Leonardo Boiko’s Diary

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)