Alrighty ladies, gents, and enbies, I am back after my brief sojourn! What a difference a week off makes. I didn’t fully appreciate how difficult it would be to write a short story every day in addition to working my full-time job and after 50 prompts I was thoroughly drained. Now, though, I’m itching to get back to writing.
I had plenty of time to think over my mini-hiatus. My problem, as I have mentioned before, is that I feel these prompts do not all lend themselves to becoming full fledged story ideas. Many are better suited to gathering ideas and making lists and sorting out thoughts. That’s not to say they can’t be short stories – pretty sure I have 50 posts to prove that they can – but they do inspire creative thinking regardless.
I mentioned back at the beginning of this blog that I also have a Write The Story prompt book. Each page in the book gives a topic and ten words/phrases to be included in the story. Key word: story. The prompts in that book are designed to spark a short story every time, whereas the regular old prompts may or may not.
So, going forward, my goal is to still do the small prompts daily and add one of the WTS prompts weekly. At the beginning of the week I will post a list of the prompts I will be writing from for the coming week. There will be no changes to the enumeration format for the daily prompts (tomorrow I will pick up with Prompt 51 etc), but there may now be two or more prompts in a single post.
My plans are fluid. I have a general idea for which prompts will share a post and which will provide enough inspiration for a single post. I may find that a prompt inspires me more than I initially expected and run out of time for a second one. Or the struggle bus may pick me up and force me to cut a prompt shorter than I planned and move on to the next one.
In the first case, any prompts I do not write in a given week will just be “rolled over” to the following week. In my weekly prompt list post I will include those which I did not get to and mark them. If I plow through all the prompts before the week is out, I will do as I have done up to this point and include the next prompt(s) at the end of the post.
Since the WTS prompts will be a weekly affair, they will be lengthier. I will also be more selective of those prompts. Whereas I’ve simply been going in order from the first page of the 300 Writing Prompts book, numbering as I go, I will choose the topics in Write The Story that intrigue me enough to get started. I will also number those, but they will not correspond to any particular order in the book.
Now that all of that is out of the way, this week’s prompts!
Daily Prompts:
51. What is a memory you would like to erase?
52. What traffic sign best reflects your life right now?
53. Think about the various roles you play in your life. If you had to give up all but one, which one would you keep?
54. What do you do, even when you do not feel like it?
55. What do you think is the most important question in life?
56. In what way are you strong?
Write the Story: A Letter Changes Everything
Include the following in your story:
- alchemist
- waterfall
- birthday
- cottage
- spring
- roar
- syrup
- sift
- immeasurable
- bank
Ok, time to get to writing! See you tomorrow!
Closet Full of Notebooks 