In high school I took a creative writing class. We did an exercise on several occasions where the teacher passed out a sheet with five premises on it. We were told to pick one and write a story based on it. We were given whatever was left of the fifty minute class period to finish it. This was in the days before personal computers and we had to write it out in longhand.
I haven’t thought about this exercise in years. I remembered it yesterday and went looking around the internet to see if anyone was doing anything like that. I should have known. There were a number of sites that were doing it. There was a subreddit that had codified the practice such that there was a set of coded tags to tell what kind of writing prompt you were posting.
There was another sponsored by Writer’s Digest (big surprise when you stop and think about it). I narrowed the search to science fiction writing prompts. The results were still over a million sites. My idea is to post a writing prompt on my blog one day and then post my response to it the next day. That will give everyone a chance to write their own response before I post mine. Leave a comment pointing to your story if you write one or message me.
I actually thought of this idea while I was brainstorming an idea for a novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which is coming up starting on November 1st. I’m still working on an idea for that.
Okay, here’s the first prompt.
Your TV is receiving broadcasts from 24 hours in the future. You see a report about a tragedy and attempt to tell somone about it so that they can prevent it but no one will listen to you.
I’ll write my story and post another prompt tomorrow.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.