Hello and welcome to the The Ink Well weekly fiction prompt and prize announcement! 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.
Note: We always launch our prompt posts with important information. So be sure to check it out first! Then we invite you to read on and see what we have in store for this week's prompt.
Important FAQs about The Ink Well!
Here are 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 that came from your imagination, not from real life.)
It also means:
- No novels, chapter stories or multi-part stories
- No poems
- No introduction posts
- 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 before publishing.
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. We do not allow stories depicting violence, brutality, or abuse of women, children or animals. If you have questions, please read this article explaining our stance on violence.
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 lacks originality or does not follow our community rules.
Important tips!
- Among the factors we look at is quality of engagement with others in the community
- Please make sure your story is clearly inspired by the prompt.
- Remember to link your story to the prompt post.
Weekly Challenge and Prize Announcement
Time for the prize announcement and new challenge!
Last week's prompt was foil and the skill challenge was to show, don't tell. This community really came through with many surprising, amazing stories!
Many of our writers created original, memorable stories in response to 'foil'. Our selections of this week's winners and honorable mentions reflect how well writers dealt with this prompt and skill challenge.
Update! We are excited to share that in addition to our first place winner, we are awarding a second and third place, in addition to a few honorable mentions. For second and third place we are awarding Hive Basic Income (HBI). The third place winner receives 2 HBI and the second place winner receives 3 HBI.
Here are this week's honorable mentions, all of them written in response to the prompt and skill challenge.
Honorable Mentions
- @restcity with the story Romantic High School Antics
That summer, my parents made me go to summer camp so my chocolate brown skin could be illuminated by sunlight and not the HD TV screen.
Next thing I knew I was off the camp bus and slapping the air, trying to survive a scourge of mosquitoes.
- @khaleesii with the story The Mysterious Foil
After a long while of staring and thinking, she decided to stall some more by going to shower, she figured out that if anything bad were to happen to her, she would rather be smelling like peaches than the donuts from her temp job.
- @kemmyb with the story Thief's Gold Luck
How did I find myself at the town's square and likely to be devoured by a gigantic predator? Fate had a way of making the very things we fear come to life. Our king and his governors had become so corrupt that the people were crying out for relief and vengeance daily. The little people could scrape together from their harvests and crafts work were sold and paid as taxes to the king through his governors.
- @idlemind with the story I Can't Think
The Bermuda grass carpeting the entire garden served as my trampoline—my guardian angel who caught me during my fall, unlike my crush who didn’t catch me when I fell in love with her. Such a silly thought about unreciprocated feelings.
Sitting at the restaurant by herself, the voice was starting to feel agitated, and the breadbasket was nearly empty – as was her stomach. And, as couples came and ate and laughed and went, she realised she was alone. She breathed out and felt a sense of relief which physical showed in her relaxed shoulders. The woman’s name was Tina, but ever since a young age, she’d been known as Tin. Imagine, she thought, what her driver’s licence one day might read: Tin-foil. She went home that night, happily alone, as Allan sat on his bed looking at the darkness beyond his window.
Third Place: Wins 2 HBI
- @seki1 with the story The Choice to Love
"How does it feel?" She echoed my question with a kind of sarcastic sad laugh. "It hurts, it's like when you put your faith in someone that they'll be there for you then they just step out of the way like they never said anything, It's like when someone carried you so high into the air just to throw you back down, it's like you're drowning but you like the feel of the water so you keep drowning still." She said all that in one breath and was gasping for air her eyes red. I just stood there regretting and silently rebuking my curiosity.
Second Place: Wins 3 HBI
- @buezor with the story All We Need Is a Friend
His pink lips highlighted the black beards behind them, and the side beards were a tiny strip of hair running from the head to the chin. Tega realized she must have been looking at him for a while now and moved her face away only to be called back when he started talking.
And the winner of the foil/show don't tell challenge is... @grindan with the story You Can't Foil the Magic of Coffee. Congratulations, @grindan. You will receive 5 Hive!
Charlie's hands shake as she wraps the steaming breakfast sandwich in an embossed sheet of foil. The capability of violence pounds in her veins as Brett continues. "I don't know whose idea it was to put the trash can there, but it makes so much more sense here! So I fixed it, also..." Charlie begins to hum, it's stupid and it doesn't help. So, she does it louder. Brett scrunches his little gremlin face up in annoyance "We should talk about sani buckets..."
