What better way to anticipate the shorter days, colder weather and incessant rain that will come with the arrival of fall than to throw together a bunch of writing prompts looking back fondly on summer?
- Write a story in which a curmudgeonly campfire recalls all the lame ghost stories told around it over the years, saving the very worst for its last dying ember.
- Include the following words in a summer tale: canoe, grizzly, bucket, haberdasher, pointillist, gerund.
- Write a journal entry in which you refused to help someone with poison ivy because you thought it was contagious. Remember to include how stupid and selfish you were, then conclude with a witty comment about how silly life can be.
- It’s so incredibly hot your computer melts, so you try writing a story using pen and paper but it’s so hot the paper bursts into flame, so you try writing a story using a stick in the sand of a beautiful tropical beach but it’s so hot the stick burns to cinders, so you try writing a story using a chisel and stone tablet but then Moses grabs the tablet away from you. Twist ending!
- The Beach Boys are your next door neighbors. Write a story about your zany adventures living next to a bunch of guys who won’t shut up about cars and surfing and what is Brian doing in the backyard there?
- Make a list of all the things you can do in the summer for less than $1,000,000.
- Surf’s up but stocks are down. Write about the world’s worst stock broker surfer champion.
- Summer is the favorite season of many people. Invent a new season that would kick summer’s ass, if a season could actually have an ass.
- What if dogs threw Frisbees and people caught them in their mouths instead? That would be one weird thing to see in the summer, wouldn’t it? But don’t write about that, write about an ice cream truck that is secretly a kid-eating monster.
- Summer spelled backwards is remmus. Write a poem about how remmus the backwards summer would fool everyone by being cold instead of hot and stuff like that. No, that’s pretty dumb. Write a sequel to the story about the ice cream truck that is secretly a kid-eating monster instead.