Story Prompts
I Found An Interesting One..
Laying out Issue #50 of Smith’s Monthly this last week, I was going over six short stories written in five days about five years ago. They were stories in the huge book STORIES FROM JULY which I am serializing in six issues of Smith’s Monthly. 31 stories I wrote in 31 days, so not only am I putting in the regular five stories in every issue, but five or six more from STORIES FROM JULY, plus a full novel.
A number of the stories from all those years ago I remember. And then there was a Seeder’s Universe story I didn’t remember at all. So as I was formatting it and catching widows and orphans, I ended up half reading it again. And I got done and went, “Wow, the next step after the end of that story is a fun prompt.”
So figured I would give the prompt to anyone who wants it. If you could go on a no-return trip into the future, say hundreds of years, would you? And why would you do that?
So now back to finishing up some stuff and moving. Hope you can do something with the prompt. At least it is a fun brain puzzle. Remember, it is a one-way trip.
9 Comments
Jenny
That is a fun prompt! I’m curious what you mean when you say you went through the story to catch widows and orphans.
dwsmith
Typesetting and layout terms. They are when you leave one line of a paragraph at the bottom or top of a column in a multi-column layout. I always try to have two lines at the top or bottom of any column of text. There are exact definitions in printing and layout.
Jason M
In story structure, I’ve always used them differently:
widows = payoffs without setups
orphans = setups without payoffs
dwsmith
Never in 40 years have I heard of that. Just strange.
Jason M
It’s from Hollywood. We used the terms in television and feature film development.
dwsmith
Again, worked with Hollywood, wrote scripts, and dealt with 30 plus produced scripts. Never heard or saw that at all. Just in layout of magazines and books. Weird.
Jenny
Thank you! That was very helpful.
Mihnea+Manduteanu
That’s a nice prompt. I will take it.
Bob
Eerie timing. I was just considering a “flash-forward” story in the same vein as the common “do-over” thing. Not sure how it would even work. I was basically just wondering if it could.