Writing Prompt: What’s Happening Here?

Who is this guy? What’s his story? What about these kids glaring at him? Who might they be? What city is this? Where are they going?

Write it out, y’all.

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Writing Prompt: Someone You Don’t Like

Fiction is about empathy. Seeing the world through someone else’s eyes helps us to understand the world on a different level, and to relate to our fellow humans in a deeper, more complicated way.

A lot of writers strive to make their main characters likeable, especially if the POV is written from a close perspective. To that end, I think there’s a tendency to write characters we like personally, so we can make other people like them, too. (I’m all for unlikeable characters, BTW, but that’s another blog post.)

But what if we tried to write from the POV of someone we didn’t like?

That’s the challenge I’m setting today. Write from a close perspective (try to do first person) about someone you know and really don’t like–without making them a monster. Maybe you can even make them sympathetic.