Five Favorite Prompts

From flash published at Fractured Lit

Let's talk about Structure! Writing micro and flash often feels like creating a world, a skyscraper, without a blueprint or any idea of how electrical or plumbing works. We're often sticking in words, details, and images, hoping they coalesce into something truthful or resonant. For most stories or writing sessions, this makes perfect sense...a way to allow the imagination to roam freely, knowing you can cut, change, and transform any word, sentence, or image through revision. Narrative doesn't quite have the rules or constraints of poetry, but what if we did decide to overlay some sense of structure before we even type a word? What would that help us produce? We can start by immediately creating counter-pointed characters. Use two characters, one who wants to stay and one who wants to leave. Will anything keep them together? Will the event, object, catastrophe drive them further apart?   Take a look at The Meteor by Jen Michalski

"We have to leave. He pulled at her synthetic shirt, which had begun to melt to her skin. The whole neighborhood has to evacuate.

I want to stay. She did not look at him. I think I am in love."

The story of the meteor has applied a new, distinct pressure upon this marriage, which is increased by the wife's willingness to stay. There's a sense of myth or allegory here by the illogical idea of a meteor falling and anyone falling in love with it that I just love. It takes to a new place in a marriage by changing the context but making this event specific to these unique characters! 

Prompt: Start your story off with something that's very unlikely to happen, but which is happening all the same. Like this story, allow yourself to dig into the details to help us feel like we're there on stage, in the moment within this event! Then, give us two counter-pointed characters, put them in this tense situation, and see what they will do for or against each other! It doesn't have to be a marriage! It could be siblings. Don't be afraid to take this in a wacky or surreal direction! Think about how characters can make choices or refuse to make choices and how this affects the other character and their choices. How can you raise the stakes? How can you extend the timeline of the moment? How does the controlling image/metaphor morph or shift from beginning to the end? 

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In “The Sea Was There,” Alvin Park takes the reader to a world on the brink of destruction. Park develops this setting through the particular point of view of a child narrator. While sometimes maligned for not being sophisticated enough to tell the story, child narrators can often give us a fresh perspective or lens to view the world in a defamiliarized way—in essence, to create something new from something old.

Prompt: Start with a child narrator. Start with them revealing how much they don’t know about another character: a parent, another child, a hero, or someone they are scared of. How can these statements of not knowing lead you into the story? Stories are often about discovery, and this point of view and this wondering can lead the narrator to learn something about the other characters and themselves in a small but expansive space! The more the narrator tries to learn, the more questions should arise.

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