Today I want you to write a story in 40 minutes. To help with that, we’re going to take away some of the invention you would otherwise have to do, by writing fan-fiction.

Choose a story, character or world invented by someone else, take a couple of their characters and mix things up. You might want to take an incident or ending that you hated and change it.

Remember that when you’re writing fan fiction it’s not the kind of thing that can be published without the original rightsholder’s permission (at least, not commercially), but there’s a long and proud tradition of artists copying other artists’ work to figure out what makes them…er, work. If visual artists can do it in their sketchbooks, then we can definitely do it in our practice.

Fan fic is common in sci-fi and fantasy worlds, and in the ‘fandoms’ of TV shows and movies, but there’s nothing to stop you writing a fan fic based on something by the obscure literary fiction writer that only you seem to love…Whatever you can summon up some unreasonable enthusiasm for is fair game.

To help you with the timing, I recommend

• brainstorming for five minutes,
• taking 5 more minutes to write your opening,
• then spending the meat of your time complicating things for your characters,
• leaving five minutes at the end to pull it all together in some kind of ending (even if the rest of the story is not exactly ‘finished’ Trust me, it’ll help, when you come back to it, or stumble across this little oddity on your hard-drive in two years and wonder what you were trying to achieve with it…)

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Fan Fic In Forty

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. Her first recurring characters, at age 11, in no way ripped off the friendship in “My Best Fiend” by Sheila Levelle (thanks, Sheila!)

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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Write a story that revolves around an heirloom toy.

This might be a single character’s reminiscence of a beloved toy; a character’s discovery of an heirloom toy that changes everything; or perhaps you want to follow your heirloom toy through several ‘lifetimes’ in a series of short flash or micro-fiction pieces.

This can be a delightful story…or delightfully horrific, or anything in between.

A Toy’s Tale

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. She recently made an accidental pilgrimage to the Merrythought Teddy bear factory in the town of Ironbridge, that made her beloved child bears…and brought home a new friend. Because if we can’t play, what’s the point?

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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It’s tempting to think that other writers have it easier, or other times were easier on writers.

• Wasn’t it easier to get published when there were more independent publishing houses?
• Wasn’t it easier to make a living at writing in the golden age of magazine publishing?
• All those other writers who are selling their work must have some kind of cheat code that they’re not sharing with us, right?

This week I read the editorial in the February 1951 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, a relatively new publication at the time. The magazine was making its mark, in part, by offering the highest rates in the market in order to attract the best writers. And they did—publishing Brandbury, Asimov, Clarke, Del Ray, Simak, in their primes.

But here’s a snippet from the editorial that I found weirdly encouraging. Editor H. L. Gold was trying to explain to readers how the economics of the writing business work, but I think he left an important message for us writers, too:

“Counting false starts, stories that won’t work out, stories that shouldn’t have been written at all but seemed good at the time, research, productive labor, etc., it takes a stupendous amount of writing even at the highest rates to support an author and his family on magazine sales alone.”

-H. L. Gold, Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1951

There’s your cheat code: there is no cheat code.

There’s just ‘a stupendous amount of writing’. 

Which we love to do, anyway, right?

Looking At The Wrong Metric

When people think of success as a writer, they tend to measure external, visible rewards: sales, income, awards, praise, etc.

But the rewards, if we’re honest, hit most deeply in those moment when a story draft pivots towards it’s real purpose, when you suddenly know what the story is really about; or when you realize you’ve revised it as far as you can, and it’s ready to be read by someone else.

The real reward is in the writing. 

What stalls a lot of people is the sense that you’re doing it wrong if you’re making ‘false starts, stories that won’t work out, stories that shouldn’t have been written at all but seemed good at the time…’

If you feel like you’re ‘not a real writer’ because it requires a stupendous amount of writing to generate the occasional piece that works, H. L. Gold would like a word…

He left those words in his editorial to justify paying the highest rates on the market; and they serve to remind us writers, that this was never easy. And that’s OK. 

Write a stupendous amount this week

If you’re an ambitious* writer, you have to write a stupendous amount to reap the rewards you’re after.  It’s not a race or a competition. You don’t have to burn out. But you do have to write. Probably more than is comfortable.

(*And ‘ambitious’ doesn’t have to mean ‘support myself financially via my writing’. That might be part of your ambition. But I suspect the true ambition is to do the best work you’re capable of.)

StoryADay May is an opportunity for you to find out what ‘a stupendous amount of writing’ feels like, over one month’s time. Are you capable of pushing through, writing when you don’t feel like it, and giving up on those ‘stories that should never have been written’?

If you want to feel the sharp satisfaction of success – whether that ‘success’ is ‘a day of good writing’ or ‘a story sold’, both are valid – remember that ‘a stupendous amount of writing’ is the baseline. It’s the thing that helps you find the stories, tell them well, and sense your own progress.

It’s OK if you don’t want to do all that work. If you have better things to do with your time, by all means do them.

But if you’re floating through life waiting for it to become easy I have some bad news: the struggle is frustrating, and annoying, and sometimes painful, but it’s also where the rewards lives.

What will you write, this week?

