Menu

More apps built by Reedsy

Assemble a team of professionals

The writing app for authors

Writing courses, events and memberships

Get your book reviewed

Weekly writing prompts and contests

Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog
Directory
Weekly Prompts Contest
Reedsy Literary Prize
Magazine
FAQ

← All contests

#46 Write It Down

Whether you've been composing stories for years, have a number of published books under your belt, or are just getting started on your craft, if you're here to write — you're a writer.

 

Like our community, our prompts this week are all about writers at different stages. Maybe you'll pick the one that most relates to you at this time, one that provides a retrospective into previous legs of your writing journey, or one that looks ahead to future goals. In any case, we're looking forward to reading your words, writers.

🥇 Winner

Turf Wars

Winner of Weekly Contest #46 🏆

  They don't want to reconcile. They don't want to like each other. They can't even share a pen without fighting.   For the sixth time that morning, I separate the bunnies, stroke their foreheads, and whisper the universal mantra of bunny bonding: This is a happy warren. You are happy bunnies. Happy bunnies don't bite their friends.   "I think you should bond them at my place," says my sister. She sits behind the pen, her trademark Moleskine in her lap—black, of course; she wouldn’t be caught dead with anything beige. Ever si...

266 likes 128 comments 128
Read story

⭐️ Shortlisted

The Agony of Forgetting

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

The last line we wrote together was utter horseshit but I can’t bring myself to delete it.  The stars shone forth from his eyes like lasers.  I stare at the horizontal blinking line for so long that the screen saver comes on but I still can’t hit the delete button.  Drivel. Meaningless drivel. Worse, I can’t remember how serious it had been, either. Had we known how crap it was and laughed? Had we thought we were challenging Shakespeare and rejoiced? I can’t believe I don’t remember.  18 months and I’d finally bee...

65 likes 42 comments 42
Read story

Sequel to the Apocalypse

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

1Baldahr Seltro didn’t mean to cause The Great Undead Uprising of the third century (third century post-Reckoning, that was) but cause it he did.To understand how Mr Seltro caused this slight little mishap, one must first understand the difference between intelligence and wisdom. You see, Baldahr possessed plenty of the former — bucketloads, in fact — but almost none of the latter. Intelligence, they say, is knowing a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable. Wisdom, as the saying goes, is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. (Not that it...

37 likes 4 comments 4
Read story

The path to Hell

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

Lili glanced around as she helped herself to a biscuit. It wasn’t any good – rancid, and old – but she hadn’t come to him for his cooking. The air was quivering hard all around her, hot and heavy against her skin. She couldn’t make out much of her surroundings. “I heard that you’re done writing”, she said, and watched him turn around to look at her curiously. “I suppose I am”, he agreed pensively, making his way back to her. “It feels strange, to finally be able to say such a thing.” They both looked at the Book. From the outside, it was pla...

36 likes 17 comments 17
Read story

dead cat

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

   I’m laying in bed, not so much a bed, a bedframe with a memory foam mattress that accelerated my spinal problems all through adolescence. The scene is familiar, it’s nightime, the yellow light bounces off yellow walls and reflects off the window and even the moon shies away, and there’s a ladybug making dumb circles around the room, droning like the teeniest fighter jet. My carpet is nasty -- I never bothered to vacuum all the years I lived here. Old drawings from high school are tacked up here and there, pretty faces disto...

30 likes 5 comments 5
Read story

Writers' Group Therapy

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

Writers’ Group Therapy. I wrote about the day my mother vanished because Mr Timms who ran the group said to write about something true. My mother was a woman of habit. When I walked in the door after school, she was always at the kitchen table. She was always just finishing up making a plate of cheese and gherkin sandwiches for me. She would look up as I walked in and say, without a smile, “I wasn’t expecting you yet. You can pour your own cordial”. Of course, she was expecting me. Our routine never varied. Until the day it did, the day it...

14 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

This week's prompts

Write a story about someone experiencing a lightbulb moment of writing inspiration.

– 139 stories

Write a story that takes place in a writer's circle.

– 68 stories

Write a story about an author who has just published a book.

– 88 stories

Write a story about someone returning to their craft after a long hiatus.

