Prompt: Write an opening line to a story, poem, essay, letter, email, eulogy, commencement speech, corporate strategy doc, Amazon review, or any type of written work you can imagine. Make it as dramatic, banal, flirty, meandering, emo, [insert adj. here] as you wish. Submit as many as you want.

A two-word opening line? Go for it! A flirty legal opinion? Hell yea! A condescending commencement speech? You’d be the first!

Share a secret desire or goal that you have for yourself as a writer. Go on ahead, put it out there ✨

Writing turns into that best friend you describe your deepest feelings, fears, desires and dreams. Starting tomorrow for the rest of 2024, i want to be open to creativity. I have a goal in mind, and it is to be as bold as possible with my writing skills.

P.S, I got a new job at a communications firm and I start on 9/11. Wish me luck.

Poetry: Write a haiku about your favorite place, literal or figurative, to go.

My head on your lap
A soft lean to turn the page
And also to kiss

— — — — — —

Nice to feel so small
Sirens and reggaeton pulse
Chaos as art imitates

Fiction: Write a scene in which the setting is very much a character.

A lone bench, hunched and steadfast, met my weight as I lowered myself with a huff of exhaustion. The beach was empty, not even other joggers present before 6am; the shore seemed to rub sand from its eyes as waves sleepily swept away last night’s detritus and tucked beer bottles under a layer of tiny rocks.

“Go or stay?” I asked aloud. It seemed at first that the wind would answer me immediately: a breath picked up and delivered a newspaper clipping to my feet, like something out of a movie. I half expected a job opportunity or a personals ad to be circled, nudging me to give my hometown one last chance to keep me.

Instead, on observing the clipping, I saw only an ad for flower delivery.

“So does that mean go?” I asked, puzzled; it was too early in the morning for metaphor.

But the sand was silent.

Use ‘Where were you last night’ as an opening line and just run with it like you stole it.

“Where were you last night?” I asked.

“Getting drinks with Leslie,” Maranda answered as she peeled off her boots.

The slightest hint of jasmine perfume trailed into the apartment. Usually when Maranda came back from a night out with girlfriends little anecdotes would spill out, interspersed with laughter at recalling the moment, as if holding it all in was a great burden. At some point in the night she had applied a mauve lipstick. The pigment was now feathered around the edges of her lips. She was stiff, her footsteps wooden, as she walked past me and turned down the hall toward the master bathroom.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Night night, hon.”

And off she went, now out of sight, the distance growing between us.

Fiction: Write a scene with an unreliable narrator. Try a first-person POV scene in which your character is anxious or terrified despite being in a non-threatening situation.

Ariel’s most distinctive physical trait were her eyes whose color was somewhere between the #127db3 and #62bad6 color codes, which roughly mapped to how the sky would appear on a cloudless August day in Los Angeles right at 5:23pm.

And her most unique personality trait was her use of the question “How’s it going?” which she did not use as a more cumbersome substitute for “Hello” or “Hi.”

It’s some combination of these traits - as well as the correlated characteristics associated with them - that led me to develop a longtime infatuation with Ariel throughout high school, as well as a racing heartbeat when she took the seat to my right on August 27 in English class, the first day of my junior year.

How’s it going, Ariel asked me as she sat down.

Ariel was wearing an oversized knitted sweater which was long enough to fully cover her shorts. Well, technically, it was possible that she wasn’t wearing any shorts at all. Like Schrodinger’s Cat, Ariel was wearing shorts but she also wasn’t, a tension that seemed to suddenly create pressure around my crotch.

Thankfully, the question was easily falsifiable. I could simply ask Ariel if she was wearing shorts underneath her sweater, but this seemed like one of those thoughts that O.G. from the rec center had said would be better to keep to myself.

Over the years, in between games of pickup basketball, O.G. would provide me with invaluable pointers about social cues and norms. These kernels of advice resembled free variables in a linear matrix that I was attempting to optimize in real time.

As the elder statesman at the gym, O.G. handed out advice like a reality TV judge. One time, Derek, the accountant who insisted on playing with his glasses on, came to O.G. asking for advice about his dormant sex life with his wife of fifteen years.

“When the last time you make her dinner?” O.G. had asked Derek.

“Well,” Derek stammered. “On our fifth wedding anniversary, I think I may have made her breakfast in bed. Well, at least the eggs, I was able to -”

“And what about laundry? Or the dishes?”

“I mean, for her birthday last year -”

“D, my man,” O.G. said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Is there anything else I need to say here?”

Unfortunately, I did not recall O.G. giving any advice relevant to my high school crush sitting down next to me, so by the time I had come up with my response to her question (“I’m doing well and my name is Jason”), Ariel had turned away from me because Zed, the seatmate to her right, had begun speaking to her.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.