Here are the most recent prompts from the StoryADay challenge

Day 17 – A Critical Day, from Mary Robinette Kowal

Day 18 – Expanded Idioms, from Julie Duffy

Day 19 – Inspired by Artemis II, from Julie Duffy

Day 20 – Making a Grocery List, from Brenda Rech

Day 21 – The Nitty Gritty, from Ruby G. Dubois

Day 22 – The Hero of their Own Story, from Julie Duffy

Day 23 – Beyond Sound and Vision, from Elizabeth Twist

Not sure how to get started with prompts? The StoryADay 2026 Handbook has custom warm-ups and brainstorming exercises designed to catapult you into your day’s writing. Get it now
(NOTICE: PRICE WILL INCREASE ON JUNE 1, 2026)

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Get the Essential StoryADay Challenge Handbook (the one that’s a short story course disguised as a challenge) from 2024. Video, audio, written lessons & captions
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Where film and television can give us rich soundscapes and nuanced visuals, only the written word allows us to access the whole range of human senses. The challenge: write a story that uses touch, smell, and/or taste, and avoids visual and audio descriptions.

Delve into some of the other senses if you wish: proprioception / body position, nociception / pain, or internal senses like hunger, thirst, suffocation, or nausea. Give your character a more exotic sense like echolocation or the ability to feel magnetic fields, extrasensory perception or knowing, but limit or eliminate sound and vision.

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Elizabeth Twist

Elizabeth Twist (she/her), untames a garden and teaches meditation in Hamilton, Ontario. Lately she’s been writing about sacred pacts, systems of power, and fungi. Her stories have appeared in Dracula After Stoker, Dark Spores: Stories We Tell After Midnight, and Unfettered Hexes. Her latest piece appears in Agita Magazine:

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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Take a story that you’ve written (maybe this month? Maybe from a longer or older work?) and rewrite an important incident, from the point of view of your main character’s nemesis.

Your beloved main character does need some flaws in order to allow readers to relate to them. Writing a story about them, but from the point of view of someone who is supremely irritated by them, gives you a chance to explore all the ways in which your character might not be perfect…

Try to make the story you write today complete, with no need for the reader to have any outside knowledge of these characters. Practice setting everything up, dripping out backstory, raising the stakes…you know, all the good stuff stories need. All while playing with your existing characters in a new way.

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Hero of Their Own Story

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. Her writing really took off when she learned to be mean to her characters. For an example of that, see ‘Amel and the BRIDE’ in the May/June 2026 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact.

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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Sand.

It can be experienced positively or negatively and either type of scenario is fertile ground for description.

Enjoy a brief brainstorming session! Pros and cons of sand. Happy memories versus frustrations with sand. Types of sand. Colors of sand. Uses of sand. Shake out those possibilities.

Find one that works for you and write a story that incorporates sand and some of its gritty glory.

Pressed for time and energy? Consider a drabble.

All the time in the world? Many successful stories incorporated vast deserts of sand.

Whatever you choose to do, hope you find joy in writing a story today.

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Ruby G. Dubois.

Ruby writes wherever she is, whenever she can, wonders what Freddie Mercury would sing if he were still alive, and hopes her attention span and the stars will align so the world can, one day, read her stories.

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday

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Who prepared most of your meals when you were a child?

What objects, smells or flavors bring back these memories?

Write a story in the form of a grocery list, and make sure to tell us the story of a character who has memories like yours…either in what you include in the list, or what you leave out.

Wondering how to make a story out of a list? Listen to me talk about that here along with an example of a list story.

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Brenda

Brenda writes short stories and a fun, upbeat newsletter – Thru the Window

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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Write a story inspired by the recent Artemis II mission.

There are so many options here, even if you don’t want to write about space travel:

• someone is far from home;
• four people are living in cramped conditions;
• someone has worked for years on a life-changing project and then has to turn it over to the people who will be the public face, and learn to stand back and watch;
• someone sees a thing for the first time in human history;
• someone who opposed a project has to watch while it succeeds;
• people who have been fighting for years are suddenly united in support of an extraordinary event…

There was so much wonder surrounding the Artemis mission, with all it’s ‘first time in 50 years, with all this new technology!’ hype, I’m going to argue for writing a story, today, that contains some of that wonder, awe, and togetherness.

But that’s just me. You write what you want

Julie Duffy

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. She can no longer say “the last time we went to the moon I was 6 months old!!” and she’s OK with that. She wonders what we will do with the 50 years of stellar sci-fi ‘what ifs’ that we’ve written since then…

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

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Write a story in six sentences and/or no more than 400 words.

Choose a common idiom as your title (no, it doesn’t count towards the sentence/word limit) and then construct your story to subvert the readers’ expectations about the meaning of that idiom.

You can go dark, like, literal, or fanciful…but keep it to six sentences.

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Julie Duffy

Julie Duffy is a writer and the host of StoryADay. She is quite long-winded. She does, however, like a sentence with lots of clauses, and so feels that writing a six-sentence story should be—frankly—a doddle. She might even try it today. In fact she thinks she will. There, done.

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday

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Write a story in which a secondary character has a secret — they are having their period. This doesn’t affect the plot, but it does affect the way the secondary character behaves.

Get the StoryADay Challenge Handbook for 2026 – custom warm-up and brainstorming exercises for every prompt, delivered as a private podcast with transcripts.
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Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal is the USA Today Bestselling author of a dozen novels, including Apprehension and the Lady Astronaut series. A winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, she is also a professional puppeteer and award-winning audiobook narrator. She co-hosts the Writing Excuses podcast, served as SFWA President, and has an asteroid named after her. Also, her cat talks.

Join the discussion: what will you do with today’s prompt OR how did it go? Need support? Post here!

Remember: Please don’t post your story in the comments here (and I talk more about why not, here). Best practice: Leave us a comment about how it went, or share your favorite line from your story.

Here’s your next Game Piece. save the image and share on social media with #storyaday

Prefer paper crafts? Here’s the cut & paste version