WRITING PROMPTS | PROMPTLY WRITTEN

Prompt Yourself: Weekly Prompts January 29-February 4

Prompts to tempt your muses

Welcome to the fifth week of writing prompts in 2024! The Mother Goose rhyme about birthdays I used as inspiration for my last two weeks of prompts has a few sisters. This rhyme, for example, extant from the American Philosophical Society’s 1888 “Proceedings… [for] Promoting Useful Knowledge” (page 160), offers superstitions about what day it is best to be married:

Monday for wealth; Tuesday for health; Wednesday the best day of all; Thursday for crosses; Friday for losses; Saturday no luck at all.

As it happens, I just got married on a Monday. (Wish us luck!) This week, I’ll be using these marriage-superstition themes for each day’s prompts.

Before we get started, here are a couple of quick reminders:

How This Works

1. Use these prompts to write poetry, fiction, an essay, creative non-fiction, or an article. They are totally open to interpretation! Include a link to the prompt at the bottom of your post.
2. If you use one of these prompts, you can submit the result here at PW, to any publication that accepts prompts from other publications, or self-publish. If you submit somewhere besides PW, make sure to include a link to the prompt and tag PW editors so that we do not miss reading your story!
3. You don’t have to use PW’s prompts to submit work here. We are an open publication for established and new writers to submit their writing — usually based on writing prompts from here or elsewhere, but unprompted stories are also welcome!
4. Please be sure to use the correct Reader Interest Tags when you submit your work to PW so it lands in the right place on the homepage. Please use ONE (not multiple) of the following tags: Poetry, Fiction, Essay, or Articles. Your other four tags can be whatever you wish them to be.
5. Please ONLY submit drafts. To do this, once you have finished writing, instead of hitting the Publish button, click on the three dots (…), choose Add to Publication, click on Promptly Written, and then submit. This will put it into our queue, and we will publish it on our end.
6. Each week, you will find prompts for Monday-Sunday. However, you do not have to use them in the order they are written. Browse them all and use only the ones that resonate with you. Submit your work any time during the week (or long after!).
7. If you previously wrote for PW but haven’t in a while, you may need to go to the Submission Guidelines and ask to be a writer again. We went on hiatus a few months ago and stopped accepting submissions; if you were a writer with us before that time, you will need to sign up again.
8. Have fun!

Are you ready? Great! Let’s get prompting!

Monday‘s Wealth

The idea of a ‘gold digger’, or someone who marries for money, has become a cliché. Write a story that subverts this trope using one of these plot ideas:

• A wealthy character has to decide whether to marry the person they love, even if it means giving up their inheritance. Can the couple survive becoming suddenly penniless?
• Two wealthy characters fall in love. Both are pretending to be poor so that they don’t accidentally attract a ‘gold digger’, leading to hilarity.
• A character wins the lottery shortly after a first date with the person of their dreams. They struggle with keeping the secret of their sudden wealth, worried that their partner may fall in love with their money rather than fall in love with them. Does the partner figure it out? Do they not know, but feel betrayed when the secret is revealed?
• A successful entrepreneur suddenly goes missing, and everyone starts looking at his wife, whom they suspect married him for the money. What they don’t know is that the wife bankrolled her partner’s many failed enterprises before he became successful, and the mystery of his disappearance has a much more complicated solution.

Tuesday’s Health

If the past four years have taught us nothing, it’s that the health of a society is highly dependent on individual responsibility and working together. While the pandemic still very much impacts the daily lives of millions of people, in places where access to vaccines, clean air, and health care has given many of us the space and time to come to grips with what happened in 2020 — to make the pandemic feel at least somewhat removed.

• If your mental health allows, write about an experience you had during a quarantine or lockdown, having a COVID infection, or another event during the pandemic that changed your outlook. This could be a nonfiction essay or poem, or a fictionalized version of the event through the eyes of a character.
• Alternatively, write about a group of individuals who find themselves in an unexpected quarantine situation (either set during a real pandemic, such as COVID-19, the Black Plague, or the Spanish Flu, or during a fictional pandemic, such as a zombie apocalypse). How do they cope with being locked in? What challenges do the characters face? Do they get along and work together, or fight amongst themselves and make things harder?

Wednesday, the Best Day of All

Write an essay about your “best day ever” (or the “best day” of a character experienced through the first-person narration).

• Was it a special occasion — like Christmas, your birthday, your wedding day, the day your child was born — or just a regular day?
• Did one good thing happen, or a lot of really good things?

Alternatively, imagine your ideal, perfect day:

• Maybe it’s a day off work to play your favourite video game, curl up with a good book, or watch a good movie.
• Maybe it’s one extra day to spend with a loved one no longer with us, meet a childhood hero, or check something off your bucket list.

Whatever it is, let yourself enjoy it, and savour the details — all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings that perfect day has in store.

Thursday’s Crosses

Rather than take this theme literally, here are a few prompts that evoke ‘cross’ or ‘crossing’ without being directly related to the Christian symbol referenced by the poem:

• Write a story or a nonfiction essay about a time when someone crossed your boundaries, ‘double-crossed’ you, or ‘crossed a line’.
• Write a poem, essay, or story inspired by being ‘caught in the crossfire’. This can be literal — a character caught between two warring factions, for example — or a more metaphorical interpretation, such as someone torn between their family and their partner in a fight over holiday dinner.
• Make your own crossword puzzle. Use clues that work together in a theme, have a hidden message at the end, or just random. Alternatively, write a story about a crossword puzzle; maybe a character discovers a mysterious crossword puzzle that seems to predict their future?

Friday’s Losses

Let’s go more literal for today’s prompts and talk about loss:

• Write a story, essay, or poem from the perspective of someone grieving a loss. What does loss mean to you / the character? What have they lost? How can they move forward?
• Write about a character who must say a final goodbye to something or someone they hold dear. Explore the emotions of reluctance, acceptance, and the unexpected strength that emerges from facing inevitable losses.
• Write a story, essay, or poem somehow inspired by the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Saturday’s Ill Luck

Did somebody break a mirror? Write a story, poem, or essay about a streak of bad luck. For example, write about a character setting out on a journey with high hopes, only to encounter a series of unpreventable problems. How does the character navigate setbacks, and what lessons do they learn along the way about resilience and optimism in the face of ill luck?

Random Words Sunday

Since there wasn’t a prediction for marriage on Sundays, we can use the tried-and-true list of random works! Choose 5 or more of these 10 random words (you may use any form, including plurals, any tense, or changing to a noun/verb/adjective):

1. Ballgown
2. Flutter
3. Gable
4. Loon
5. Starstruck
6. Pane
7. Rig
8. Crescent
9. Ballast
10. Ameliorate

Bonus Prompt — Write a ‘romantic’ poem, flash fiction (<500 words), or essay.

There you have it! Another week’s worth of prompts to tempt your muses. I look forward to reading your submissions, so make sure to tag me, Dr. Casey Lawrence, if you use one of these prompts!

Don’t forget, there are Writing Sparks available in the Monthly Theme from ADEOLA SHEEHY-ADEKALE, and all our previous prompts are still very much adoptable if you’re in need of inspiration.

Enjoying my content? Check out my first novel, Out of Order, available in eBook and paperback from JMS Books. Not looking to buy a book right now? Consider showing your support by buying me a coffee, and make sure to subscribe to my stories on Medium!