Writing Prompt #194: Disillusioning

Your character has to reveal to someone that something was a lie.

His lie? Someone else's lie? Has he previously gone along with the lie? Your choice.

Writing Prompt #193: Dressing Room Conversation

Dressing rooms are places of so much humor and conflict and role-reversal and vulnerability. The search for an adequate item of clothing can be  a source of so much frustration, and the way people discuss or disagree on choices can show a lot about them.

Write a scene in a dressing room environment. For the most mileage, make sure your character has an objective, questions about him or herself, and someone to serve as an accomplice/antagonist.

Writing Prompt #192: Offer of Protection

Someone offers to protect your character.

This is always such a weird situation when it happens to you.

Writing Prompt #191: First Impressions

Think about your first impressions of the people you've gotten to know in your life. Which ones were correct? When were you wrong? How have your understandings deepened as you've walked with them through bigger, harder things?

Write about a first impression, and how it was right, wrong, or not deep enough.

Writing Prompt #190: When I First Saw You

I have been so AWOL. I forgot the extent of my buffer-zone and got tied up in Christmas and promises to friends. I apologize. I did not mean to leave this blog unattended.

 Write a story tell someone about when you first met them.

Writing Prompt #189: Little Person, Big Deal

Someone meets a baby.

Writing Prompt #188: ...sorry, guys. v_v

Pick two of your friends who don't know each other, and stick them in a story together.

My apologies for lateness.

Writing Prompt #187: Young and Earnest

Do you remember how intensely new the world was when you were smaller? Can you think back to the way everything was important and live-rending, because you didn't have any perspective to let you know better? Do you remember the noble promises and fierce devotions of a heart that didn't know that it could break?

A small person makes a giant promise. Now make them keep it.

Writing Prompt #186: Difficult to Love

Create a character that is unlikeable, and someone who loves them.

Now show us the why.

Writing Prompt #185: No Time to Pack

I just saw The Hobbit.

It was so worth it.

Send a character on a trip they don't want to go on.

Writing Prompt #184: Unpopular

Someone takes an unpopular stand.

Writing Prompt #183: Trading Faces

Reverse an expectation. Your villain does something noble. Your mentor gives foolish advice. Your hero hurts someone he loves.

Writing Prompt #182: Broken Trust

What do you do when someone breaks a trust?

Trusts can be established or implicit. We trust that people will keep their promises; we trust that our friends won't steal the belongings we leave at a table; we trust that the strangers in bathrooms won't try to kill us. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we have someone we trust more than normal.

If the stranger in the bathroom breaks my trust in strangers in bathrooms, or a friend breaks my trust in friends, I experience a mini-trauma. There's a shock. There's a re-evaluation of the way I see my world. There's a scramble of guilt and doubt and searching to see if maybe I violated some tenet and this break is my fault.

But when someone I trusted more than other people violates the trust I put in them, it's more like getting socked in the gut. A semi-friend can steal my things, or a stranger can try to kill me, and I'll feel for it a bit and move on. But someone I feel safe with can cross a boundary we never defined and leave me gasping in a corner trying to breathe.

How do you deal with a break of trust? How do you work with relationships when people break the rules? How do you move on with life when your world is different?

And when trust is broken, can you mend it? How?

Writing Prompt #181: Cut Open to Interpretation

Have you ever noticed that a guy can say almost anything and if enough girls hear it someone will be able to translate it into a proclamation of affection?

"Pretty sure he just said I was the devil."
"No, that was TOTALLY his confession of love. Run to him, sister, and confess your undying like."

Riiiiiight.

Sometimes different cultures and experiences and genders really do see completely different subtext and meaning in what they say. Sometimes what one person sees as something kind or innocuous or flattering can mean "I don't like you and need you to understand that I am in love with Sylvia" to someone else. Sometimes we just wish people would not be so confusing.

Your challenge: A character receives multiple interpretations of what someone has said. Bonus points if you involve a metaphor including a piece of sports paraphernalia or a member of the local wildlife.

Writing Prompt #180: For Approval!

A character goes to an extreme length to win the approval of someone.

Writing Prompt #179: And then there were Puffed Sleeves

If you have never read The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith and you're planning to read them, the following contains sort-of-but-not-really-spoilers.

These spoilers will not tell you who lives or dies or anything except a bit of setting and an inconsequential section of the plot of the way-later book they happen in, but...wait, were you reading these books to be shocked by the plot? Really?

[KIND OF BUT NOT REALLY SPOILERS]

In the nth book, some people are in another dimension trying to organize a jail break. They are surrounded by vampires and demons and Japanese fox-thingies and damned souls. There is political and social and economic turmoil all around them. People are dying and being enslaved. The characters themselves are having near-death experiences constantly. So what does the author spend maybe twenty pages on?

The characters' intricate, pretty, non-combat-oriented clothing and makeup for a party.

Why? Because when you're going into a hellish alternate dimension to save your dying friend, your central focus is always whether or not you are dressed stylishly enough for a gala that is attended mainly by demons. (I am not exaggerating; the MC worries about this for more than a page.)

[END SPOILERS]

I am challenging you to give characters a big, important goal, and then make them focus on something completely inappropriate to the situation. Why are they worried about their clothes/lunch/windshield cleanliness/secret-Santa gift choice/allergies when something really important is going down?

I hope you have fun with this.

Writing Prompt #178: Right at the Wrong Time

A character puts off something he or she wants to do because the timing isn't right.

Writing Prompt #177: And then I Didn't Kill You

Someone responds graciously to an interruption of their work.

Writing Prompt #176: Oath Keeper

Someone keeps a promise made by someone else.

Writing Prompt #175: Guarding the Heart

Someone avoids lust.

Writing Prompt #174: Rush of Fools

Someone rushes to judgement and is wrong.

Writing Prompt #173: Painful Kindness

A character in pain does something for someone else.

Writing Prompt #172: Calculated Risk

Someone calculates a worst-case scenario and still decides a move is worth it.

Writing Prompt #171: Unworthy Authority

Someone respects an authority figure when the authority is doing something wrong.

Writing Prompt #170: Friend-mance

Spotlight the conflict and value of a non-romantic relationship.

Writing Prompt #169: Lousy Ambassador

Someone representing someone else does a bad job of it.

Writing Prompt #168: Deadly Consequence

Someone is killed by a mistake they made.

(Work this into your chick-flick, why don't you.)

Writing Prompt #167: The Welcome Muffin

Today's challenge is: Someone receives something they were hungry for.

"A desire fulfilled is a tree of life," right? Find something odd to hunger after, and an odd way to get what they want.

Writing Prompt #166: Holy Toothbrush

Write a character with the idea that they are "set apart" for something specific. Where does this concept of being different, being made for something different, come from for them? What do they have to give up in their pursuit of what they're "made for"?

The best description of "holy" I've heard came from an ex-rock star computer programmer of my acquaintance: "You don't use your toothbrush to scrub a toilet."

Your toothbrush is set apart for a specific use, so there are things you just don't use it for. Can the same be said of a person?