4 Comments

Hi Sean,

To be honest my list is looking fairly sparse so far.

I've got:

Macabre Monday- horror/suspense

Fictionistas- the great Substack prompt (monthly)

Flash-friday- flash fiction (although I believe this might be limited to paying subscribers)

Sci-Friday- sci fi/spec

Thorny Thursday (bit of a theme going on here)- Romance

Outside of Substack I also regularly enter the NYC fiction competitions (which are paid) These provide prompts for genre, an action and ask you to incorporate a specific word. Quite good for stretching the creative muscles.

But yea, among the crowd of writers on here it's surprisingly hard to find regular prompts. Perhaps that's a hole in the market?

I hope this is helpful in any case.

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"I’ve put together a list of pages here on Substack that regularly put out writing cues and micro-competitions." Would you be willing to share this list? I'm having the same conundrum, and have come to the same conclusion--but I don't have a list! :)

I do enjoy participating in the daily Haiku prompts by @HONEYGLOOM

https://www.honeygloom.com/s/horror-haiku-club

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Hi Sean,

Here's another one I've come across:

https://fictiondealer.substack.com?utm_source=navbar&utm_medium=web&r=yo86p

Great name and concept. Simple prompts that deliver outsized inspiration. This is partially for my own use, but I think I'm going to use this comment thread as a place to link any new prompts I come across. Feel free to add to direct people here and add to it it if you come across any interesting ones. Thanks, Hamish

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Thanks, Hamish! I appreciate you hooking me up! Another one that I like, outside of Substack, is Globe Soup. They do a mix of paid and free contests. I'm currently working on a story for this challenge: https://www.globesoup.net/horror-short-story-challenge-2024

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