A Fiction Writing Prompt to stretch the literary muscles. No rules. No word counts. Simply write and explore.

I discovered it at the bottom of the trunk. I opened the old, dusty journal and began to read. A life long gone breathed again…

Writing Prompt Expanded

You might have noticed but I like to journal. In fact, I am an avid journal user. I often find I am repeating myself in several places. If you picked up and read my journals, you’d get a pretty good idea of what my life is like. And that is exactly where we are going with this prompt

This prompt is all about recreating a world from the past. Your character is reading an old journal and as they do they discover the life of the person who wrote it.

• What year was the journal written?
• Is the journal written by a relative?
• If they had an occupation, what was it?
• Was their life difficult or easy?
• What things concerned them day by day?

This prompt will help you bring an old world to life. Creating a believable setting for your characters and stories is a vital skill. Using this journal style prompt is one way to do that. You describe someone’s life and therefore describe the world they inhabited. And even just several years in the past can make a huge difference to the way people lived. Smartphones and the Internet didn’t exist twenty or so years back.

As always these writing prompts are optional and entirely open to your own interpretation. Use them as a starting point for a short story or something a little more grandiose. If you do write something, please share it or a link, in the comments or tag me. I’d love to read what you create. Write and enjoy the learning process.

Original Journal Image by JamesDeMers from Pixabay

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