I enjoy timed writing and writing from prompts. My favorite way to generate a prompt is to throw “give me three nouns,” into a Discord chat. Or I might open three books to a random page and put my finger on a word. I’ve gotten quite a few stories from these prompts, or from 15 to 30-minute periods of free writing. Once the exercise is done, though, I can usually tell if an idea works for me, or if it was fun while it lasted, but not something I’ll be returning to.
But just because an idea doesn’t excite me, doesn’t mean somebody else won’t find it intriguing. So, I’m going to start posting some of these “story starters” here. You’re welcome to use them for inspiration or even copy them verbatim. I don’t recommend that, though. This is off-the-top-of-my-head stuff. The stuff I call my Zero Drafts, because they haven’t achieved First Draft status yet. Editing will be minimal, for typos.
Ciao!
Snippet #1: Wrong Haunting