1) Your character keeps attracting trouble throughout your story even with the best intentions. 2) Write a story somehow based around a favorite activity that you always look forward to (from your childhood or today). 3) Your character takes a huge risk and decides to expose their secret identity to someone during your story. 4) In your story, feature a student who always feels embarrassed over asking seemingly stupid questions in class. 5) During your story, your character participates in a protest march with the most bizarre or obscure cause. 6) During your story, your character sets the most bizarre life goals. 7) Feature a talking refrigerator in your story. 8) Start your story with a children's book author autographing copies of their book at a bookstore. 9) Write a eulogy for your favorite deceased pet. 10) In your story, feature a character that has a hard time and really struggles with letting their needs be known to others. 11) Start your story with a teacher reading a fairy tale to their students. How do the different children from different kinds of family’s react to the story? 12) Paint a scene for the reader by describing the color of every object in your setting. 13) Something happens during your story that triggers a stress or anxiety response in your character. Describe this event in as much detail as you can and without directly telling the reader the character's emotions. 14) A plane flies over a war zone and drops the most bizarre supplies. 15) Set your story during a lecture on the most bizarre or outlandish subject being taught at a school. 16) Your character has a habit of spewing made-up statistics about things that are oddly self-serving. 17) Sometime during your story, your character gets an unexpected tip (monetary or intellectual or both). 18) Your character has quite an unusual roommate. What’s so strange about them? 19) During your story, your character gets paid for something they usually do for free. 20) Write about an ant colony that evolves intelligence and starts mining plastics from a landfill. 21) During your story, your character is forced to choose between doing the right thing and getting something they’ve wanted for a long time.
1) Your character has just discovered a new endogenous substance (a drug that the body naturally produces) that allows people to have mystical and visionary experiences. 2) Your character wakes up in the middle of the night to a house fire near their home. 3) Start your story with the following line: “She was waiting for him, alone in the rain.” 4) Set your story in the restricted section of a library or bookstore. 5) Choose a really messy area in your home and depict it from an ant's perspective. 6) Your character finds a highly valued item that doesn’t belong to them. What do they do with it? 7) Write about a mentor who advises someone in the most bizarre or outlandish profession. 8) Your character is a good Samaritan who goes out of their way to help their friends, family and community at large. What do they do? 9) Write about someone who lives their whole life almost exclusively at night. 10) Write an “About the Author” blurb about yourself. 11) During your story, the setting is described from the point of view of two different characters. One character is cynical and bitter and sees everything in a negative light, while the other character is hopeful and wholesome and sees everything in a positive light. 12) Start your story with the following phrase: “One fateful night while researching the depths of the dark web …” 13) In your story, a very unusual and unique character travels from afar to care for a young child. 14) Write a descriptive story about what it feels like to be really really sick. 15) During your story an expert in a field is stumped by something they must admit that they don’t understand. 16) During your story your character stays at a hotel built entirely as a treehouse. 17) Write about a character who is desperately trying to alleviate their guilt. 18) Create a character who is a celebrity and depict a day in their life and how they avoid the press etc. What are they so famous for? 19) Your character has a special power - they can summon at will any object which can fit in the palm of their hand. 20) Write a reflective essay about the foods you used to hate as a kid. Have you grown to like them today, or do you still despise them? What about foods you loved? Do you still like them? 21) Your character has carried a fortune cookie in their pocket for a long time and finally decides to open it. What does it say? 22) Write about a dream you once had and fictionalize it. 23) Your character visits a sick child in a hospital. What do they bring with them to brighten their day? 24) Your character is intent on crafting a handmade object that will protect them from something. 25) Contrary to popular belief, the past is not fixed. Write about a character who is in the midst of reinterpreting their past. 26) Use a favorite song lyric as a dialogue for one of the characters in your story. 27) Write about a conversation between two different species of animal, insect or plant. 28) Use the phrase “Count your blessings instead of sheep” somewhere in your story, either as a phrase of dialogue or as part of the narration. 29) Write your story in the form of a journal entry written by quite an unusual character.
That part of the mind the gods used to talk to; what is it doing now? Set the stage for a good death. Seduce the monsters. Persuade them to help us finish the job. What's the most important thing right now and why can't you write about it? Its lucky your protagonist is going so slowly, because they're going in the wrong direction. What awful admission would you rather die than write about and see published, so much so you couldn't even bear to write and burn it immediately after, in case the gods saw it over your shoulder and hated you for it? Take that thought, anonymise it just enough, write it, and publish it anyway. Blood bath.
1) Write about a blind date - literally, the couple can’t, don’t or won’t see each other throughout the whole date. 2) Set your story in a world where the local star is dying and people are forced to move to another planet to be able to continue to live and thrive. 3) Write about a character who is painfully doing a chore they really don’t want to do. 4) Write about a society whose population has expanded beyond bearable levels. What do they resort to in order to survive? 5) Write about a character who works in a soap production factory and decides to one day add an extra ingredient. What is it and what does it do to the soap? 6) Write about a society that lives entirely underground or underwater. 7) Tell a story that happens over the course of a few seconds when your character walks into a store and notices a few things that are very wrong with the scene. 8) Write about a society that values a certain obscure commodity way more than others in its social hierarchy. 9) No one knows where dreams take place. Write about a character that ponders the question: “Where do we go when we dream?” 10) Write about a character who can’t resist the urge to categorize people at every step in their life. 11) Write about a creature that lives inside the bodies of Acoustic Guitars or Ukuleles. What is a typical day in their life like? 12) “Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.” Feature this famous Carl Jung quote somewhere in your story. 13) Make up your own culture which is building a monument or temple to somehow facilitate dreaming. Feature this culture in your story. 14) You’re a food critic and you’re writing a particularly scathing review of a fringe food that you find particularly disgusting. 15) Describe the most uninviting, dangerous and harsh no-man's-land that you can come up with. How did your character ever find themselves in such a place? 16) Your character has chosen to destress from a very long day in a very unusual way. 17) Your character is a talented fashion designer, designing the most stylish outfits for the most bizarre animals. 18) Your character is like the Willy Wonka of ice cream and they’ve just come up with a wild new ice cream flavor! 19) Write about an adult character who is somehow forced to relive a moment from their teenage years that makes them cringe. 20) Your character has the most useless or annoying magical power that they wish they’d never had. 21) Your character has an invisible friend that only they can hear who constantly speaks to them throughout their day. 22) Write a reflective essay about the people who have had the biggest impact on who you are today. 23) Write about a romantic rendezvous set in the most unusual or bizarre venue possible. 24) Take the farthest place you can imagine and have your character travel there during your story. 25) Write a story reflecting on the following quote: “The problem is not the sin around us, but the sin within us.” 26) Your character finds the silliest and most bizarre way of getting out of having to go to school. 27) You get out of the shower to notice that there’s a drone hovering outside your bathroom window! 28) Re-invent yourself as some kind of mythological creature such as (for example) dwarves, elves, golems, or halflings (or any other you can come up with).
