Writing Spark #80
Here’s a shiny new prompt for you:
A distant relative of yours is declared dead, and to your surprise, their estate lawyer contacts you because you have been included in the will. It is not a large estate and it has been split among many various relatives, and you have been left a single item: a small metal box locked with a combination.
The will does not include the combination, only your relative’s assurance you can figure out how to open it.
Should you get into the box, it contains a small, solitary seed.
Writing Spark #79
Here’s something a little different to get you started:
Sometimes when the wind is high and the trees move in a complex dance, the forest floor breathes. It heaves and huffs, the undergrowth rolling atop it, and if you listen closely, very closely, there is a moan deep underneath the singing of the branches.
Writing Spark #78
A bright prompt to light your way into a new story:
The office building where you work has always struggled to be eco-friendly. They tried lights that automatically shut off, but they never seemed to work. The timers kept turning the lights off in sections at different times, and only for half an hour at a time, no matter what they were set to. Sensors were constantly being tripped, so the lights just stayed on. They asked the cleaning crew to turn off the lights as they cleaned, but after the crew finished a floor, someone else would come along and turn them all on again.
Finally, the building management instituted a simple policy: last one out turns off the lights. The problem was that there always seemed to be someone there, working away, just out of sight but audible. Typing or shuffling or closing drawers. And so the lights stayed on. The lights are always on.
Writing Spark #77
Is this a prompt you can get in touch with?
You hate using the phone. No matter how careful you are, you always call the wrong number. Somehow, though, it always seems to be the right call.
Like the time you didn’t feel well and tried to call your doctor, and wound up calling your butcher by mistake. It turns out they’d had a batch of bad meat and they told you to go to hospital right away. Or the time you tried to book a hair appointment and dialled your mother instead, and found out your sister had just gone missing.
Your sister was found, and now, years later, she’s having a baby. You want to call to see if she has given birth yet, but you’re afraid to dial the number. Who will you get this time? What if it’s that cute person you just met? Or the morgue?
Writing Spark #76
Where will this dreamlike prompt take you?
You have been having a recurring dream for months. Always the same one: you are at school, where everything is fine except for that dream thing where voices sound wrong and the colours are off. You write the date at the top of your notes for each class. The day progresses normally until you walk into the cafeteria for lunch and everyone stops and looks at each other. Then you are falling until you flinch yourself awake.
Over and over, the same dream about the same day, years ago. You don’t remember anything odd happening that day. Finally, you look up the day in question, and you find that nothing happened on that day. Nothing at all: there are no news reports, no weather records, no births or deaths, no proof anywhere that the day happened at all. The days either side seem quite normal; there is just that date in between that everything seems to skip over. The date that you wrote at the top of your notes for each class.
Writing Spark #75
Where will this one take you?
You have always been able to open any door, no matter how large, or stiff, or locked it might be. At the touch of your hand, every door simply opens. You are a human key.
You’re just about to start your first real, paying job when a childhood friend gets in touch. They’re in trouble and they need your help to get through a very particular door.
Writing Spark #74
Your writing prompt this time is:
You are a demon, and a woman performs the summoning spell so she can make a deal. Your arrival, however, causes her to faint, and you have to make a choice: stay and wait for her to wake, so you can bargain for her precious soul; or head home and make her do the whole spell again.
You’re still trying to decide when her tiny daughter wanders into the room and promptly adopts you as her imaginary friend.
Writing Spark #73
Here is a writing prompt to do with what you will:
An animal has been following you for your whole life. A wild creature that you have glimpsed from time to time: out of your bedroom window when you were small; through the trees that one time you were walking through the woods alone; standing in your street one night when you were out late; reflected on a window when you were deep in a city.
Always the same animal, always with the same sense of calm around it, though it seemed to turn up at the most chaotic times for you.
By the time you’re an adult, you’re sure your animal must have died of old age. It has been a while since you last saw it, after all. Then there is a noise one night and you open the door to find it standing right outside. The two of you are finally face to face.
Writing Spark #72
In a superpowered world, you have been blessed with the ability to know when the wind is about to change direction. But what use is that in the scheme of things?
Writing Spark #71
You are a witch, and well used to people coming to you asking for love spells. Sometimes they are to create love, sometimes they are to break lovers apart. The same few stories, told over and over again, with different faces.
One evening, a man turns up on your doorstep, asking you to sever a love tie and break someone’s heart. His own heart.