Freeing your Strangers We have trapped strangers in the backgrounds of our photographs. Perhaps we are the elderly couple taking a selfie in a derelict bandstand who catch by accident a large and red-faced woman jogging through the park behind.…
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“A prompt I was given once that spawned one of the most intense stories I’ve ever written is one where you limit a story to exactly 200 words, but you’re only allowed to use 50 different words within those 200.…
Jennifer Jean Choose a card from the Tarot deck and write a story inspired by the card–feel free to look up the meaning of the card. Do not mention the title of the card, or Tarot, in your story. Jennifer…
“Mash Stories www.mashstories.com, has a good system, where they take three words, and then require the participants of each contest to use those three words, exactly as they are, in a story that is 500 words or fewer (and in…
Many writers are visually inspired. An evocative photo can be a great starting point to a story, especially when you are experiencing writer’s block. I’m a big fan of photographer Ashley Inguanta’s work.…
Victoria Redel- Writing Prompt 2 Collect overheard bits of conversation/dialogue during the course of the day. Choose three unrelated bits of dialogue and make use of them (either as dialogue or not) in a piece of flash fiction. Victoria Redel…
Victoria Redel Take a title for your story that is an abstraction (e.g. Grief, Love, Bliss) and construct a story that seemingly has nothing to do with the abstraction but earns the title in a unexpected manner. Victoria Redel has…
Susan Tepper Prompt: Smoke billows thick and black from the chimney of the deserted house. Susan Tepper has been a writer for twenty years. Her sixth book, a fabulist linked-fiction, is set in 19th Century Russia and titled ‘dear Petrov.’
Rick Moody Write a story with no modifiers (I.e., no adjectives, no adverbs). Rick Moody is the award-winning author of twelve books of fiction and memoir, including The Ice Storm, The Black Veil, and Purple America. He…
Lore Segal I want to define habit as that which it is easier to keep doing than to not do. In my twenties I spent a summer with friends in Connecticut, a pain in everybody’s neck because I was never…