On Blogging | Author Skills | Writing Prompts
10 Prompts, and an October Challenge!
Time for some seasonal writing
I like to share writing prompts every Monday, usually as themed lists.
This set are more of a mixture — but sometimes a bit of chaos can spark creativity, so let’s roll with it!
What’s more, I’d like to set a challenge. I don’t want to make this a weekly thing (there are already the Hodgepodge challenge and Monday Mashups for that, by Sweet Chaos and Bradan Writes Stories respectively), but I thought it would be fun to set a longer, seasonal thing.
More on that in a moment!
The prompts
Okay, here goes with ten new writing prompts (well, it is the 10th month!):
- A very new cyclist sets out on a very old road.
- A food fight turns into a romantic encounter.
- A team of farm workers, all kobolds, fall down a wishing well and find themselves in the bowels of a space ship, where they are forced to work as janitors (ahem…).
- Someone is cooking when drunk, and something gets cut/chopped off.
- “It’s not immoral,” she/he/they said. “The more you have to choose from, the better.”
- A new species of insect suddenly appears… and it’s everywhere!! Exciting? Disturbing? Alien? Does its sting/venom/blood do anything special?
- An elaborate prank causes someone to believe that the world has ended and that they are living in the apocalypse. How do they react?
- Someone tries to get organised, but fails.
- A software developer team is chosen to lead the country, serving as president and in the key government roles. What happens next?
- Three goblins are seen in downtown Manhattan (or a city of your choice).
October challenge
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to craft a story including at least two of the prompts above, and to tie it into a broader theme that features Hallowe’en or Samhain in some way (or it could be a very similar celebration, e.g. in a fantasy world).
- Hallowe’en, as most of you will be well aware, is a traditional family festival where pumpkin (or sometimes turnip) lanterns are left out to scare the spirits away, the night before All Saints’ Day: 31 October.
- Samhain or ‘summer’s end’ is part of the pagan calendar, and was a traditional Celtic festival to celebrate the harvest period. It is nowadays a spirituality-focused celebration, typically celebrated on the same day as Hallowe’en, but sometimes a little later, or at the time of the nearest fully moon.
There aren’t points or prizes for this challenge, but hopefully I’ve given you plenty of food for thought!
Please tag me in your stories, and I will read them, clap, make a list of all the responses, and share them on Twitter.
Thanks for reading! You can find my fiction and poetry here, as well as my articles about creativity writing and author skills right here. Or simplify things by getting my posts direct to your inbox. Do that here! 🧠 Thank you! 🌟
Here are all my previous lists of writing prompts:
