Category Archives: Unusual Prompts

A Writer’s Calling Card

It’s Not What You Think

By Annette Rey

As writers, we are always looking for inspiration for a new slant on old ideas, for freshness inside ourselves. It’s fine to write gloom and thunder and broken hearts but I think all writers need UP messages and a cheerful attitude to draw them in, to begin their journey into expressing their voice on the printed page.

So we need a calling card, something that calls US into the act of writing. Let’s look at UP calls and see where that brings us.

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Picture Prompts for Writers

By Annette Rey

Here are some visuals to inspire a short story, a poem, a flash fiction. Be creative. Dream. Write.

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Do you know where you are?

Are you driving alone?

Is someone you don’t know driving the car?

 

Sunny, but sinister? Are your spider senses tingling?

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What goes on inside? Does a cult meet here? Is a psychopath holding hostages and no one on the outside knows it yet?

What is this man pointing to? What is in his pouch?

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Are you filled with sympathy? What thoughts do you have about how vulnerable he is on the city streets? Could he be your new protagonist?

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Trapped!

You are locked inside a store with an angry bear!

How do you outsmart him…or not?

 

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Is this a story about the past? What did this tree witness? What role did it play in the lives of many? Who is mourning its passing? Who was the violent agent who brought down such a monument to life?

Write the stories you feel and see in these images.

Just write!

The world is waiting to hear your song.

 

Unusual Writing Prompt #1

For Flash Fiction or Short Story

By Annette Rey

I’m starting a new series of posts based on breaking writer’s block with exercises using an unusual approach.

Do you need a quick-start writing idea that is unusual and challenging? You can make this exercise as involved and as long as you like. Or you can hover around the idea and write a short flash fiction.

Here’s how to begin:

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