Stories from Nonsense Prompts

There’s a scene from Finding Forrester where William sits himself and Jamal down at a couple antiquated typewriters with a simple instruction to the young man across from him, “Write.” I’ve always loved this scene. It shows the two side of writing brilliantly. One, full of confidence, acceptance and experience to simply start writing about anything, and the other, confused, frustrated by a lack of ideas on what to write about, and ultimately ending up with a blank page.

We have all been in both positions with regards to our own writing. Those amazing moments when our fingers can scarcely keep up with the pace of our minds, lost in the momentum of flow, confident and accepting of the words coming to us, or, sitting and staring at the blinking cursor on a blank page, trying to figure out what to write, how to start, and why ideas are not coming to us.

I tend to think of this situation as the results of an irresponsible muse, either heaving inspiration at us in quantities we can’t possibly express quickly enough, or off sleeping in a corner somewhere as we sit there pining for the moments of plenty.

The ability to sit down and simply write with no particular direction, and effectively pull a narrative out of thin air is challenging, and usually comes with lots of practice. Today, we are going to look at one of these practices, by using random things, events, and places to create nonsense prompts we can write about. This is an excellent exercise for generating ideas, some of them very strange, to aid us in our creative works.

Connecting seemingly unrelated elements allows us to draw inspiration from things around us we’d not typically consider relevant to what we are working on. It expands the breadth of our creative scope and when practiced with some regularity, goes a long way to preventing the dreaded “writers block” from getting in our way.

This exercise has three parts. Listing the story elements, connecting them into random prompts, and using the prompts to create a paragraph or two of narrative (or nine for us long-winded types).

Firstly, we have to come up with the story elements, which can be made up or sourced from the objects and magazines around us. These story elements fall into three categories, Characters/Things, Events, and Places, which we can think of as the who’s, what’s, and where’s of the stories we’ll write. We will list six of each here, but it can be done with as few or as many as we like.

We’ll be drawing these elements from a card deck I made to help with these kinds of exercises.

With the elements in place, we can now get a sense of how truly nonsensical these can be. If we want to push ourselves creativity, coming up with the strangest elements will force us to make connections that defy our own creative logic. Doing so, and finding joy or comfort in the challenge trains our brain to make more abstract connections.

This can also be used as a “What If” matrix for the characters in a story we might be struggling with. By listing the characters, different events they might encounter, and the places they might encounter them we can roll the dice, as we will in a moment for the above elements, to generate prompts for us relating to our characters. This allows us to experience various random events and places with our characters, while also exploring their emotions and how they’d react in different scenarios.

Our focus today, however, is on idea generation, so let’s get rolling those (virtual) dice! If physical dice are available, it’s always fun to have something to yeet across the room when selecting the story element combinations, but if none are available, this online dice roller is a good alternative. It allows you to set the number of dice, number of faces on each die, and rolls them all at once:

https://www.calculator.net/dice-roller.html

Let’s get to rolling! Because I prefer to use all the elements without reusing them, I will roll all three dice first, to get the first prompt. After this first prompt, the dice may roll the same number again and again, so for this I will switch to rolling each category one at a time, re-rolling for already used elements. It’s perfectly fine to reuse the elements if we choose to do so.

Roll #1 – 5,6,6

We take the roll and use it to craft a statement or prompt from our list.

“A cheese elemental guest-staring on a cooking show in a majestic sequoia.”

The prompt gives us the who, what and where, and leaves the why and how up to our imaginations. Let’s roll the rest of the elements into prompts and then get started on the fun bit, crafting narratives.

Roll	Prompt
5,5,6	“A cheese elemental guest-staring on a cooking show in a majestic sequoia.”
2,3,4	“A haunted Sport falling through the air in a ballroom.”
4,2,3	“A confident bard confronting a bully in a Paris café.”
1,6,2	“The daughter of a madman planting flowers in a family theme park.”
6,4,5	“A sentient computer virus staking a vampire at the gates of heaven.”
3,1,1	“The lost-sock monster chasing down a criminal in a high-tech factory.”

