Writing Prompts

I was an early habitué of the Internet. By the time AOL bought out Netscape (November 1998), I was already circulating a dozen or more e-mails every day and had joined three online discussion groups. Imagine my elation when I won a contest sponsored by AOL’s new fiction writers group! I did it by turning a writing prompt into a 1,000-word Western short-short. The prize was a month’s paid subscription to AOL. (Yes, those were the days we paid a monthly subscription fee for Internet services like Netscape and AOL. I told you I was an old-timer.) I haven’t written another piece of Western fiction before or since. The story prompt took me in that direction, and it was a refreshing change of pace.

A writing prompt is a brief idea expressed in a phrase or a single sentence, which becomes a springboard to an entire story you can write. Here are a few benefits of using story prompts:

• Thinking outside your narrative box. Like my winning entry for AOL, a story you write from someone else’s prompt is likely to take you to a time, place, and genre that you wouldn’t normally choose. 
•  Priming your creativity. You may be pleasantly surprised to see how quickly a story coalesces around a story prompt. If you’re suffering writer’s block with your major work-in-progress, this exercise may get the creative juices flowing again.
• Sharpening your mental focus. Astronomers see a cosmic object more clearly by looking beside it rather than straight at it, because the retina of the human eye becomes worn at the focal point. When you take a break from a major project to write a short story from a prompt, you may see the major project more clearly.

Writing prompts are all around you. Books such as The Amazing Story Generator, by Jay Sacher (Chronicle Books: 2012) and The Writer’s Toolbox, by Jamie Cat Callan (Chronicle Books: 2007) contain tools to create thousands of random story prompts. You can do the same thing with a newspaper or magazine. Just take the subject from one article and the predicate from another article to create a new situation for your prompt. Here are some I compiled from this month’s issue of the AARP Magazine:

• Your eight-year-old grandson brings you a basket of overripe grapes salvaged from a dumpster.
• A fifty-something pastor blacks out from a brain aneurysm while exercising at the gym.
• An aspiring comedienne loses her job after writing a protest letter to her hometown paper.

If you feel “stuck,” take a prompt and write a 1,000-word story. See what happens.

Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.