I love to write in the morning, and I love a bit of direction. Some of my most surprising stories have come from assignments given to me by anthology editors. More than a decade ago, Jeff VanderMeer edited an anthology called Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories. The assignment: write a story based on a single word. The word he assigned to me was Logorrhea. I had to look it up—”a tendency to extreme loquacity.”
A few years after that, Don Noble asked me to write a story for Alabama Noir. The assignment: the story had to be set in Alabama, where I grew up, and it had to be noir. I’ve written other stories for other themed anthologies. Every time, the assignment produces a story I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise—which is the most fun kind of story to write.
In that vein, here are twenty-five fiction prompts to help you jumpstart your writing day. You can use the prompts to generate a flash fiction, a short story, or a fragment or chapter of your novel-in-progress. These prompts are adapted from my five-week Flash Fiction Intensive.
Don’t think, “I’m writing a story.” Just pick a prompt and start writing. Do this for ten minutes in the morning or whatever time of day you have set aside for writing.
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