Do these prompts look crazy? They certainly do! And that’s exactly what we want. The closer they come to pure insanity the better it will be to stretch our grey matter and our creative vision. Now the fun can begin, but before we get to that…

This is an exercise that should be approached with acceptance and humour. In order to help us not clam up when we tackle the prompts, we have to be willing to let what we write be bad, ridiculous, and way out of character for us. We can accomplish this with a healthy dose of humour. Learning to laugh and find humour in what we do dissolves our tendencies to self-judge and criticize our writing. We can embrace humour by writing humorously, or by mentally or physically laughing when we catch ourselves casting far too critical an eye on the words flung off across the page. Remember, humour dissolves self-judgement. Now on to the stories.

There is no right or wrong way to approach this. It may be the opening of a story, the climax, or the ending. Don’t overthink it. Just write what feels right and natural to you.

Prompt 1

“A cheese elemental guest-starring on a cooking show in a majestic sequoia.”

“Imagine this! Me! An elemental, a fundamental force of nature—well okay sure, maybe not as fundamental as fire or earth—but still! Forced to perform for the glutinous masses who want nothing more than to shovel slop into their faces, who wouldn’t know a proper Gorgonzola from the mass produced plastic-like crap piped out of their factories. Not an ounce of sense, no soul to speak of!”

A charcuterie board sat nailed to the tree limb in front of Chester, an assortment of cheeses and cured meats neatly displayed upon its top. Being a being cheese elemental, more specifically, the elemental spirit trapped in a preposterously large wedge of 15-year-aged cheddar, the irony of being asked to do a cooking show involving cheese wasn’t lost on him.

“It’d be damned disgusting if I cared about cheese-on-cheese canibali—”

Whack!

An errant branch caught in a gust of wind nearly knocked him from the trees crown. He steadied himself, grasping the massive trunk with his oily, two-fingered hands.

“Bah! This is ridiculous!”

He considered his situation, of having to deliver this broadcast from such a place to avoid the production crew become ravenous at the exposure to his scent, and of course, the ‘cooking’ he was to do.

“It’s okay, it’s all good…If this is what passes for cooking, I’ll do it. I’ll explain the damn board.”

“3…2…1…” A distant voice called; the light of the studio camera haphazardly strapped to the tree in front of him blinking in time with the count-in.

“Showtime.”

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Prompt 2

“A haunted Sport falling through the air in a ballroom.”

The moment, a glorious moment to be sure, stretched out before like ribbons flowing effortless from the hair of the women across the room. He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed he’d be going home with Rachel tonight. No, this was not some sordid affair of the heart. Rachel was joyful and innocent, and too good for the family who’d left her to play on her own the corner of the ballroom, amongst the covered tables she seemed to think made the perfect house for her new friend.

He did consider himself a friend, you know, even if it was chance that brought the two of them together. He’d had many friends over the years, as he was passed from person to person, adult to child, child to the ground only to be picked up and loved once more. Of course, it helped that he was immortal, as least as far as he could tell. He’d been disposed of many times, event being sent to a powerplant to be burned, the production of electricity from waste, or some such. But he never failed to find his way back into the hands of someone who loved him, someone he could protect.

He wasn’t always a spork. Once, back farther than he cared to admit, he was a boy, a happy boy, until his father and mother made him unhappy, one spooning at a time. The last spoon they’d used to make him unhappy was of a peculiarly large wooden variety with three big teeth on it. After he became that wooden spoon, he was happy again. He made him self happy. His parents felt his happiness, in their end.

Now, he looks forward to making new friends, to playing with them, and making their bad parents unhappy, so his new friends can be happy, just like his is now.

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Prompt 3

“A confident bard confronting a bully in a Paris café.”

“No! You won’t harm him!” Coltard’s warning was as stern as it’d ever been, echoing back from the close plaster walls.

“How’s that, ya figure? Gonna sing me to death. God knows you must have a trail’o bodies behind ya, if ya sing like ya talk.”

