I bumped into an article last week, Romance Novels, Generated by Artificial Intelligence, that had me grinning like a monkey on acid for days. I kept going back to it, considering, and deciding that yes, some of those titles need to be written. I mean, come on. “Cattle Me.” “Hating the Marine.” “Seeping Baby Man.” Dude. How could I not?
So, all the prompts this week come from those titles in some way, shape, or form. See if you can guess which is which.
If this is your first visit to my prompts (or ‘matches’) it’s in honour of a book called The Writer’s Book of Matches. It has 1,001 little prompts that are designed to give you something to work with. I often flip through it when I’m in the mood to just write without a specific focus. The book has three kinds of prompts: A single line of dialog; a scenario or situation; and assignment prompts where the book lists a series of three characters all reacting to a particular moment/event, and since I first got it, I’ve been noting my own prompts to myself the same way.
If you ever find success or just fiddle around with any of these ‘matches,’ please do let me know!
- A woman discovers that while she is pregnant, getting angry gives her supernatural abilities.
- “Wait. You investigate millionaires? For what?”
- After an accident, a man starts to see images of strangers in his head the when he touches someone for the first time. Invited to a friend’s wedding he realizes the bride was the woman he had a vision of when he shook the groom’s hand, and starts to realize he has somehow gained the ability to “see” soul-mates. Then he shakes someone’s hand, and sees himself.
- Sick of going to family functions alone and being criticized for “still” being single, a woman blackmails a good-looking co-worker to come with her for the holidays to finally shut her family up.
- A group of co-workers get together after the funeral of their boss, who all generally agree was a wonderful person and a great employer. They stop to have a drink at a local pub where the boss often took employees after work. Write the scene from the point of view of these three characters: the bartender, who can hear them talking about the boss and who knows how often the boss came here alone, obviously isolated and sad and lonely for the last few weeks; one of the employees, who had an affair with the boss and hasn’t been able to openly grieve since they broke up a few weeks ago; and the employee who found the boss and decided to hide the evidence of suicide and frame it as an accident.
See you next week, and by all means, drop any prompts of your own in the comments!
Hey folks!
