Short story writers: Your April prompt from Write Club

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Welcome to the latest writing prompt from Write Club. We run a monthly short story writing challenge that starts with a writing prompt for our members. But anyone is welcome to use it for inspiration.

If you are not a Write Club member and you want to use the prompt to write a short story, feel free to share a link to your story in the comments for an upvote. Or let us know if you are interested in joining our writing group. You can find the writing prompt and information about how to join in this post.

What Is Write Club?

We are a small group of fiction writers who are committed to writing and polishing stories for publication in mainstream publishing outlets. We write on a cadence — one story each month — and do peer reviews and revisions to prepare our work for submission to the publisher of our choice.

Our writers have a range of fiction writing experience, from workshoppers to MFAs and published writers, who are mastering the craft of fiction writing and want the accountability of a group and deadlines to keep us on track.

Our Monthly Schedule

It goes like this:

• We issue a writing prompt at the beginning of the month.
• In 10 days we write the first draft. Then we read one another's work and provide feedback.
• In another 10 days, we refine our stories. Then we review again.
• By the end of the month, we complete a third draft.

The final draft is then hopefully ready for submission to a publication of our choice before the next month's challenge begins. Naturally, it's not always that easy. Many stories need more work, even after three drafts.

But we're writing! And that commitment to goals, deadlines and the editing process gets us from wishful thinking to completed stories.

Is Write Club a Fit for You?

Maybe you are actively writing and editing your work, but you have those lazy moments when you would really like a nudge to keep moving, and could benefit from working with a writing community and having deadlines.

Or maybe you dabble in short story writing, and you always intend to really knuckle down, complete and polish your stories, and submit them for publication. That notion of getting your work written and polished and ready to submit to publications might be out there somewhere on the horizon.

We are here to nudge you forward.

Invitation to Short Story Writers

If you are a fiction writer who wants to get serious and get your work ready for publication in fiction magazines, you are welcome to check us out. You are also welcome to use this process to improve your writing quality overall, and get stories ready to post on Steem, Hive, Medium, Narrative or other self-publishing venue.

Here are two options:

1. Check out Write Club and see if it's for you.
2. Or, use this month's writing prompt on your own.

You can find more information about how to join Write Club in this article on Medium, along with a link to our Discord channel where we converse and manage all of our deadlines and reviews.

This month's writing prompt

That brings us, at last, to the prompt! For the month of April 2020, Write Club members must write a story that takes place on or near the sea. Yes, this is broad, but you get to make it what you choose.

To get going, here are some ponderings:

• Do you have a yearning to write a pirate story? And if so, what personal hurdle does your main character encounter? Maybe the MC is a fierce pirate who secretly has a tender heart, or an imprisoned captain of another looted ship who is trying desperately to find a way to escape.
• Or perhaps your story is about a widow who has moved to a beach house to heal and reclaim her sense of self after the death of her husband. Who might she encounter on the beach or in the little beach town that alters her future and helps her to see a path forward?
• Or what if your story is about the view of a child who is summering at a beach house with her siblings and parents and comes to understand something about her family, her parents or their past, and must decide whether to do something about it or cast the secret into the sea.

One tip is not to procrastinate. Start thinking about your story's conflict, who is experiencing it, and how they might seek to overcome what they are facing. The more your conscious and sub-conscious brain are working on who your MC is and what scenario has brought us to the time and place of the telling of this story, the sooner your story will take shape.

You could write out some loglines - one-sentence story plots - and then choose the one that resonates the most with you.

Have fun!