Day Eighty One

Write a story in which a landmark or monument plays a pivotal role.

Day Eighty

Create a storyline around a garden that is life for your character.  This garden is a character in and of itself.  It is also the setting, the conflict, and the resolution for your story.  Time to bloom!

Day 79

Write a fictional story based on a real-life painter.  Whether your painter is famous, unknown, or somewhere inbetween, how does his gift touch the world?

Day Seventy Eight

Your character is treading water and desperately needs to climb ashore.  3, 2, 1, write!

Day Seventy Seven

Raft, dugout, dinghy, kayak,

Gondola, catamaran, fishing boat, schooner,

Houseboat, yacht, riverboat, ferry,

Cruise liner, lifeboat, submarine, aircraft carrier.

Drop your character right on the deck of one of these boats or ships.  Choose one, choose many, but therein lies the challenge.

Day Seventy Six

Luck.  Do you believe in it?  Does your character?  No matter the stance, entwine the concept of luck into your storyline.

Day Seventy Five

A bridge from one side of the bank to the other can take many forms.  Choose a character you've written about in a previous prompt and add planks to the bridge he may take to get from one point in his life to another.

Day Seventy Four

For a writer, any corner of the world becomes a playground.  What is your ideal setting for a story?

Day Seventy Three

Why not dart through the trees from time to time?  Take the path you see in front of you, or weave through the shadows for an entirely different adventure.  Write of a character encountering an unforeseen shadow that shifts him into an unpredictable circumstance.

Day Seventy Two

 

Calling all tides, high and low, ready and waiting.  Where do you need to be?  What do you need to do?  What's keeping you from attaining that goal?  Are you ready and willing to get your feet wet to do so?

Day Seventy One

 

What is the most beautiful thing about the forest? What is the ugliest? What is its biggest inconvenience? What is its greatest contribution? Write a story with a forest as the setting.

Day Seventy

What if all mannequins were live people?  How would that change the social construct?  Would that alter such things as the privacy of conversation?  Write a story from the perspective of a mannequin.

Day 69

Your boat capsizes, spilling you and your belongings into the sea.  You have time to grab one item only before the rest sinks to the ocean floor.  What do you grab and why?

Day Sixty Eight

What would your welcome mat say?  Write a story about an unusual welcome mat.

Day Sixty Seven

Comparable to the number of bricks are the days you have walked down this alley.  Only today is different.  Why?

Day Sixty Six

Once the vehicle for a man's livelihood, this wheel now sits neglected and overgrown with weeds.  Turn back time and create a story around the wheel's heyday.

Day Sixty Five

Devoid of color with a focus solely on shape...once broken down to the bare minimum, how does this image still have presence?  Still have impact?  Still have worth?  Despite the obvious, what do you see? 

Day Sixty Four

Would you rather cross the world's oceans in a skiff or snowshoe across the Himalayas?  Have your character face seemingly insurmountable odds and tag along as the adventure unfolds.

Day Sixty Three

How are you blessed?

Day Sixty Two

The nails will rust, the wood will weather, and the paint will chip.  Age is inevitable with all things, just as the skin with its wrinkles and the hair with its shades of gray.  When the inevitable comes, what remains?  How will you remain in the face of time?

Day Sixty One

Write of a world that has depleted its supply of wood, or of a world where wood never existed.

Day Sixty

This is your view and your destination, or so you believe.  And go!

Day 59

Name the predominant color in this photo.  Now write using the color as your focus.

Day Fifty Eight

A first impression can sometimes cloud the senses.  How do you part the heavens to see past the misconception a first impression may instill in you?  Or do you?

Day Fifty Seven

As your writing blooms, let's mix it up a bit.  It's now your turn to write a prompt for this photo.

Day Fifty Six

What would you do if you had a turbo boost button?

Day Fifty Five

What if this was your shelter?  What brought you here?  How would you survive without the convenience of modern utilities?  Would you view it as an adventure, a relief, or a terrible misfortune?

Day Fifty Four

Create a character obsessed with safety and control.  Now throw your character in the middle of an unsafe situation.  What happens?

