Open Novella Journal 2024

Prompts - Remaining -Still Clear-

This is something that trips up writers each year, so I go over it every year by going over what I've seen.

And yes, the answer to question number ten, the one about "use any prompt for any genre of your choice," does say, "You can write the kind of story you envision." The latter doesn't mean you're actually free to write anything you want, but instead means you're allowed creative freedom to do what you want with the prompt. The prompt still needs to remain "still clear," as they said later on.

Definitely don't go into this thinking, "Oh, I want to write a vampire story, so I'll grab the first vampire prompt I can get." Also, don't go grabbing a prompt that is comprised of a famous quote and loosely base your story off said quote, and definitely don't just use the quote as a one-liner, a mistake another individual admitted to making a previous year.

Make sure you're using the full prompt, but if you make a change, make sure that what the judges are asking for isn't lost.

Make sure the prompt is integral to the entire story as much as possible, which is the not so easy part and is something the ambassadors are likely to figure out as your story progresses, but there are some ways for them to pick this up from the form as well.

Now, onto some of the prompts from previous years, skipping 2018 as there were only a small handful of prompts.

2019

Prompt 1 - I was actually surprised not to see any stories for this prompt because a writer could have effectively written practically any story that took place in a world where technological/biological body modifications were the norm, although that does oversimplify the prompt as there is the part, "Because in this kind of society, surely nothing can go wrong..." and thus there needs to be a way things do in fact go wrong in the story, but it could be as zany as a writer wanted, rather than something dire and life-threatening.

Prompt 5 - "An individual is somehow transported back in time and because some tropes are too wonderful to avoid, they inadvertently kill their grandfather. In a direct contradiction of everything everyone has ever been told, however, they do not cease to exist."

While this is a wonderful prompt for fanfic, I did see writers that year make the mistake of only focusing on the time travel aspect, or if they did include their parent/grandparent/etc. they never killed them off and instead made it a story about getting their parents or grandparents together. Thus there was never any focus on the last part, them not ceasing to exist.

Prompt 13 - "You have suddenly gained the ability to dream about the future. Whatever you see in your sleep the previous night happens the very next day. At first, you dream only about mundane topics like you going about your daily life. But then, a dream comes in which you are held at gunpoint by an unidentified person just before midnight."

Now, despite loving this prompt, I never saw anything from this because making the prompt work for a good 20-40k rather than a one-shot isn't easy. However, in saying this, this could be taken as a prompt that a writer starts off with showcasing the characters power, then move onto a scenario like or similar to the one mentioned and then moving forward with a chaotic adventure where they keep dreaming about what will happen on said chaotic adventure along with their attempts to avoid the situation.

Prompt 18 - "To save their beloved, an anti-hero becomes the stealer of souls of the rich and corrupt -- a kind of Robin Hood of life energy. Through desperate and forlorn, the anti-hero's beloved recovers their soul from sickness, but with the burden of the stolen souls' corrupt wickedness."

So, the reason for bringing this prompt up is I actually used this prompt, adjusted a few things, and ended up Longlisting for that year, but the main change I made to the prompt was that my anti-hero wasn't actually stealing the souls of the rich and corrupt. Still, instead, those he thought to be rich and corrupt because he'd effectively gone mad when his beloved is killed, which in turn resulted in a second change, that the beloved is actually corrupted by the fact corrupted souls were used.