Every month, Switch-Lit releases an original collection of five (5) story prompts to help launch your next collaborative fiction journey. Find the latest monthly collection on the Switch-Lit “Prompts” page, or explore our full archive of 100+ prompts.
This month’s theme: Lightning
In the fever dream of summer, do you feel the storm coming?
You close your eyes. You listen for the thunder that reverberates off buildings, trees, and bodies of water into the pit of your stomach. You feel the hairs on your arm rising as if a bolt just might appear in your dominant hand. You lick your ionized lips and taste metal. Without seeing, you already know: a lightning bolt has just been hurled from a dark cloud in a flash of blinding light.
Eyes closed still, time slows, all senses give way to your imagination of Zeus or Shango hurling that bolt, Thor’s mjölnir about to drop, Indra’s vajra fracturing Hanuman’s jaw (and in time, Harry Potter’s aching scar). It is the weapon of choice for divine intervention and instant justice. To be struck by lightning in myth was to be chosen – either annihilated for hubris or permanently altered by its cosmic touch.
Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year: 1/1,222,000
Odds of being struck by lightning in your lifetime: 1/15,300
Odds you will be affected by someone struck: 1/1,530
You finally open your eyes and see a magnificent oak tree. In the very next instant, the lightning has obliterated it to splinters and smoke.
Terrified, you do not back away. Your innocent wonder turns into a dark creative epiphany: A force which can instantly turn a living being into dead ash surely must hold the secret to the spark of life itself!
You are a young Victor Frankenstein, profoundly altered by the sight, and lightning will become your Promethean obsession, bridging cloud and ground, heaven and earth, life and d-e-a-t-h—
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But you are just words and letters on a page for now, the imagined character and vivid figments of yet another imagination all along:
That of an 18-year-old writer named Mary Shelley alive in the Romantic era and brainstorming what will become one of the best known works of English literature. Unbeknownst to you, your ghost story (prompted by Lord Byron himself as a challenge) will spark an immense canon of horror stories, films, and plays obsessed with the exquisite corpse-like being that is your Frankenstein monster.
And here in our solitude, the lightning is in you two.
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Between 1942 and 1977, Roy Sullivan was a Virginia park ranger who was struck by lightning seven times and surviving them all. His strikes cost him his eyebrows, set his hair on fire multiple times, blew off his big toenail, and even seared his shoulder.
Tony Cicoria performing on the piano
In 1994, an orthopedic surgeon named Tony Cicoria was struck by lightning while at a public phone booth. Shortly after recovering from the strike, he experienced a sudden, obsessive, and unprecedented neurological transformation: he desperately needed to hear and play classical piano music, despite having no musical background. He taught himself to play, began composing the music "playing in his head" since the strike, and became a performing concert pianist.
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen teacher
Switch-Lit is on a mission to manifest the collective imagination of diverse writing communities through the connective power of collaborative fiction, poetry, and prose.
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