One thing I like about workshops is they tend to get us out of our comfort zones, so we learn more than we would otherwise.

I can’t begin to tell you how many writing prompts I’ve let pass me by without bothering to give them more than a glimpse, such as this one from Writing Excuses:

Writing Prompt: ‘Take a protagonist younger than 16 and put him or her in charge of a group of adults.’

Sure, I read it, but do you think I actually bothered to write a story about this? Nope. I didn’t even put a single word to paper. But maybe I should start thinking about these more. After all, thinking about writing prompts helps keep your creative juices flowing; a good thing, to be sure.

Usually writing prompts are just words, but sometimes they can be pictures. Either way, they’re supposed to serve as kindling to jumpstart a story. A tiny spark of an idea born from a writing prompt could ignite and blaze to become your next novel.

Merrilee had us look at three pictures and derive three story ideas from each.

The first picture was the easiest to draw ideas from:

Here’s the three ideas I came up with:

1. In the future, there’s only one way to get ahead in the corporate world: Freestyle Dance-offs.

2. A street magician who makes women’s purses ‘disappear’.

3. “And have you seen her nose? It’s like THIS big– …Oh, hi Susan.”

The second picture was a bit trickier:

And the three ideas were:

1. A billionaire obsessed with rebuilding his childhood home on the sea, but it’s never quite right and he keeps starting over.

2. “We ‘ave ta drove those houses across the whole of Australia. But careful o’ the green ones, mate– they’re particularly nasty.”

3. A war: houses vs benches. This one hides in the bushes, hoping he wasn’t spotted by the platoon of houses that just landed ashore. Then he notices the many church pews floating lifelessly in the bay. (Wood War I? :P)

The final picture was the trickiest of all:

The ideas:

1. Scientists didn’t realize the galaxies are also in orbit with each other. This is a spectrogram of the paths they take. They overlap, and once every 373 billion years, two of them collide. This will cause universal magnetic catastrophes. The implications of this– both scientifically and socially– are staggering. And, of course, the next collision will occur later this year.

2. ‘Midnight bowl’ wasn’t enough to save the bowling industry anymore. The answer? Bowling balls that glow in the dark. And play techno.

3. He knew how he’d get the Great Lord to appear; he’d smash the Orb of Souls.

As silly as some of these ideas were, the point was they got the creative juices flowing, so I’m going to run with this and try to come up with a good idea for a short story worth writing this week. Good luck, everyone!