tips: more prompts than you can gather under your hat

Sites to find a less traditional prompt (that aren't a pain to visit):

PostSecret - Every 5x4 piece of confessional artwork tells a story.

Overheard In New York - "So I says to Mabel, I says..." Go here to work on your dialogue and character. Google for other cities.

FOUND Magazine - Stuff. Letters, notes, drawings. The detritus of civilization. Where did it come from and who found it?

Not Always Right - Customer blunders. The worst part is, we've all been that dumbass at the front of the line. Go here for your small town color and big city ennui.

National Geographic Photography Archives - From landscapes to people, the beautiful to the bizarre, our world and far beyond the stars. If you can't find a picture of it here, maybe you should consider if your SF is too inaccessable.

Youtube - Most people use this go-to idiot box for vids, but youcan also find any song in the history of ever on the biggest multimedia site on the web. Music and writers have had a long history together. If you just have to hear "Thriller" or you'll never finish your big love scene, Youtube is the place to go.

Prompt 7: all fall down

Prompt 7: Write about a chore you must perform during an apocalypse.

My father wasn't dead when we abandoned the house, but my brother and I thought of him as such. Dad wanted to be buried with Mother, so Toby and I took him to the basement, dug him a grave beside Mother's, and laid our father beside it. We told Dad that when he was ready, he'd have enough strength to flip himself into the hole, and he believed us, and we believed ourselves, because what else can you do?

Before we left, Toby and I protected him in a canvas tarpaulin and tied off his feet so the rats wouldn't get to him, or the cat, if the rats died of plague too. We gave him a long rubber tube to breathe through and the rest of grandfather's dandelion wine. We locked the cellar door against looters or . . . whatever. And we left.

Photo credit.

Prompt 5: radio gaga

Prompt 5: gifts of love

Sometimes finding a prompt is as convenient as flipping on the radio and staring out into the middle distance. This story came to me while staring cross-eyed at the wall and listening to not this song, but it's from the same play, and I can't find "Gifts of Love."

Harry married her, sure. But is that any reason to stay with her?


Imagine him, a fifty-six year old man, running away to join the circus that he's watching on tv. The gays are getting liberated, so Walter Kronkite says. There's old dogs in that group in the crowd in front of the nightclub in California, it's not just for the young fellows. Harry could go. . . .

They'd laugh at him down at the bank. Old Slaughter gone sissy, let's get him a dress to go with his favorite pair of nylons. He'd seen that goddamn bank over thirty years from a booth in Nell's Grocery to a fifty-branch, tri-state conglom.

Imogene would laugh at him. Harry's stomach rolled the beer and popcorn over. Where would she go if he left her? Her sister's, maybe; it could be good for her, to get away from a miserable alcoholic who stayed up watching the late night news with a bottle in his fist. Why not?

They had no children, he'd never made much of his career. He was the office fool, not one who brought in accounts but who was always good for a laugh; he never really fit in with the boys. Imogene had always said she didn't need furs or diamonds, but a woman ought to have a pretty thing to dress up her life. She preferred to paint and decorate and be-curtain their little bungalow to death, to fill it with things he sorter liked to look at, come to think.

Imogene liked listening to him talk, or at least she let on like she did. He liked to talk, but not many people seemed to want to hear him. Did Imogene really like to listen? He never asked.


It just didn't make any sense.


Photo credit.

a few new prompts

I finally got the fire going, so I can write up some Prompts For You All.*

*I come by this term through marriage, as it were - my SIL is from Texas. Words are lovely and useful things and it's perfectly serviceable to adopt words from wherever one finds them. Voice, after all, is an acquired skill.

I encourage you to respond one or more of these prompts in the comments, on your own journal (but please leave a link in the comments!), or the privacy of your imagination.

1. "Your baking is always so . . . interesting."

2. The things you overhear in a mad scientist's lab.

3. An old woman dies and leaves a generous fortune to her cat. Everyone wants a piece, except one person.

4. You never noticed a particular detail in a family heirloom before.

5. What does the apprentice (or familiar) do when the witch or wizard says "oops"?

Photo credit: Old typewriter by Petr Kratochvil

Prompt 3: oh by the way...

