Image source: Myriams-Fotos on Pixabay
Hello and welcome to the The Ink Well weekly fiction prompt. The Ink Well is a Hive blockchain-based social media community of creative writers. If you love to write short stories, we invite you to join us. Or peruse the work of our community members.
Important FAQs about The Ink Well!
Before we get to the prompt, we have answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about The Ink Well.
What Is The Ink Well all about?
The Ink Well is a short story community. This means we only accept short fiction. (Fiction means stories from your imagination.)
It also means:
- No novels, chapter stories or multi-part stories
- No poems
- No essays or other non-fiction
- No memes
Just fictional short stories!
The Ink Well is all about creativity, quality, community, and engagement. As such, we ask the following:
- Please take the time to get to know the community and read other writers' work. Everyone who posts in The Ink Well is expected to read and comment on at least two other stories for each piece you post.
- See our catalog of fiction writing tips and make use of our resources. (Many of our writers are developing awesome skills, and you can too!)
- Put effort into your posts. Review and edit your content for errors.
What are the community rules?
You can find our community rules at the top of The Ink Well community (right side of the page).
Please read the rules before posting in The Ink Well, as we outline the "do's and don'ts." If you can't find them, you can read them here.
Our community rules are designed to make our community a safe, welcoming, plagiarism-free space for self-publishing original short stories.
What does it take to get rewards in The Ink Well??
We refer you to the above description of what The Ink Well is about. If you are not getting great rewards, it is likely for one of the following reasons:
- Your story has many grammatical errors. (This is easily fixed with the tips in our post, Help for the Grammatically Challenged.)
- Your story lacks some important elements of good fiction, such as character development, dialog, scene details or a story arc. (See our catalog of fiction writing tips for information on these important aspects of short stories.)
- Your story appears to be a retelling of an old folk tale. There's nothing wrong with folk tales, but here in The Ink Well, we are looking for 100% original fiction. We want to see fresh new stories from your imagination, not age-old stories with well-worn themes.
Okay! Let's review fiction entries from last week's prompt and launch a new one.
Stories From the Previous Week
Thank you to everyone who posted a story for last week's prompt, “holiday."
We really enjoyed all of the creative and interesting stories about holidays, traditions and Christmas surprises that emerged from this prompt! Thank you, everyone!
Here are the week's stories. Be sure to read and support these authors for their work.
- He Was Sure of a Wonderful Holiday This Year End, by @rayt2
- A Sick Day Before Christmas, by @piratethanos
- The Bad Egg, by @cool08
- If Wishes Were Horses, by @mrenglish
- Not the Holidays She Hoped For, by @khaleesii
- Young Jesse, by @emeka002
- Christmas Dwells in My Singularity, by @gabmr
- The Holiday that Settles Differences, by @popmanj
- Holiday Gone Wrong, by @kingkenny44
- Unwise Investment, by @raymondpeter
- A Trip Off-World, by @killerwot
- Divorce Dilemma, by @milezofplay
- Christmas Holiday, by @repayme4568
- Beautiful Chaos: Five Little Fingers!, by @deraaa
- The Christmas Food Poisoning, by @coolkris
- The Arms Manufacturer's Secretary, by @khoola
- The Festive Holiday, by @dwixer
- Holiday Gone Wrong, by @iyimoga
- A Holiday from the Rain, by @amirtheawesome1
- A Warm Holiday, by @ozohu
- Jean Luc DuBois Saves Christmas (in September), by @deeanndmathews
- Christmas Fever, by @raymondpeter
- Save Me from Santa, by @doziekash
- Forced Holiday, by @diebitch
- Christmas Entanglements for Spending the Vacations at Home, by @katleya
- It's Almost Christmas!, by @kemmyb
- Wolf in Sheep's Skin, by @ricardo993
- Gunkai Land, by @kei2
- An Unexpected Holiday Encounter, by @yuki-nee
- Pandemic Vacation, by @radenkusumo666
Well done, everyone!
This Week’s Prompt
The last three weeks we have been enjoying holiday-themed prompts, which were of course open to any sort of interpretation one might choose. We continue with a prompt that can be related to the holidays or not. It is up to you!
This week's prompt is: New Year.
