose the year you were born to see a list of words that were first introduced that year. Choose three of them and write a three-paragraph…
Samantha Steiner WRITING TIP: WRITING AND REST For a time, I was bothered by the question: what do I do on the days when I don’t feel like writing? I tried forcing myself to write every day. Sometimes…
Melissa Joplin Higley PURPOSEFUL PUNCTUATION Punctuation tells the reader how to read a passage or poem: how fast or slowly to proceed, where to pause or stop, where to reflect or rush ahead, what information to consider together…
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello THE EPISTOLARY EXERCISE Write a story entirely in the form of a letter to an individual addressing a specific conflict between you both. The addressee can be your imagined reader, a character, creature, object, place, or…
Mary McLaughlin Slechta WRITING PROMPT I have a small wooden drawer long detached from its bureau. It’s a great catch all for things I’ve kept past their usefulness and others discovered on walks around the neighborhood, especially in a…
David Hollander THE UNDELIVERED MESSAGE: A WRITING PROMPT Many of the prompts that I’ve had the most success with involve the institution of formal rules or limitations, which have the odd effect of liberating writers from having to…