Prompt 3: Two friends meet after 20 years apart. One admits to having killed someone.* 

As always, I encourage you to respond to the prompt in the comments, your own journal (but please link back so we can share in your genius!), or the privacy of your imagination.
 
To see Frankie again in her class, of all places, shook Martha to the core. He was just Frank now, with a longer face; he'd grown himself a hooked nose and broad shoulders. She missed his long hair and silently counted all the hidden tattoos under his collared shirt and black jeans.

Oakdale stretched out behind her like a forest path long grown over, though Martha still spent one or two Christmases in her lonely apartment at two am, feeling grit under her fingernails and hearing Daddy's bootfalls in the hall. The smell of alcohol made her nauseous. If, standing at the lectern, she were foolish enough to call up that state of mind, Frankie would feel like an oasis, a safe island in a sea of indifferent freshman faces. Even now, a hundred years later.

At the end of session, Frankie waited until the cloud of students waiting to talk to her dissipated, until it was just she and him, Frankie and Martha, transposed from the Qwikstop parking lot to the university lecture hall.

"'Ello, Professor Turner."

"Frank Gellert." She didn't know what else to say. "You got taller."

"You cut your hair." He looked her over. She pulled in her stomach.

"I guess I did. . . . Did you have a question about the lecture?"

"I wanted to thank you, Martha. You saved my life. If it wasn't for you, I would have gone to prison. The army was good for me, it straightened me out. Thank you."

Martha turned her gaze to her sheaf of folders and papers. She wasn't that girl anymore, she wasn't working on roller skates at the In-N-Out, she didn't live in a town where the worst men at home rose to the most powerful level of town government.

"It wasn't your fault Trina Addams was in the car that night of the big snowstorm, Frankie. You're lucky Councilmen Addams' heart gave out before it went to trial."

Martha wasn't a candy striper any longer, and hospitals locked up their digitalis. Sometimes when she caught a late night movie, the detective still mentions that the sweet drug is undetectable in soda pop.

Frankie ducked his head. "Yeah. Sure am. You take care now."

Frankie didn't show up to another lecture, though Martha saw him around campus. When it came time to defend his thesis, she sat on his defense committee approved him without question. There's just some things you do for the people who really, really know you.

Prompt credit: Summarized from The Writer's Book of Matches, by the staff of Fresh Boiled Peanuts, Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, OH, 2005. Photo credit.

Prompt 2: in another place...

Prompt 2: Put someone you know in another time and/or place.

"Pick up your shoes," Mother said, "don't you care about your appearance?" The house was clapboard, the town runny in spring. Elyse entered America in 1956 and half of Honeysuckledale, Pennsylvania didn't have a radio. To visit a friend's, it was faster to walk across a field than to drive. Prom dresses came from Sears & Roebuck. By the grace of a too clever mind in between the two braids that ran down her head and over her ears, Elyse was granted the privilege of college.

Elyse returned to Muhlenberg College her senior year newly anointed with peace, love, music, and mud on all her favorite flares. She asked her grandma to teach her how to crochet and macramé and made herself an autumn-colored wardrobe. She ironed her hair. She met Michael. And then Anna, Raquel, Georges, Sacha, Professor DeLeo ("Call me Tim"), and the magic mushroom.

At 56, Elyse still lunches with Anna, she's still married to Michael, she heard some poor girl finally pressed charges against Professor DeLeo, she's taught someone to macramé, and has landed in a cabin in California to hide out until the Republicans go away. She's not done taking on the world, but prefers to take it one small chunk at a time.

I welcome you to respond to this prompt in the comments, your own journal, or the privacy of your imagination.

*Prompt source: Uni English prof. Photo credit here

Prompt 1: that time you fucked up

Prompt the first: Write about a time when you were in a bit of trouble, a time when you found yourself in the midst of a royally fucked up situation.*


I left the office; the alcoholic was called in. And soon turned out.

Drink exposed her pain and evaporated her awareness.

Her gin-vile, breathy plea: "What did I do to you?"


I encourage you to answer the prompt in the comments. If you respond on your own blog, please post a link here.


*Prompt source.