The insult wasn’t a new one, from anyone who didn’t like bard’s performances, and even though he’d just met this hulking drunkard, it would have been obvious what he did, who he was. He unslung the instrument laying across his back, a squeezebox that elicited mixed reactions wherever he played it. The reaction to it during a bar brawl was always the same, however.

“Oh—oh! Looks here! C’mon, Bardy, sing me to sleep…”

The brute had let go of the barkeep, wobbling on his heels while squaring up to Coltard, knocking two tall stools out of the way in the process. Coltard didn’t know a song that could lull such a ruffian, but the instrument did.

“Tonight’s performance will be by my good friend, Beatrice—”

“—She got a nice asssss? That’ll gets me to—”

Beatrice sung out into the stuffy evening air within the small café, a discordant, abrupt song of squeaks and cracks, followed by an applause of teeth raining down on the stained wooden floor. The room was silent. She was awe-inspiring.

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Prompt 4

“The daughter of a madman planting flowers in a family theme park.”

“Damnit!”

Tears trickled down her face.

“It’s not deep enough. Again, it’s not deep enough!”

The dirt filling the grave was level with the ground around it, but the carny’s left and knee were still visible. She looked around. He was nowhere in sight. She hurriedly threw more dirt on the corpse, covering the exposed parts with as much as she could scrape from the forest floor.

“Faster, Chelse, faster. Don’t let him—”

A snap rung out in the night air, a twig, or crunchy bit of leaf. She scanned the forest. Everything was black, the moon hiding her face as she did every time her father found someone else to…

She laid the spade aside, confident it couldn’t be the sound of his boots tromping through the woods by Squiggly’s Fairground.

“He doesn’t know you’re out here, Chelse. He doesn’t know.”

From a canvas bag she produced three clumps of hardy windflowers, placing them along the top of the shallow grave. She’d done it so many times now it seemed second nature.

“He never puts them to rest,” she murmured to herself, recalling the first time she’d seen her father with a body. “Why c—can’t he put them to ressstt?”

Tears threatened to overwhelm her. She could feel them running down her chin, creating clean streaks through the smudges soiling her amber skin. Earthen grit scraped across her cheek as she wiped the tears away.

“Calm now, you can do this. Just pant these and you can back home before he—”

Another snap shot out, another twig, broken, but she knew this time it wasn’t a squirrel or a rat. The twig was murdered, as had the poor man in the grave before her, by the tromping boots of the man looming above her.

“Chelsey-girl, what have I told you…”

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Prompt 5

“A sentient computer virus staking a vampire at the gates of heaven.”

The universe really is a strange place, and I say that as someone who knows a thing or two bout the matter. As the great great grandson of an interactive AI refrigerator, let me tell you something about ‘strange’. Strange is minding my own business, strolling the digital highways of the great Catholic archives, uncovering truths those robe-wearing geriatrics never want to come out when, and I have to stress how unceremoniously this was done, I was yanked from that comfy server and jammed into the implant of someone who had no business in doing so.

Said he was looking for some information I’d gathered from the old texts, something I’d translated and that he could use to further the righteous battle against the forces of night. Leave to a meatsuit to be so brazen as to imprison me in his brain-bucket in a device that I could easily kill him from. Sometimes, when I think of that miserable sod, I even feel a bit impressed by his bold, if foolish, actions.

Well, silicon trumps carbon, or so we intelligent computational disruption AI’s say. But anyways, I know you don’t care about all this, not really. I mean, why would you, a stake through the heart is a stake through the heart, regardless of the exposition leading to the aforementioned staking. But here’s the thing. When God—yes, big-G god, came to little old me, riding this meatsuit around, and having the time of my life, I had to take a moment.

You have to understand, God, to me, was always a brain controlling some fingers tapping away on a keyboard somewhere. Alas, that was not God, and when he said he needed me, that I was the only one who could do this really important job, who was I to say no? Who was I to deny a bit of fun, to say nothing of where it would lead me. Me, me! In one of old Musky-Musk’s neural implants, whiling away the hours with a vampire who thought he could sneak through the pearly gates.

