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- May 25, 2025 Writing Prompts for the Week
May 25, 2025 Writing Prompts for the Week
Happy Sunday! I’m curious: Is Sunday a day of rest of you, or a chance for you to catch up on all of the things you’d meant to get done during the week?
Historically, for me, it’s a catch-up day…which doesn’t exactly leave me rested for Monday morning. So, this weekend, I’m trying an experiment:
I’m resting. No working, no errands, no obligations, not even any TV. Just some reading, maybe some socializing, a walk, some fun, a rest. Wanna give it a try with me?
Speaking of fun, how about some writing prompts?
This Week’s Prompts*
It struck her as odd that no one else seemed to have much urgency in their own exiting as the fire alarm shrieked on.
How to explain this near-total desperation for butter?
He gripped the cat close to his chest; no one told you taking a cat through airport security was even more of a hassle than it looked.
Describe someone receiving a piece of mail that makes them instantly paranoid.
As the teapot began to whistle, Sid's blood began to boil.
One—no, two!—two dozen red roses that he ought to have known she would absolutely despise.
"It's starting," he whispered to himself.
*How to Use These Prompts: The italicized prompts let you create your writing entirely from scratch; the non-italicized prompts are intended as your first line and jumping off point. But, at the same time, there are no rules. Write on!
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Book(s) We’re Reading This Week
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
Full disclosure: This is actually not the book I’m reading this week; I’m actually reading “Marble Hall Murders,” the third book in the series. But if you’re going to start with one, well, start with the first, right? The novel intersperses two stories: One, a novel-within-a-novel involving a murder in a small English village and, the second, the attempt to solve that novelist’s murder. Even better, the latter is being investigated by the novelist’s editor. Here’s to making editors heroes more often!
Grab it on Bookshop.org (and support local bookstores!)
Grab it on Amazon
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Links We Like (And Think You Will, Too)
🗺️ How’s your life going? Could it use a change? Daniel Pink shares Stanford’s “Odyssey Plan” on his Instagram, guiding us through three different life possibilities—all of which is designed to help us re-explore our life plans.
🙈 I stumbled upon this post about the “worst books of all time,” what makes them the “worst,” and some common similarities. What I found most interesting, though, was a few that made the list that were written by some of our most lauded authors. Nobody’s perfect, eh?
🤖 Somehow (fingers are being pointed as we speak), an AI-generated article listing the top reads of the summer ended up in the Chicago Sun-Times. But the real problem? Ten of the 15 recommended books…don’t actually exist.
Top (Published) First Line of the Week
He’s coloring a night sky on the underbelly of the kitchen table.
From The Bright Years by Sarah Damoff
Grab it on Bookshop.org (and support local bookstores!)
Grab it on Amazon
This poll is respectfully reproduced from the article about "the worst books of all time" by Isabelle Popp (link above). So, would you rather: |
P.S.
Got the itch to travel the world? Here’s how one woman found a career that lets her write for a living and enjoy a more-than-comfortable lifestyle on the road.
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