Places are delicious, aren’t they? World building starts here. Where are we? What are the colors, sites and smells? What are the activities? Why are we here, right now, as this story unfolds?
Your prompt is “airport.” Go.
Airports are bustling places. Dramas are happening. People are stranded in some cases, or catatonic and cattle-like in others. It all depends on the circumstances — whether our main character is moving through a routine check-in and boarding process, or any one of a thousand other scenarios are playing out.
What if everything is normal, but some completely whacked out crazy person enters the scene? What if someone insists they need to board with their emotional support chimpanzee? What if there is a global pandemic going on?
If you have never read the post-apocalyptic novel, Station 11, I highly encourage you to do so. The entire story doesn’t take place in an airport, but there is one scene that is so powerful and so poignant, that Station 11 will forever be connected to that scene for me. (Forgive me, but this is from memory.) At the beginning of a devastating global flu pandemic, an airplane is observed landing… and then veering to a runway that is as far from the actual airport as it can go… where it stops dead. And no one emerges.
Think about that. If you were the author of a short story or a novel and wanted to portray the different roles people play in the eerie world of disease transmission and the behavior of the surviving humans, how w0uld you choose to illustrate the dire consequences and the horrific decisions of various players? How would you portray the heroic efforts of a pilot who has ascertained that all of the plane’s passengers are dead or dying of the illness, and must do whatever can be done to help prevent further transmission?
That is the fodder for the prompt we are exploring in this blog post: Airport.
Source: Pixabay
Real Travel, Time Travel, Doomed Travel…?
Okay, maybe I’m just in a particular mood as I write this (sardonic) or maybe I just really want to tickle the imagination. Whether you have traveled minimally or extensively — or even if you have never been on a plane, but have dropped off or picked up travelers — you have had an experience with airports.
Bend them. Distort them. Turn them into fictional accounts that have a life of their own. Write about a person waiting for a loved one in an airport and getting a text from a past love that changes everything. Write about a child waiting at an airport with her father to meet her new step-mother for the first time. Write about two people sitting next to one another as they wait for their flight and realize they remember one another from primary school. What happens next? Run with it! Write the story!
When you allow your mind to wander and let settings, scenes and characters take shape in your mind, there is no end to what you might come up with. How do you get started on a story? What are your favorite ways of getting into creative writing mode? I’d love to hear from you.
Learn More About Write Club
Write Club is an online writers’ group for short story authors, with a focus on writing for mainstream publications, literary journals and genre magazines. We are committed to publishing our work in the many professional publications and short story anthologies accepting submissions. Some of our members are successfully published, and others are on their way, with the help of the honest yet caring critiques from our workshop members. In fact almost all of my published short stories were written from Write Club prompts.
How Does the Community Work?
Each month we launch a new writing prompt. Write Club members are required to write a short story based on the prompt, and then review and critique each other’s stories. These requirements are central to who we are. Every writer needs an outside eye to help them see what they may have missed and to provide perspective. This invaluable feedback can make all the difference in taking a story from promising to published.
The next phase is to revise our stories based on the workshop feedback, and (optionally) do another round of critiques. This method helps us to prepare our manuscripts for professional editors.
Is It Possible to Join Write Club?
While we purposefully remain a small group to ensure that we can all read each of the other stories that are submitted for critique each month, we do occasionally welcome in a new writer with experience who is looking for an online writing community for mutual support, writing critique and comradery. If you are interested in exploring whether Write Club is a fit for you, visit us in our Discord server or reach out via my Contact page.
Note: If you enter our Discord server you will be in a waiting area where we can chat with you and learn more about your interests.
Here’s what’s expected of our members:
- You should already have a strong foundation in short story writing, excellent English skills, and a desire to continue your development as a fiction writer.
- You should have the goal of publishing your work in professional publications.
- You must be ready to commit to writing one story each month.
- You must be willing to provide helpful feedback to other writers and support their journey as well as your own. We are all required to critique every story produced within the community.
Looking for Prompts and Writing Resources?
If you’re just looking for inspiration, watch for our monthly writing prompts, which are published at the beginning of each month on jaynalocke.com. Feel free to use them to inspire your short stories. You can post them on Hive, Medium, Vocal, your WordPress blog, or wherever you like. Note that we do not offer critiques for those who are not members of our workshop. This is just for inspiration!
All we ask is that you provide a link back to our prompt post that inspired you so others can be inspired too. Thank you!
I love to share tips and ideas about creative writing! Here are two treasure troves for you:
- You can find many of my tips and resources on my website, in the On Writing section.
- I also share writing tips in The Ink Well community on Hive. See the complete catalog for the full list of articles.
Have fun and keep writing!
Featured image source: Generated with Leonardo.ai
About Jayna Locke
Jayna Locke is a Minnesota writer who has had a lifelong love of fiction. Her short stories have appeared in a range of literary journals, including Great Lakes Review, Portage Magazine, and Bright Flash Literary Review, as well as several anthologies.
Her collection of short stories, Somewhere in Minnesota, is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kirk House Publishers, and indie bookstores. She is reachable through her contact form at Contact Jayna.