Writing Prompts and a Challenge

Generally speaking, I write stories with a specific idea in mind. I like the idea of “writer’s prompts” in theory, and on some occasions when my daughter and I have traveled on roadtrips together, she’ll take a “writers prompt” book and we’ll talk about her creative writing ideas from those prompts, but I’ve never used any for Druthers (or any other audio theater work on Nutmeg Junction).

One episode, at the tail end of the second season of Druthers called “Monster in the Moonlight”, there was no “writer’s prompt” to create the story, but I realized on reflection that the premise of the story could be reduced to a writers prompt and other writers could take the premise and come up with their own spin on the idea.

The writers prompt one could use from it is “Your character is locked in a room with a Werewolf and the moon is starting to rise”

Last week, my friend David Macharelli who portrays Smythe made mention of a “flash/micro fiction” concept of writing a 100 word story. I’ve never tried that before and as it turns out, the idea that I had for writing something like that, turned out to be a short story that, when put into script form and recorded, became a full episode, which is this week’s episode “Pettibone’s Ghost” and features 3467 words.

After this, I wrote an even shorter short story which will run next week called “Sir Bedivere’s Gift”. That has 1686 words.

Here is MY challege to myself and I open it up to you: As an experiment I will attempt to write a story under 1250 words.

And here, I return once more to the concept of writer’s prompts. The prompt, in part, is the format: writing a short story. I am setting myself a new goal of writing a story under 1250 words, but special unofficial bonus for me if it is under 1000. The prompt, well let’s see, as I write this, I don’t have one. So I will walk to the curio cabinet where there are some books and see if something jumps out at me.

I returned after opening the curio cabinet. The first word that leapt to mind was the word “Traditions” from a copy of Ralph Nader’s work “The Seventeen Traditions”. When stepping into the kitchen, I also spied the word “Success”, which is a brand of Rice.

So I will consider writing a short story about the concept of Success or Traditions. But admittedly, if my story requires more words, I would rather have a better story that is outside this arbitrary format.

My challenge to you is this; are you interested in writing something similar from a prompt hat is less than 1250 words? you may write from a prompt about tradition, success or “stuck in a room with a werewolf as the moon rises”. If you write something under 1250 words with this in mind, share it with me or at least share with me the knowledge that you did it and whether you enjoyed the challenge!

Thank you for reading and hopefully listening to Barnaby Druthers!