I generally don't use writing prompts. I see the value in them but as far as I can remember, I've only used a writing prompt once. 

It was for "Homework Assignment #3," a story just published in The Militant Grammarian, and the prompt was: “Write something in which a place becomes a metaphor or is a locus of a specific emotion.”

Seems simple enough. But at the time I was given that prompt, I didn't want to write a simple straightforward story. I didn't want to write a serious story about a heavy emotion. 

I wanted to write something that would be more fun.

So I decided to write a dramatic monolog from the perspective of a college student in a writing workshop who is trying to explain to his writing professor why he's struggling to write a story using the same writing prompt. In the end, he does actually describe a room and the emotion it holds but only in an indirect way that allowed me to have some fun.

Along the way, the narrator describes seven different ideas along with the reasons he doesn't think they'd work. For me, part of the fun was that instead of coming up with just one room and one emotion, I had to come up with eight -- the seven that the narrator dismisses and the one room that he ultimately describes.

For example, one of ideas would require a flashback, and the narrator dismisses the overall concept because he knows -- has been told, as I have -- that flashbacks are much more complicated than you'd think, in part because they disrupt the narrative flow. So of course, I included a significant flashback in "Homework Assignment." 

The goal was that all the story concepts had to be different from each other, different characters, settings, etc. They couldn't be a variation of a theme or involve the same character or location. At the same time, they had to have a way to connect to the narrator, had to seem like concepts he could have devised, and had to help with the emotional payoff at the end. And I wanted many of them to have a humorous element, something to make it fun to write and to keep the reader's interest.

An added benefit for me was that when I looked at the stories-within-the-story, I decided some of them were worth writing as standalone stories. One of them, "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," recently received an honorable mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. Another needs some polishing and I hope to start submitting soon. In the meantime, I'm working on two others.

Which is to say that "Homework Assignment #3" has spun off several stories I'm proud of, a pretty good payoff for one writing prompt.

I don't always remember when I get ideas for stories. But in the case of "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," I do remember where I got the idea. 

I'm interested what sparks story ideas because the process of finding a story-worthy scenario isn't science. It's not just inspiration from a muse. The source of a story may help me understand what I'm thinking about (as Joan Didion said, in her essay, "Why I Write") or what another writer, whose story I'm reading, is thinking. Not every story needs to make a point about society, of course. But if writers can write about any topic, it's worth looking at what motivates them, and what they're trying to say about the world they're depicting.

For "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," the goal was to write about a room that contained a lot of emotion; the scenario of a daughter and mother who have a complicated relationship came from a different story, "Homework Assignment #3," which has just been accepted for publication. 

In "Homework Assignment #3," a dramatic monolog, the narrator is a college student who tries to explain to his off-screen professor why he's been unable to fulfil the assignment of the assigned writer's prompt -- to write a story in which a room is a locus of emotion. In the course of that other story, the narrator describes several possible ideas that he tried and dismissed because he feels he couldn't write any of them. (The reason becomes apparent by the end of the story.)

After setting "Homework Assignment #3" aside, I figured a way to write the story that became "Shrine." As basic as it sounds, I started with a description of the room in order to set up the emotion the room holds for the daughter. That meant describing the contents of the main character's room as Gabby decides what to take with her to college, what to give away or trash, and what to leave behind. It was those details that help establish who Gabby is and what her relationship is to her mother. 

While I knew what the beginning had to describe, I had no idea what the middle of the story would entail, and only a partial sense of what final section should be. As details fleshed out the lives and disagreements between Gabby and her mother, I kept asking: how are these relevant, what don't I need to keep?

I had to figure the plot and raise the stakes while maintaining a focus on the room as a character itself. As with Gabby, the room changes over the several years covered in the story. It was interesting going from what I knew I had to describe in the first section to figuring out the path to the climax.

Part of the challenge for me is that while "Homework Assignment #3" and "Shrine to the Cult of Joy" are standalone stories -- they are not sequels, for example, because they have different types of narrators (first person and third person, close perspective) and involve different characters entirely, different settings (New York City and suburban Massachusetts), etc., I wanted to keep them connected. Since the scenario in "Shrine" originated in "Homework Assignment," I wanted to write "Shrine" as if the "Homework" narrator was the writer. "Shrine" had to be the story the "Homework" narrator could tell, the story that would interest him, with some of his obsessions, his interests. That is why there is a similarity in the description of Gabby and her mother and the love interest in "Homework" and her mother.

Along the way, I moved sections around, added new content, deleted unnecessary scenes. After a lot of work to make sure "Shrine" could stand on its own (instead of being a story-within-another-story), it won Honorable Mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. 

My main point is that you have to trust and believe in your ideas. Often it takes longer to see them through completion -- at least for me -- but I'm pleased that my conviction in the story ultimately paid off.