– 185 stories

Write a story about someone who has just finished writing their first story/book.

– 131 stories

Stories

Turf Wars

Winner of Weekly Contest #46 🏆

  They don't want to reconcile. They don't want to like each other. They can't even share a pen without fighting.   For the sixth time that morning, I separate the bunnies, stroke their foreheads, and whisper the universal mantra of bunny bonding: This is a happy warren. You are happy bunnies. Happy bunnies don't bite their friends.   "I think you should bond them at my place," says my sister. She sits behind the pen, her trademark Moleskine in her lap—black, of course; she wouldn’t be caught dead with anything beige. Ever si...

266 likes 128 comments 128
Read story

Blood, Sweat, and Tears.

Weekly Contest #46

‘Mama’s decisive girl,’ her mother used to say. ‘You got it from your daddy. A tenacious soul he was.’ It was her daddy’s dream, after all, to see her become a writer, but God willingly, both of them left her early, too early thought Rosé. A tear streamed down her face, then another. Quickly, she wiped them away.It was when the clock struck twelve that Rosé realized it was the meeting day with Mr. Danniell. Grabbing the essential documents, she hurried down the staircase straight into the car. The hippocampus in her brain kept indi...

127 likes 84 comments 84
Read story

8:46 Peaceful Assembly

Weekly Contest #46

“Single-file! Whoa, buddy, back up. Around the barrier. Everyone, Single-file!”The line captain herded us like cattle, directing traffic toward four separate sound stages. I didn’t expect a mixed team of volunteers and police to handle such a diverse crowd of thousands at the Houston rally.“How did they organize all this in three days?” I asked my friends, who had talked me into videotaping the event. Justine and Paula showed off for the camera, blowing kisses in full body paint. Justine flashed her body, covered in an ocean of metallic blue...

113 likes 31 comments 31
Read story

Silver Crown

Weekly Contest #46

The cold bit at his skin as the breeze hit its hardest smacking in and out tearing through the very fabric of his leather vest. On a mine in the land of the Neroshi, the snow was falling again. He looked up to the sky and felt a shiver go through his spine. He tightened his fur coat around himself. Even after spending all of his life fighting through the cold in the land blessed by Thirel, the god of the sea. Even with the blood of the First Gods running through his veins, the cold still hammered his skin and dried his lips.The axe...

93 likes 35 comments 35
Read story

Half the Truth

Weekly Contest #46

It was on the day the stars began to die when I first met him. He knew of my future, yet I had no recollection of his past. Somehow, strangely, I knew him. Like one knows a reflection they see in the mirror. Even though he looked nothing like me, I recognized a part of myself as I looked into his eyes…***  I began trapped in the time rift, slowly decaying in my prison, the ship’s oxygen depleting. My reality was fading, and I would soon be erased from existence. I could only hope that happened before I began suffocating. In a few m...

90 likes 23 comments 23
Read story

Perhaps one day...

Weekly Contest #46

I felt a raindrop fall against my skin, followed by several others, but I didn't have the heart to go back inside. I moved over and sat on the edge of the roof, crossing one leg over the other, leaning back on my palms to observe the remaining constellations uncovered from the clouds. The moon hung full and hazy beneath an eclipse of blazing stars, allowing me to see the rooftops of the identically bleak buildings surrounding my own. My body was a fountain for the incoming rain, the water making my eyelids heavy. I closed my dull grey e...

80 likes 22 comments 22
Read story

Dear Wren...

Weekly Contest #46

What I'm about to say sounds like a line out of an over-dramatized, teen romance novel.I actually can't believe that this happened to me. Oh. My. Goodness. (Katri, chillax. Katri, stop hyperventilating. Katri, CALM DOWN!!!) Sorry about this...I'm just REALLY happy right now. No, I didn't win American Idol. (I'm not even old enough! Yet...) I didn't enter America's Got Talent or The Voice... (That's still on my list, though!) Ok. This is the first page, and it's such a coincidence that there's a new notebook for a new chapter of my ...