Day Fifty Three

What if you could confess without consequence?  Would the checks and balances of morality still hold as strongly as they do when consequence is present?  Would virtue still be sought?  Choose a character you have used in a previous prompt, but now assign him the inability to acknowledge consequence.

Day Fifty Two

What allows for a clear connection?  What allows for energy to pass from one source to another, from one person to another?  Is it easier to create the connection or block one that already exists?  Write a story about a connection between two unlikely characters.

Day Fifty One

What do domesticated animals think about?  What do they think of us?  Or are their thoughts just "moo...like a cow's opinion, it just doesn't matter."  (Thank you Joey from Friends.)  Write a story from the point of view of a domesticated animal.

Day Fifty

You are invited to a party, but misread the invitation and show up a day late.  It is the best mistake you have ever made.  Why?

Day 49

Man employs rigid strategies to prevent nature from taking over.  Write a story about this eternal battle and man's struggle to prevail.

Day Forty Eight

Upon closer examination, one of these bricks has been chiseled free from its mortar.  You slowly pry the brick from the wall and discover a secret hidden behind it...and go!

Day Forty Seven

You find yourself thrust against justice into this damp cell.  Your eyes adjust to the darkness and take stock of two rusted cots, stacked one on top of the other against the far wall.  A man, weathered by time and incarceration, occupied the top cot.  He paid you no attention save for speaking a single word upon your arrival...

Day Forty Six

How pure is reflection?  How do the ripples of life alter it?  How does the eye of the beholder distort it?  Write of a character examining his or her reflection, either in clear view or that of the subconcious?  Does this scrutiny lead to joy or sorrow, to action or regression?

Day Forty Five

What does it take for you to feel loved? Could you live without such expectations? Would doing without make any love you receive better or worse?

Day Forty Four

Imagine a life of obsessive compulsion—a preoccupation with detail that hinders the quality of life, a pervasive anxiety that infiltrates the simplests of moments.  Let an awareness grow in you as you consider the difficulties of both day and night.  Now imagine this disorder as what is deemed normal and you are the sore thumb. 

Day Forty Three

For every blade of grass, you spend a day on the road.  You continue to move just as the grass continues to grow.  Why are you in a constant state of motion?  Who or what do you encounter as you travel?

Day Forty Two

What do you hear when you sit in silence?

Day Forty One

What is it about locks denying access, rules limiting life, that makes us itch to break them?  Curiosity, definance, the allure of the unknown?  If these limits, these restraints were not in place, would we still feel the draw to investigate the other side?

Day Forty

Life is everywhere, even sprouting from the cracks of a long forgotten road.  Write a story centered around finding life in an unusual or unexpected place.

Day 39

Picture the craftsman whose hands are responsible for this piece of art.  Write about this person and the details of the build.

Day Thirty Eight

Grasp onto the first word that popped into your mind when you saw this photo...no thinking, no analyzing, just own it.  Now create a story around the inability to use, feel, or comprehend that word.  Does its omission cause conflict?  Do you struggle without it or can you make do?

Day Thirty Seven

To what are you tethered?  What happens if your tether is secured hastily?  What do you do when the knot comes loose or the rope becomes frayed?

Day Thirty Six

The light stays on.  Waiting to welcome, waiting to signal, or just waiting.  Find a story behind the light's wall, or find it in what the luminance represents.  But find it somewhere and give it a voice.

Day Thirty Five

A world without traction, picture it.  Tires without tread, shoes with smooth soles, even fingers without prints.  No grip, no friction.  You slip, you slide, you lose your balance and fall to the ground.  Or do you?  Are speed, rash behavior, negligence forbidden?  Or do you use them to your advantage?

Day Thirty Four

When two contrasting worlds collide, is a symbiotic relationship possible?  Or will one always fight for control over the other?  What do your eyes see?  What do they fight to see?  Take a stand, choose a side, duke it out...now write.

Day Thirty Three

FISH

Buy it, sell it, pack it on ice,

Catch it, gut it, fillet it twice.

Hate it, love it, or swim with it,

Doesn't matter, just write about it!

Day Thirty Two

You wake to find a window in your house fogged over and a message written in the condensation.  What does it say?  What does it mean?