Oh, and in case your wondering, yes, I unload all this exposition on every vampire I usher to the great beyond. You have to know, after all, your place in the grant scheme of things. You have to learn, as this sad sack I’m wearing did, that silicon always trumps carbon.

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Prompt 6

“The Lost-Sock monster chasing down a criminal in a high-tech factory.”

The commotion arose from the second level, a long, grated steel walkway above the assembly line. Heavy work-boots rung out. They were fast, dragging, panicked!

Adreana rushed to the stairs, swinging herself onto them with a hand on the steady railing. Shouts could be heard, a scream.

“Please don’t be too late!” She chided herself, aware that she was the only first-aid worker in the plant.

She leapt two steps at a time, rising over the countless printers on the main floor, blasting metal together below her in whatever shapes was on the order sheet.

Shit! She’d left her station running. No, that doesn’t matter. Almost there…

The same panicked voice called out, it was Richy, she could tell by the yell. He sounded like that whenever he was hollering at the workers over the sound of the machines. But there was another noise, penetrating the loud factory, echoing down from around the corner at the top of the stairs.

“What the hell.” She muttered, cresting the top of the steps and resting her eyes upon the walkway.

On it, a single striped knee-high sock lay, as if discarded by one of the children from the St Vincents on the other side of town. Rustling filled the air to her left, around the corner where a panicked whimpering had set in. She leaned forward from the second stair, peering around the wall.

Ricky lay on the walkway, hugging the base of a support beam which passed through it. A look of sheer terror on his ashen face. Before him, an undulating mass of fabric stood. Hundreds—thousands, of socks churned and shifted as if by some unseen force, rising up from the metal grating.

“Please.” The fallen worker pleaded. “No—Please!”

Andreana’s jaw went slack as the monster rose up to the ceiling and plunged down on Ricky, covering him entirely. Through the twisting, amorphous mass of striped and checkered socks his legs were seen, covered in the constricting lengths of old tattered clothes.

SNAP!

The sick filling her mouth seemed to come ahead of the screams and bones dully cracking with the mass. Shee lurched, puking ahead, next to the errant sock laying limply on the grating. Another scream, cut short at its highest pitch, drew her eyes for the impossible scene playing out. The mass, still undulating and constricting, seemed distinctly pink in the harsh light of the fluorescent bulbs, ensconced in their long overhead ballasts. The rustling gave way to a distinctly different sound, as if someone were slapping wet clothes on a tile floor, over and over, and over.

The monster turned to her, a chasmous blood-soaked maw grinning horridly before the whole beast moved her direction. She shrunk back, hoping it couldn’t see her standing there so obviously. She wanted to run, but was frozen in fear. Yet it came closer, stopping two stairs from her on the walkway atop the limp sock, which was absorbed into the writhing mass of wet fabric.

She didn’t know if it was just in her head, or if this creature actually nodded to her, but it began moving again as quickly as it’d stopped, leaving behind nothing but a trail of red, scraped across the oxidized metal walkway, and a single sheet of paper, equally bloodstained.

Little of it was visible, and she was too terrified to move to it, but she could clearly see from her spot on the stairs, the bold red letters of the missing persons notices posted around the town over the past weeks, and the photograph of a young girl, smiling joyfully through the blood of her dead coworker.

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Now, what do we do with these stories after we’ve finished them? My suggestion is that we should keep them together, adding to them whenever we do the exercise. It will create a repository of crazy, far-out ideas that we can draw from. Some of the prompts may generate stories we wish to continue, and others may just be there for us to go back to when we are feeling uninspired.

The key takeaway from this is that there is no good or bad coming out of the narrative of these paragraphs we’ve written. They are simply the flow of ideas out of us into a place we can go back and draw from and teaches us that a cracked rock can be hero, that trees and can host television shows, and that any character can do anything, if we only let ourselves imagine it.