The Ink Well Fiction Prompt #6: 50 Story Ideas

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Hello and thank you for visiting The Ink Well. If you're new here, then welcome! We are a Hive blockchain-based social media community of creative writers. If you love to write fiction, we invite you to join us. Just please be sure to read our community rules where we outline the "do's and don'ts" of publishing here. Our community rules are designed to make our community a safe, welcoming, plagiarism-free space for self-publishing original short stories.

Okay! Let's review fiction highlights from last week and start a new prompt.

Highlights of the Week

Thank you to everyone who posted a story for last week's prompt, “A Matter of Time".

Be sure to read and support these authors for their work!

• The Longest Time, by @deeanndmathews
• Deferred Collection, by @generikat
• The energy of the stars, by @ricardo993
• Eva and Awa, by @gracielaacevedo
• The Gold Seal Invitation, by @justclickindiva
• Sage Advice, by @kemmyb
• Fifteen Minutes, by @bruno-kema
• The Proposal, by @mrnightmare.net
• The Cursed, by @dwixer

This Week’s Prompt

The prompt for this week is... well... 50 prompts.

Why are we providing 50 story ideas? Well, we have a few reasons.

Mainly, we want to help fuel your imagination. We want our community to have all the resources needed to produce fiction that is fresh, engaging and interesting. When writers get the sense that there are thousands of possible stories out there, they are more likely to write and publish regularly. And they are less likely to write about tired, redundant themes.

Which brings us to another reason:

As you know, if you have read our community rules, we don't accept certain story themes - such as stories about women being assaulted, or any violent treatment of women and girls. And yet, stories with these themes emerge weekly - sometimes three or four of them a week.

These stories may be well-intentioned, for example when authors want to shed light on the very real inequities and abuses in our world. But we simply ask that you do not publish those here. (As we shared in the Tips post, Banish the Stereotypes, "topics like abuse of women of can inadvertently glorify the perpetrator or cause post-traumatic stress for the millions of women who have experienced it.")

The good news is that the possibilities for what to write about truly are endless. We're providing 50 ideas right here in this post.

Pick a Prompt!

Here are our 50 story ideas to help you get that pen moving:

1. A conversation between three old friends where an old lie is revealed.
2. Someone discovers their spouse was once a circus clown.
3. Five things that happen to a person on a very bad day.
4. A woman discovers she is married to an AI.
5. A man discovers his wife is a killer-for-hire.
6. A child discovers that the door to the attic leads to another world.
7. Some kids pretend to dig for treasure and find something else instead.
8. A painter loses control of his hand and watches in horror as his hand paints something that predicts the future.
9. Two people who intend to spend their lives together are separated by war, but find one another again 20 years later.
10. A young girl finds a note to her from her grandfather after his passing, and is shocked by what it reveals.
11. At night, after everyone is asleep, creatures crawl up from the underground sewer system and cause chaos and death on the city’s streets. Only one person has the ability to combat them.
12. Two people who used to be in love many years ago see one another across the grocery store. What then?
13. Something sinister is passed down through the generations in a family, and everyone is powerless to stop it.
14. A book seller discovers currency bills adding up to a huge sum of money inside a donated book.
15. Two couples join up for a weekend get-away at a beach house after not seeing one another for many years, and discover something they had overlooked all those years ago.
16. An extremely shy and introverted teenager gets up to speak in front of the class, and goes off script to describe the astonishing reason for his shyness.
17. To avoid the memory of something tragic that happened, a man walks all the way across the continent. Tell the story of who he meets on the way.
18. Two friends decide to pull a prank on their teacher, and everything goes wrong.
19. A bully who harassed other kids in primary school encounters an even bigger bully in secondary school.
20. You find a penny on the ground as you are taking a walk and decide to flip it. If it’s heads, you’ll go to the right. If it’s tails you’ll go to the left. What happens is pure fate.
21. A young girl comes home from school to find that her house is full of people, lights and cameras, and discovers that her family is going to be in a reality TV show.
22. A family comes to terms with the mother’s or father’s terminal illness.
23. A stow-away on a ship thinks he’s on a cargo ship, but then discovers his hosts are pirates.
24. A teacher becomes jaded and angry after some students vandalize the school and her classroom; but the innocence and caring of other students help her to recover her love of her work.
25. Describe a day in the life of a toddler. What are the big dramas from a two-year old perspective?
26. Tell the story of someone who recently learned they are adopted. How did they find out, and what did they do as a result?
27. Tell the story of someone who won the lottery, the choices that are made and the outcomes.
28. Two people keep seeing one another in different places around the city. What is their story?
29. Write a story that incorporates these three words: bubblegum, springtime, jewels.
30. A university student plans to spend all night studying for the most important exam of his life. But then he gets a desperate call from a friend who is feeling suicidal.
31. Write a historical fiction piece about something that happened in the town where you live.
32. A couple buys an ancient home to fix up. What do they find when they tear out the walls?
33. Two sisters have a vitriolic relationship, as both of them have always believed the other was their father’s favorite. How do they reconcile?
34. Someone is running through the woods, frantic and out of breath, because they are being chased. Who or what is after them? How is it all resolved?
35. Write the story of the first person you loved, why it ended and how you recovered. Embellish or revise any aspects of the story to make it more interesting.
36. Two people fall in love, and one of them becomes extremely successful, whereas the other cannot seem to keep a job. Write the story of the dynamics of their relationship, the mounting tensions over their differences, and how they resolve their issues.
37. Childhood best friends reunite after 15 years, and having promised they would marry one another one day if they weren't married by the age of 25, they make wedding plans. And then everything goes wrong.
38. Write the story of someone wrongly accused of stealing.
39. Write a time travel story in which the main character ends up in a different time whenever he sneezes, and returns to the present day when there’s a full moon.
40. Three kids fantasize about growing up. One wants to be an astronaut, one a doctor and one a famous writer. What happens really?
41. The doorbell rings. The main character opens the door, but no one is there. Instead there is a mysterious package with no return address. What is it? What happens?
42. Someone famous moves to a small town to get away from the paparazzi and befriends the story’s main character who runs the local cafe. What makes their relationship special?
43. Write the story of a ghost who discovers he is the only one at a party who is not living.
44. A couple moves into an old house, and things keep moving from one place to another when they’re not looking. Tell the story.
45. In a small town where a child was once saved from drowning by a cowboy with a lasso, everyone is required by law to carry lasso rope. Tell the story.
46. Write a story that incorporates these three words: danger, ransom, houseboat.
47. Write the story of a man dating a woman for a year before he discovers she is married.
48. A grandmother finally tells her children and grandchildren the story of how she came to America.
49. Two people have a heated argument about a philosophical question such as nature vs. nurture, or whether people are inherently good. Tell the entire story in dialog with only a few narrative phrases here and there.
50. Two people meet at a fancy party on an exotic estate and have an instant connection. When they next see one another a few weeks later, the man has aged 10 years and is dressed in rags, and the woman must figure out how to reverse what happened.

Pick any of these ideas for your story this week. We welcome you to share in your post why you chose the one you did. And feel free to keep these ideas in your writing files so you can always turn to them when you need to get the writing ideas flowing.

Good luck! And be sure to remember the important elements of good fiction:

• A good setting
• Character development
• Conflict
• Dialog
• A story arc and resolution

Weekly Prompt Rules:

1. You have a week to write for the prompt, until the next one is posted. (Note: You can write for any of the prompts anytime. This is just a guideline to be included in the weekly round-up of highlights.)
2. Please use these hashtags: #fiction #writing #inkwellprompt #theinkwell.
3. Post a link to your story in a comment on this post.
4. Visit the work of at least two other community members and comment on their work.
5. The title is up to you. You can come up with any title you wish. You do not need to name it after the prompt or include the prompt word.

Note: Be sure to also read our community rules.

Here are the past prompts if you would like to write for them or refer back to them:

• #1: Heart and Soul
• #2: The moment when...
• #3: Beauty with a twist
• #4: The Way Home
• #5: A Matter of Time

We look forward to reading your stories!

@jayna and @agmoore

We would like to invite lovers of creative writing to visit The Ink Well, a Hive community started by @raj808 and run by @jayna and @agmoore.

We also invite you to follow The Ink Well curation trail on the Hive blockchain, at https://hive.vote/. Simply navigate to the curation trail section and search for theinkwell (all one word with no @ symbol) and our trail will pop up as an option.

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