The Inkwell Combined Writing Prompt #11 ~ Fiction or Creative Nonfiction

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Welcome to the Weekly Writing Prompt from The Ink Well

IMPORTANT: We are now providing one weekly writing prompt. See the announcement in our October 2025 Newsletter for details. 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).

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, "Crisis averted"!

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

And we have a winner! No... wait. We have two! This doesn't happen often, but last week two contributors received top marks from The Ink Well curators. So we are giving out two prizes. Congrats to @rinconpoetico7 for his story, Planetary Crisis, and to @treasuree for her story From Fire to Laughter.

Here's what our curator had to say about @rinconpoetico7's story:

@rinconpoetico7 turns in a nail-biter. I almost held my breath as the earth moved toward destruction. Only a last minute translation of ancient texts saved the planet. A trigger-happy general was going to attack a space ship. The scholars stopped him and the story ends with a peaceful message from the alien visitors.

Here's what our curator had to say about @treasuree's story:

@treasuree delights us with a wonderfully authentic creative nonfiction story set inside a Lagos compound where all hell breaks loose one morning when a burning pot gets out of hand. It was such an enjoyable and lively read — I chuckled all the way through it! The characters and dialogue situate us right in the midst of the chaos. The sense of community comes through beautifully, and the storytelling feels wonderfully authentic.

Congratulations, @rinconpoetico7 and @treasuree!

Short Story Writing Prompt of the Week

This week's prompt is: "Silence." There are many ways to interpret and work with this prompt, whether you're writing a fictional story or a creative nonfiction story.

• Why is there silence on the other end of the telephone line? Is the caller there? Are they playing a prank? Has something happened to them? Are they calling with a silent threat?
• "Silence is golden," one parent might say to another, once the children have finally gone to bed and the house is peaceful. (Or is it? Perhaps just then a cry is heard, or a child's plea for a glass of water.) Or one might use the expression "silence is golden" to gently tell another person that they are talking too much, and this could indicate tension in the relationship.
• Silence is rare, and when it comes, sometimes it is so unexpected that it is startling. Why have the birds gone silent? (Is a storm coming?) Why has an entire city gone silent? (Has there been some tragedy in the night? Alien invasion??)

Here are a few fiction ideas from ChatGPT:

1. The Contractual Silence: A woman discovers that her lucrative new job requires a legally binding vow of silence about one specific event in her past — an event she’s never told anyone about anyway. The twist comes when she realizes the company somehow knows details she’s never spoken aloud, forcing her to confront whether silence can still be a choice if it’s being enforced.
2. Silence Between Notes: A struggling composer becomes obsessed with the idea that the most powerful part of music isn’t sound but the pause between notes. As they begin removing more and more sound from their compositions, audiences report profound emotional reactions — and disturbing shared memories — suggesting the silences are speaking directly to something buried in the human mind.
3. Unanswered Voicemail: A woman keeps an old voicemail from her mother that contains only ten seconds of silence. After her mother’s death, she plays it obsessively, convinced she hears meaning in the quiet. The story reveals that the silence was intentional — her mother knew exactly what would be communicated by saying nothing at all.

And here are a few ChatGPT ideas for creative nonfiction stories:

1. What We Never Talked About at the Table: A reflection on family dinners where conversation flowed freely around safe topics, while one subject — addiction, money, a lost sibling, or an affair — was never mentioned. The story examines how silence can function as a shared language, teaching everyone what not to ask long before they understand why.
2. Learning to Be Quiet: A memoir-style piece about being told, repeatedly and in different ways, to be quiet: in classrooms, churches, workplaces, or relationships. The essay traces how enforced silence shaped the narrator’s identity, and how choosing silence later in life became a different, reclaimed act.
3. The Text I Never Sent: A personal narrative built around an unsent message — typed and deleted repeatedly. The essay explores how silence can be a form of communication, protection, or regret, and how not speaking sometimes changes relationships just as profoundly as speaking does.

We hope these 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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