Day 109

Do you think farm animals are content with their role in life?  What would happen if they could speak our language?  Set your story on a farm and have the animals play an integral part in your plot.

Day One Hundred Eight

One specific number is seemingly following your character.  This number is everywhere.  The change from the restaurant bill, the time of a meeting, the focus of a news report, the bus route number, etc.  With each new appearance, your character becomes more paranoid about its meaning.  Go!

Day One Hundred Seven

What emotion does this photograph evoke for you?  Apply that emotion to your character and have him feel it to the extreme.  Every word and every action is defined by it, as is your story.

Day One Hundred Six

What do you see when you can't see out?

Day One Hundred Five

Bugs.  They are your focus.  Write about 'em.

Day One Hundred Four

Write of a place, a thing, or a person in need?  It can be as simple as a brick wall in need of a little natural beauty to soften its edges, or something more complex.  You know the drill.

Day One Hundred Three

Do you live on the outside or the inside?  Is one better than the other?  Can you do both?

Day One Hundred Two

You are confined behind this wall for a day.  Your only exposure to the outside world is through this small round window.  Why are you here?  What do you see?

Day One Hundred One

Embrace an abstraction, find a reality in it, and write about it.  Now examine the abstraction a second time and write from an entirely different perspective.  Does one reality have more truth that the other?  And off we go again!

Day ONE HUNDRED!

What does 100 mean to you?

Day 99

What if spring no longer sprung?

Day Ninety Eight

A game is your focus. Is your character a player or a spectator? How does your character react when a goal is missed, a throw falls short, a ball goes out of bounds?

Day Ninety Seven

Sniff out the paper, the pen.  Bark at the blankness of the page that stares back at you.  Now sit, good writer.  Here's your treat.

Day Ninety Six

How would your life change if you turned off all the electric lights?  Base today's story in an era without electricity, or in present day but without this specific modern convenience.

Day Ninety Five

A wall to block out the encroaching sand and sea.  What if all these walls were knocked down, all breakwaters were removed, all attempts to control the sea were prohibited?  How would that affect us and our coastal way of life?  Overlook the immediate effects and focus on the long term consequences, if any?  Or are we a consequence to the sea?

Day Ninety Four

It's ten o'clock at night.  You cautiously look back up the stairs as you knock on the door.  Your knuckles rap three times, pause and then land on the wood for the final knock.  At this point, the door opens.  What happens next?

Day Ninety Three

You know how this glove got here and who it belongs to, but a backstory is needed.  Please fill us in.

Day Ninety Two

Imagine a world with no contrast: every person alike in appearance, every car the same color and shape, every city the same, every acre of land the same.  Now introduce a single unit of contrast.  How does that change your imagined world?

Day Ninety One

Imagine yourself on a road trip in the 1920s; newly laid highways and open countryside at your fingertips.  After a long day of driving, you decide to stop for the night at a motorist's hotel you spot just off the road.  Begin here.

Day Ninety

Clouds: simple pleasures in the sky.  What do you see?

Day 89

Does the board keep us from seeing in or what's inside from seeing out?  Ponder, then write.

Day Eighty Eight

You are next in line to board when you get an uneasy feeling in your stomach.  What happens next?

Day Eighty Seven

When a pattern emerges, do you pay attention?  Have your character discover a pattern in something, anything.  How does this pattern change him?

Day Eighty Six

Early one morning, you decide to stop at the corner cafe for some coffee.  Moments after you order, a woman comes barging through the front door.  You immediately make a judgement about this woman, but as the events play out, you find your judgement to be terribly wrong.  Fill in the details and go.

Day Eighty Five

A concrete foundation.  Evaluate its strength in the face of nature versus the face of human kind.  Both, if given the opportunity, will get the best of it.  Create a storyline around the very existence of this foundation.

Day Eighty Four

Straight, curved, thick, thin, jagged, smooth, patterned, solitary.  What kind of line is your eye attracted to?  Does the line tell a story within the visible frame of your piece or does your imagination fill in the blanks?  Think about what the lines on your page say about you as an artist.  What do they say about your characters?

Day Eighty Three

If you could vacation anywhere in the world, where would it be?  Now imagine living there.  Write about it.

Day Eighty Two

You find a token hidden in the shadows and it takes you on a remarkable journey.  Write about it.

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!