Alternative writing prompts
People in the writing subreddit often post writing prompts. Problem is, these writing prompts are mostly for the kind of story I have no interest in — things like «write about love at a distance» or «write about how you’d fix a mistake you made in the past». So I thought I’d propose alternative writing prompts, for my own later use if nothing else:
- Write a story involving a lone ninja, an hippopotamus, and Hillary Clinton.
- Write a story involving a fat hairy man with a webcam, Iceland, and an anagram of your middle name.
- Write a story involving talking badgers wearing ties, 70’s rock’n’roll, and the end of the Western civilization.
- Rewrite a fairy tale in hard-boiled noir style.
- Write a fantasy story where every single character turns out to be a villain bent on world domination.
- Write a standard love story, then apply S+7. Try to use the worst dictionary you can find. If the result is still boring, write another story and do it again.
- Write a story in boustrophedon that can be read backwards (line by line). The theme should be the life of Native Americans.
- Write a serious, formal sonnet about a videogame character of your choice. The style should be old-fashioned but not so much as to become caricaturesque.
- Write poetry on how much you love coffee (or tea, or bacon). Make it sound like advertising copy.
- Choose a section of the last contract or bureaucratic document you had to sign and rewrite it as poetry.
Suggested story formats are: short story, fable, drabble (≤1000 words), 100-words story (exactly), dribble (≤50 words), 6-word story, Twitter microfiction (≤140 characters), Oulipian knight’s tour.
Suggested poetry formats are: limerick, double dactyl, sonnet, rhyming couplets, anything in strict iambic pentameter, real haiku (not Internet haiku, those are too easy!), renga (find some friends!), rap.
(This post on reddit)
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