CHALLENGES - 2019

Welcome to Challenges 2019! 

Let WEP brighten your life and your writing!

Join us for these exceptional prompts especially developed by the combined team of WEP/IWSG to expand your creativity!

Who knows? Like many others have experienced, participation in a WEP?IWSG challenge may lead you to expand your flash/idea into a novel or novella.

Join with us in thanking Olga Godim, a WEP team member, for her exceptional badges created in consultation with the rest of the team. Aren't they wonderful?

If you intend being a WEP participant, please feel free to copy the year badge and paste it on your blog with a link to WEP.

This year we have six exciting Challenge Prompts - two of them have been generated through a contest where the IWSG members have brainstormed the ideas themselves. Creative and superfun! 

Quick summing of the writing rules - any genre except erotica, 1000 words or less. Come in with your take in flash fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photo essay or artwork. The blurbs are here just to get your creative juices flowing, as an indication of the possibilities. Remember you can take any direction you like with the interpretation. Help yourself to an option here, or pick something else entirely and blaze your own trail. 

Let's get writing!

This prompt came up as a contest winner generated by the IWSG gang – we chose the winner from a whole bunch of creative ideas! Congratulations to long-time WEP participant, Toinette Thomas. 

Incorporate 28 days in your entry. It can be the time limit for a task or a challenge. The quantum of growth, a journey, a change, and/or healing that happens in 28 days. Come in with a werewolf entry. Or don’t. Tell us about some other moon phase-based folklore instead. Fashion an epistolary flash as a series of 28 diary entries or postcards. Mainstream, fantasy, romance, travel – all wide open. A lot of things can happen in 28 days!

An old locket with a faded photo inside...A string of pearls reminiscent of a special evening...A magic jewel box that comes up with just the right piece whenever the owner needs it...A jewel box out of reach of a regular working class person who passes it in a fancy shop window everyday...Maybe a ring associated with terrible political intrigues and heartbreak?...Or...maybe a missing jewel box after a murder...bought in some faraway place...

Just some of the ways you can weave this prompt, there are many, many others. As you can see, all genres are your oyster with this prompt - romance, adventure, fantasy, speculative, crime...What use will you find for the jewel box?

The cage can be real - a prison, a basement, a walled enclosure. It can be metaphorical - a bad marriage, an abysmal attitude, a mental block, a deal gone horribly wrong. 

A war veteran trying to cope with PTSD, reconnecting with a lifestyle that no longer fits. A schoolboy facing the misery of cyber bullying. A young woman in a cycle of poor body image. A creative stuck in a dead end job. Any situation that can entrap and make a character feel claustrophobic. 

How will your bird break free? or will s/he choose to stay?

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow....so begins the famous poem by William Carlos William -  the inspiration behind this prompt. Which can be taken in myriad directions. It can be purely a prop. A part of the setting in a garden? A construction site? A factory? What depends upon it? 

It can be used to carry away debris from a broken home. Or bricks for a new one. Maybe a skeleton, or a heist. Anything is possible. Will it turn out dependable or feckless? That's the question ... and you get to decide!

As you sow so shall you reap.  What will your character sow - dragon's teeth, elven bones, gouged eyes from tormented souls? Or will it be a more mundane series of actions with some awful unforeseen consequences, but without a whiff of a ghost anywhere? 

Write a ghost story, or write a mainstream one. Most of our members go with horror or speculative for October. But that's not written in stone. Nothing rigid about us - we are a culturally diverse mix and we welcome all interpretations. 

Footprints is the prompt we chose from the members of the IWSG admin who had a contest between themselves to come up with a challenge to catch our eye. Thanks Tyrean Martinson for this winning entry. 

Footprints in the sand...Footprints in the snow...and they don't have to be human - alien, monster, unknown creatures...all up for grabs. Footprints are metaphors for so many situations - we walk in someone else's footprints, we leave footprints in the sands of time, we minimise carbon footprints, or at least try to. 

Or you can forget the metaphors and interpret it straightforward - plain and simple footprints as a clue in a crime story...Write a Christmas story with Santa's footprints. Or don't, if you wish not to. No pressure. Our prompt, your interpretation, your way. 

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This will fill you with cheer as the 2019 WEP challenges are here. @DeniseCCovey @theIWSG http://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/p/challenges-2019.html

Help spread the word on the 2019 WEP challenges. @DeniseCCovey @theIWSG http://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/p/challenges-2019.html

Which of the six 2019 WEP challenges are you looking forward to the most? @DeniseCCovey @theIWSG http://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/p/challenges-2019.html

Have a favorite 2019 WEP challenge? @DeniseCCovey @theIWSG http://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/p/challenges-2019.html

Here’s our entire 2019 challenge list. Don’t miss out and join in on the fun. @DeniseCCovey @theIWSG http://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/p/challenges-2019.html