I’m looking to push myself to write more short stories, and the best way I’ve found is to be given basic guidelines/parameters for the story. Namely, a word limit and some sort of jumping off point. It could be a characters, a scenario, a phrase or sentence, or a combination of those or whatever else. (Yes, even a picture, potentially.) Anything to build a story on.

In the spirit of the social media age, I’m asking my Twitter “tweeps” to send me suggested story prompts in the form of tweets. If all goes well, I will solicit ideas each Friday, then spend the weekend working on the story, which I’ll post and announce on Monday (or earlier).

At this point, I’m going to pick my favorite from each Friday’s submissions, and write that story. In the future, I may devise a more random way to choose the “winning” prompt.

And by winning, I mean you win the fact that my story will be based off of your suggestion. Not a huge prize to say the least, but it doesn’t take much to “enter” either. :-) Plus I’ll give you props via tweets and such, and a link with the story if/when I post it on my site. (I may want to submit it somewhere instead.)

So here are the guidelines:

  1. Tweet your suggestion on Friday to @FreelanceLance, in a normal-length tweet.
  2. Aside from “@FreelanceLance”, your tweet has to include a number between 200 and 2000–the word limit– and a story seed of some sort. That part is up to you.
  3. I’ll take suggestions until late night Friday night (PDT), and will announce my pick then and in the morning.
  4. At this point, more than one tweet/suggestion is fine, as long as you don’t mind competing with yourself. ;-)

Sound good? I really appreciate you playing along and helping me scratch my creative itch. I hope I can do your ideas some justice!

You can fire off a tweet to me via this link.

Thanks so much! If you have any questions, just post a comment here or send me a tweet.