Sticking with our series of seasonal themes, we arrive at last to the year's end, and a brand new year with all of its promise of a fresh start. There are many possibilities for great stories at the close of a year and the beginning of a new one.
Perhaps your character wants everything to be new — a new job, a new house, a new spouse...? Or your character had a terrible year in 2021, but upon reflection realizes that some good came from everything that went wrong. You could also explore traditions for celebrating the new year, or the behaviors of adults ringing in the New Year viewed from the eyes of a child. And of course New Year's Resolutions could be excellent themes.
We hope that will get your imaginations started! We look forward to reading your stories.
Note: As always, please avoid gory, bloody, brutal, sexist or racist themes and language, erotica and other NSFW (not safe for work) content, and stories featuring abuse of women, children or animals.
If you don't feel inspired by this prompt or the featured image, feel free to peruse any of our past prompts or our collection of idea-generators:
Weekly Prompt Rules:
- Deadline: You have a week to write for the prompt, until the next one is posted. (Note: You can write for any of the prompts anytime. This is just a guideline to be included in the weekly round-up in the next prompt post.)
- Story link: Post your story in The Ink Well community, and post a link to your story in a comment on this post.
- Hashtags: Please use these hashtags: #fiction #writing #inkwellprompt #theinkwell.
- COMMUNITY SUPPORT: Visit the work of at least two other community members and comment on their work.
- Title: The title is up to you. You can come up with any title you wish. You do not need to name it after the prompt or include the prompt word.
- Images: Please only use images from license free and creative commons sites, like Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels. Images you find on the Internet are copyright protected and cannot be used. Be sure to provide the source link.
- Length (NEW!): We request that story word counts are a maximum of 1,500 words maximum length (preferably 750-1000 words). This is just a guideline. Longer stories tend to get fewer readers. Additionally, The Ink Well admins appreciate keeping to that maximum story length for our time management!
Reminder: Be sure to also read our community rules. The reason for the repeat reminder is that we see many stories describing brutality of women, children, or animals, or that have excessive gore or violence, and we must mute them. Please do not post these stories in The Ink Well. We want our community to be a safe and comfortable place for all readers.
Here are the past prompts if you would like to use them or refer back to them:
- #1: Heart and Soul
- #2: The moment when...
- #3: Beauty with a twist
- #4: The Way Home
- #5: A Matter of Time
- #6 50 Story Ideas
- #7 The Library
- #8 All the way to tomorrow
- #9 Legend
- #10 Three Words
- #11 World Building
- #12 Childhood Summers
- #13 50 Imagination Ticklers
- #14 Railroad
- #15 Cats - 750 words
- #16 Your Birthday
- #17 Action, Dialog and Narrative
- #18 Change
- #19 Tea Time or Tee Time?
- #20 Summer Camp
- #21 Main Street
- #22 Fireworks
- #23 Picnic
- #24 Run
- #25 A word of advice
- #26 Winding road
- #27 Mirror
- #28 Shipwreck
- #29 School Notes
- #30 Three Words: Scooter, River, Midnight
- #31 Flash Fiction Contest
- #32 A Fork in the Road
- #33 Shadows
- #34 Three Words: Island, Witch, Cake
- #35 Full Moon
- #36 Graveyard
- #37 Jack-o-Lantern
- #38 Family Ties
- #39 Longing
- #40 Feast
- #41 Gift
- #42 Season of Light
- #43 Believe
- #44 Elf
- #45 Holiday
Thank you for being a part of The Ink Well!
@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo and @wrestlingdesires
We would like to invite lovers of creative writing to visit The Ink Well, a Hive community started by @raj808 and @stormlight24 and run by @jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo and @wrestlingdesires.
We also invite you to follow The Ink Well curation trail on the Hive blockchain, at https://hive.vote/. Simply navigate to the curation trail section and search for theinkwell (all one word with no @ symbol) and our trail will pop up as an option.
Similarly delegations are possible on Hive using the fantastic https://peakd.com/ Hive Blockchain front end. If you wish to delegate to @theinkwell, you can do this from the wallet section of https://peakd.com/
@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @iamraincrystal, @generikat, @marlyncabrera, @preparedwombat, @marcybetancourt, @zeurich, @stormcharmer, @adncabrera, @vision-of-esca, @josemalavem, @morey-lezama, @sayury, @evagavilan2 and @bertrayo.
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