Prompt #137

End a 600-word fragment of a story with a joke you like or loathe.  Use the joke as a way of coloring the whole passage, but don’t just lead up to the joke.  The joke should be relatively short, and it might be better if the joke is somewhat odd.

Prompt #136

 In a 500-word scene, have one character teach another character something that changes the teacher.

Prompt #135

Construct a character who is not present.  You have many options here: people may talk about this character before meeting him, or after meeting her; you might choose to examine what this character owns, how he or she lives, under what conditions; you might use indirect approaches, like letters or documents that attest to the existence but not presence of the person.  How do we know of people?  Examine the ways we build characters in our minds and in our social environments before and after we meet them.

Prompt #134

Write a 600-word first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun (“I” or “me” or “my”) only two times—but keep the “I” somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing.  The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself or herself than in what he or she is observing.  It is very important in this exercise to make sure your reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize that this is a first person narration.  Show us quickly who is observing the scene.

Prompt #133

Write a 500-word sketch of a scene in which a character has an experience that causes her to recall a startlingly similar past experience.  Juxtapose the two scenes, the present one and the past one, on top of each other.

Prompt #132

Write a chilling, edge-of-the-seat, stay-up-late-reading suspenseful story about whether your character will get the new puppy he wants.  Make the puppy extremely important to your character, and make sure we know why. Make us ache with your character’s need for the puppy.

Prompt #131

Your character and his wife visit a new house that they’re thinking of buying. Your character’s wife is enthusiastic about the house, but it’s really a terrible place. The character hates it but is afraid to say what he really thinks. Show the scene. But.. do NOT tell the reader that the house is terrible. Do NOT tell the reader that your character hates it. Do NOT have the character tell his true feelings about the wife. Instead, make the reader see and feel it all. And eventually, make the wife see it too.

Prompt #130

Your character’s husband is an alcoholic, but your character refuses to realize it. She idealizes him. The couple had a dinner party the night before, and your character’s husband got drunk and violent. Your character tells the story of the party in the first person and tries to convince the reader that what happened was no big deal.

Prompt #129

Choose a set of three elements and write a story that contains all three of them!

1. A stolen ring, fear of spiders, and a sinister stranger.
2. A taxi, an old enemy, and Valentine’s Day.
3. Identical twins, a party invitation, and a locked closet.
4. A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.
5. Aerobics, a secret diary, and something unpleasant under the bed.
6. An ex-boyfriend, a pair of binoculars, and a good-luck charm.
7. An annoying boss, a bikini, and a fake illness.
8. The first day of school, a love note, and a recipe with a significant mistake.
9. A horoscope, makeup, and a missing tooth.
10. A campfire, a scream, and a small lie that gets bigger and bigger.

Prompt #128

A child moves into a new house and finds out that the other kids in town think it’s haunted. She begins to invent ghost stories to tell at school in order to get attention. But the more stories she tells, the more frightened she becomes of the house…