The Inkwell Combined Writing Prompt #18 ~ 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, "The Things We Didn't Say"!

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 @neotopher for his story Internal Doubts.

Here's what our curator had to say:

@neotopher writes a most delightful story. A couple is about to marry. At the alter, we see inside the head of each as conflicting voices disguise the wisdom of going forward. Very clever and well done.

Congratulations, @neotopher!

Short Story Writing Prompt of the Week

This week's prompt is: "Vacancy."

The word "vacancy" probably calls to mind a hotel, for most people. A weary traveler looking for a place to sleep for a night cannot helped but be warmed by the site of a glowing "Vacancy" sign, right? Well, perhaps not if the hotel looks like the one in the picture above!

Yet there are other meanings for this word. One could feel a sense of loss at at the vacant seat on the bus when a friend or love interest has gotten off at their stop. A vacancy in one's love life could be the reason they finally take the step to use a dating app. Or maybe a person could see a vacancy notice on an apartment for rent and decide it is time to move out of their home and away from their loveless marriage.

Here are some fictional story ideas generated by ChatGPT:

The Vacancy Sign Never Turns Off
A lone motel on a forgotten highway keeps its VACANCY sign glowing long after the town has emptied. Travelers who stop there find that the rooms adapt themselves to whatever loss the guest carries—and not everyone leaves with the same number of memories they arrived with.

Position Still Open
In a near-future city, a job posting remains unfilled for years, drawing in applicants who don’t realize the vacancy exists to absorb their ambitions, regrets, and discarded versions of themselves. The final candidate begins to suspect the job was never meant to be filled at all.

The House with One Empty Room
A family moves into a house that contains a locked room labeled only “vacant.” Each member imagines a different purpose for it, but when the door is finally opened, the room reflects the life that might have been—had one small decision gone differently.

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

Vacancy: Room 214
A reflective essay about staying alone in a nearly empty hotel during a transitional moment—after a divorce, a job loss, or a long illness. The physical vacancy of the building mirrors the emotional hollowing out of the narrator, and the quiet becomes a space for reckoning and slow repair.

The Chair No One Took
A personal piece centered on an unfilled seat at a family table after a death or estrangement. The story examines how absence becomes a presence of its own, shaping rituals, conversations, and the way grief quietly rearranges a household.

When the Calendar Went Blank
An essay about an unexpected stretch of unscheduled time—unemployment, a canceled season, or early retirement—and how the sudden vacancy of obligation forces the writer to confront identity, worth, and what remains when productivity disappears.

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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