Okay, let's review fiction entries from last week's prompt and launch a new one.
Stories From the Previous Week
@ipexito
@fantom22
@mrenglish
@marynn
@george-dee
@royaldiadem
@bahnhoft
@lordtimoty
@zeraton
@merit.ahama
@grindan
@kemmyb
@restcity
@balikis95
@iyimoga
@littlepiggies
@cool08
@madamnaomi
@temileke
@diikaan
@idlemind
@popurri
@buezor
@abigail04
@wrestlingdesires
@itsostylish
@khaleesii
Thank you to everyone who posted a story for last week's prompt!
This Week’s Prompt
The Ink Well is fortunate to have many members who are eager to write. However, the curation team does not have infinite resources. In order to be fair to all writers, we have decided to ask our members to publish only one story per week. If members choose to publish more than that, they may. However, only one story will be curated.
It would be wise to use talent on the best story you can write so you can receive the optimal curation. Remember, Quality over Quantity. Moving forward the Ink Well Team believes this will provide a better experience for writers and curators.
At last, the prompt of the week!
This week's prompt is I can't believe you said that! Our skill challenge will be to use dialog in the story.This week's prompt and skill challenge go together easily. You don't have to use the exact words of the prompt. Derive inspiration from it.
@jayna discusses using dialogue in her essay, Action, Dialog and Narrative, the Dynamic Trio. Here is anothen essay, from Masterclass, that offers tips on how to format dialog.
To jump start your story, we offer a few examples here of how the prompt/skill challenge might be used:
Mary is going to get fired. She told the boss, "I don't like it here."
Andrew jumped from his seat and screamed at the bug, "You bit me!"
Making friends is not Darlene's strong suit. She is likely to say to people's faces, "You smell."
Everyone fell silent when Eric announced, "I'm not really human."
Did you hear what Martina said? She came right out and said it, "I stole the jewelry."
These are just some ideas of ways in which the prompt might inspire a story. You can probably come up with much more interesting ideas of your own.
A week from now, we will select a winning story that demonstrates this skill and utilizes the prompt. Of course we will also be looking for overall quality in the winning story. Good luck!
Note: As always, please avoid violent, 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. (We have a complete article about The Ink Well stance on violence and brutality for more information.)
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 and #dreemport, if you are also posting your story to the DreemPort site.
- 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: 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 are okay too, but they tend to get fewer readers. Additionally, The Ink Well admins appreciate keeping to that maximum story length for our time management. Thank you!
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
- #46 New Year
- #47 Unlikely Hero
- #48 Inheritance
- #49 Under the Light of the Moon
- #50 Three Words: Shoes, Mood, Adventure
- #51 They're Here
- #52 Artist
- #53 Headlights
- #54 Tomorrow
- #55 Lense
- #56 Perfection
- #57 Making and Breaking Rules
- #58 A Reckoning
- #59 Blossom
- #60 Temptation
- #61 Happiness
- #62 Footprint
- #63 Frequency
- #64 Sailing
- #65 Fortune
- #66 Worry
- #67 Adventure
- #68 Shadow
- #69 Motor
- #70 Embarrass
- #71 Proud
- #72 Guide
- #73 Impression
- #74 Lost
- #75 Wonder
- #76 Tear
- #77 Splash
- #78 Brilliant
- #79 Sinkhole
- #80 Exhaust
- #81 Roll
- #82 Wishbone
- #83 Chatterbox
- #84 Foil
Thank you for being a part of The Ink Well!
@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @yaziris and @itsostylish
Interested in joining our community? Start by joining Hive!
We invite lovers of creative writing to visit The Ink Well, a Hive community started by @raj808 and @stormlight24 and run by @jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @yaziris and @itsostylish.
You can follow our curation trail by going to our hive.vote curation trail page and clicking the follow button.
We welcome delegations! These support our community in many ways, including helping us to provide support to quality content creators through curation and contests.
@jayna, @zeurich, @felt.buzz, @marcybetancourt, @marlyncabrera, @stormcharmer, @generikat, @agmoore, @iamraincrystal, @preparedwombat, @gracielaacevedo, @chocolatescorpi, @kirlos, @josemalavem, @morey-lezama, @sayury, @evagavilan2 and @popurri.
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