76 likes 19 comments 19
Read story

To my dearest brother

Weekly Contest #46

Dear Lucas,  I don’t know what to say here. I feel really stupid but you know me and you know that I can’t leave spring creek town without finally letting go of all my pain. I’m sorry that I have been running away for so long. First I want to tell you how much I love you and miss you. It’s been six years since I have seen your face. But I still remember that untidy red hair that mom always told you to comb and how dad always said you were kissed by fire, your beautiful almond-shaped eyes, your daring dimpled smile and the way you l...

75 likes 35 comments 35
Read story

Renaissance

Weekly Contest #46

She asked me, last night, to tell her a story. She’s changed since the day I pulled her out of the collapsing star that was our home. Since I snatched her from his gaping black-hole clutches and fled, holding her too close and too tight like I was turning her back into a part of me, since I drove haphazard and wild out of the state with her clamped in my arms, swerving through traffic and through tears. Her eyes are a little less wide and afraid. Her voice is a tiny bit clearer. She asked me to tell her a bedtime story. It’s not the kind o...

72 likes 17 comments 17
Read story

Enjoy This Time

Weekly Contest #46

JournalDay #1                      My therapist said I should write stories about my feelings/experiences as part of a cognitive behavioral therapy. So here goes. I’ll try anything.One of my favorite activities when I was young was dragging my old things out to the curb for someone to haul away as one of their new possessions. I’d find a piece of cardboard in the garage and use black spray paint to carefully spell the word “FREE,” an...

69 likes 26 comments 26
Read story

The End of All Days

Weekly Contest #46

Thunk. Another book is dropped onto my desk. “This one needs to be completed by tomorrow morning”. I look up and see my boss walking away. I exhale slowly, trying to calm myself. All day, my boss had been dropping more and more books to be edited on my desk as if I wasn’t already in the middle of other books too! Not that I wasn’t grateful to have gotten this job though, not at all. I had graduated English Literature in Burfield, England when I was 21, and soon after, I had landed this job in editing! Still, I had so much work to do and hard...

65 likes 13 comments 13
Read story

The Agony of Forgetting

Shortlisted for Contest #46 ⭐️

The last line we wrote together was utter horseshit but I can’t bring myself to delete it.  The stars shone forth from his eyes like lasers.  I stare at the horizontal blinking line for so long that the screen saver comes on but I still can’t hit the delete button.  Drivel. Meaningless drivel. Worse, I can’t remember how serious it had been, either. Had we known how crap it was and laughed? Had we thought we were challenging Shakespeare and rejoiced? I can’t believe I don’t remember.  18 months and I’d finally bee...

65 likes 42 comments 42
Read story

Enemy of the State

Weekly Contest #46

The woman was nervous. She was constantly fidgeting; crossing and uncrossing her legs, adjusting her hair, glancing at the thin sheets of paper in her hand.Her name was Aishwarya and she had come here to get her first book published. Her name was called and she jumped up and hurried to the little booth at the end of the corridor.“Close the door and sit down.” The person inside was a tall, thin lady. She had high cheekbones and expensive silver earrings. Aishwarya thought she looked rather like a Victorian era noble or a famous singer. They w...

59 likes 56 comments 56
Read story

Kin

Weekly Contest #46

Muddy shoes dangled above the trickling stream. Attached to the shoes was a trio of voices, badgering and exclaiming and remarking. Their discussion was disturbing the peace of the forest- or so an outsider would say. To them, they were entertaining the trees. “See, I have the perfect relationship between the protagonist and her friend. And yet, every single backstory I try to come up with for either of them is just...sooooo cliche.” “Tell me the basis of the backstory for your protagonist.” “Her parents just died-” A sharp intake of air...

58 likes 30 comments 30
Read story

Simple Minds

Weekly Contest #46

“That will be all for today, Miss Marcia,” my interviewer sneered at me, his eyes momentarily leaving the documents in front of him. “Sit out in the waiting hall, we will have the results soon.” “Thank you for your time,” I spoke softly with a smile, forcing my eyes open and holding back the tears I could feel welling. I am not going to give them another reason not to hire a woman. I was stronger than this, I can take their words and negativity.The hall only had two other people in it, one man who met me in height but was buil...

55 likes 13 comments 13
Read story

How to Write a Novel

Join Tom Bromley for a writing master class and finish your first draft in 3 months. Learn more →

How to Write a Novel