The Inkwell Combined Writing Prompt #16 ~ Fiction or Creative Nonfiction

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Welcome to the Weekly Writing Prompt from The Ink Well

We provide one weekly writing prompt for short story writers. You may choose to use the prompt to write a fictional story (made up from your imagination) or a creative nonfiction story (based on your real life experiences).

IMPORTANT: To be considered for curation, you must include one of these tags on your post:

• Fictional stories: #fiction
• Creative nonfiction stories: #creativenonfiction

It is also very helpful to the admin team when authors add Fiction or Creative Nonfiction (or CNF for short) to the story title!

Before You Post in The Ink Well

Be sure to check out our community rules before posting in this community. You can find them at the top of our home page. They also appear at the top of a new post window.

Please also check out these additional helpful resources:

• Learn more about our community and the expectations of community members in our FAQ post and our treasure trove of tips and guidelines.
• Peruse our collection of great writing resources on everything from character development to how to write dialogue in our catalog of storytelling tips.
• Learn more about creative nonfiction, how it differs from fictional stories, and tips for success in our post on creative nonfiction tips.
• Remember that we are always about quality first. Never about quantity. To achieve awards in The Ink Well, take the time to write quality stories and check them for errors. See the topic of the month, "Don't Miss This Step" in the March 2025 newsletter to learn about using tools (and using them properly) if you are not already doing this. We do notice when you don't take the time!

Last Week's Winning Story of the Week

Thank you to everyone who shared a story for the last prompt, "Heartfelt"!

Each week we pick one of our favorite stories of the week and award the author 5 Hive.

And we have a winner! Congrats to @almadepoeta for his story The Heartfelt Silence of a Typewriter.

Here's what our curator had to say:

@almadepoeta turns in a gem of a story. A young woman discovers a typewriter in the attic of the family home. There she learns of her deceased father's secret ambition. She finds pages, fragments of stories. Letters written and half written. Her father, a man of few words, found those words upstairs in the attic as he wrote on his Olivetti typewriter. This is a lovely story.

Congratulations, @almadepoeta!

Short Story Writing Prompt of the Week

This week's prompt is: "Fool."

"Fool" is a rather interesting word with multiple meanings. Back in medieval times, a "fool" was a professional jester who entertained royalty. So if you write a fictional story that takes place in a medieval castle, a fool could be one of your characters.

Today, the word is most commonly used to criticize someone for lack of intelligence or poor judgement. One young woman might say to another, "You're a fool if you fall for that man's romantic gestures. He's never going to settle down!"

There's also an expression, "pity the fool," which is something a person might say in reference to a nonsensical decision or unfortunate choice. In other words, it is not referring to anyone in particular. A person might say, "Pity the fool who bought that company stock right before the price dropped."

Here are some fictional story ideas generated by ChatGPT:

The Village Fool Knows the Way
Everyone in the mountain village treats the old man with the bells on his boots as harmless and dim. He babbles nonsense in the square, laughs at funerals, and gives away anything he’s handed. When a sudden flood traps the villagers between rising water and collapsing roads, they discover too late that the fool’s daily wanderings were careful rehearsals. His “nonsense” turns out to be a map, and his laughter a way of remembering where the ground is highest.

The Fool’s Bargain
A clever con artist agrees to pose as a fool in a royal court, pretending to misunderstand commands and mock power through jokes, all while secretly stealing information. But the longer he plays the fool, the more invisible he becomes — not just to the king, but to himself. When he’s finally offered freedom in exchange for revealing everything he knows, he must decide whether being seen as clever again is worth losing the strange, honest power that comes from being underestimated.

And here are some AI generated ideas for creative nonfiction short stories based on this prompt:

The Fool I Needed to Be
A reflective essay about a moment when you willingly looked foolish — asking an obvious question, admitting ignorance, trusting someone too easily — and how that vulnerability became the doorway to learning, growth, or connection. The story reframes “fool” not as embarrassment, but as a necessary role in becoming wiser.

Everyone Laughed, Except Me
A personal narrative centered on a public misstep such as an ill-timed joke, a failed performance, a misunderstood email, or a wardrobe malfunction that branded you as “the fool” in the eyes of others. The piece explores the long emotional afterlife of that moment, how shame distorts memory, and how time eventually turns humiliation into perspective, humor, or empathy.

We hope those ideas inspire you! Use this prompt as you wish in a fictional story or a creative nonfiction story. As always, you do not need to actually use the prompt word(s). They are here to inspire your creativity!

We look forward to reading the product of your imagination or your memories!

Good luck! And of course, you are welcome to use AI to generate ideas and images, but the writing must be your own! We do not accept stories that are AI-generated or heavily edited by AI. Only use tools like Grammarly to fix spelling and grammar issues.

Remember, as always, we are looking for the elements of story. These include:

• Great first lines
• Good settings
• Well-developed characters
• Integration of action, dialogue and narrative
• A conflict that intrigues the reader
• A "story arc" which results in the resolution of the conflict and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion
• And of course, we are looking for well-edited stories that are not littered with typos or grammatical errors — please use the free Grammarly tool for grammar and spelling checks (and not AI writing or rephrasing tools for revising)

You can find more on all of these topics in the catalog of storytelling tips.

If you don't feel inspired by this prompt or the featured image, feel free to peruse any of our past prompts or our collection of idea-generators:

• 50 Loglines
• 50 Story Ideas
• 50 Imagination Ticklers

Rules:

1. Accepted content: Remember that we only accept short stories (fiction or creative nonfiction). We do not accept advice columns, personal development articles, reviews, chapter stories, recipes, etc. We also do not accept posts about violent, gory, bloody, brutal, sexist or racist themes, NSFW (not safe for work) stories like erotica, stories with a political or religious agenda, or stories featuring abuse of any kind. (We have a complete article about The Ink Well stance on violence and brutality for more information.) And do NOT use AI tools to write or manipulate your stories. You must provide your own unique content.

2. Post link: Please be sure to publish your story in The Ink Well community, and post a link to your story in a comment on this post.

3. Hashtags: Use the #fiction tag for fictional stories and the #creativenonfiction tag for creative nonfiction stories. You can also use #writing, #inkwellprompt and #theinkwell.

4. Images: Please only use images from license free and creative commons sites, like Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels. You can also generate them with AI tools. Images you find on the Internet are copyright protected and cannot be used. Be sure to provide all image source links.

5. Length: We request that story word counts are a maximum of 1,500 words in length and ideally 750-1000 words. This is just a guideline. Longer stories are okay too, but they tend to get fewer readers. Additionally, The Ink Well admins appreciate keeping to that maximum story length for our time management. (Note: We generally consider stories less than 750 words "too short" and they tend to be missing important character development. See the "story length" topic of our September 2025 newsletter for resources on how to improve and further develop your stories.)

6. Translations: If you post a story that has been translated from another language, please include the English version first, followed by content in the original language.

7. Community support: When you post in The Ink Well, please be sure to visit the work of at least two other community members and comment on their work.

Past Prompts

After 241 straight weeks of fiction prompts (and nearly as many creative nonfiction prompts) we have started a fresh new series! If you'd like to see the full list of previous fiction prompts, you can find them at the bottom of fiction prompt #241.

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