September 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the September installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“Undressing the Vanity Dolls,” in Fado and Other Stories, by Katherine Vaz (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)

It is pure delight finding just the right excerpt in a book that presents an intriguing situation that opens out to several possibilities. I was very happy this morning to find these two lines in Vaz’s stellar book of stories.

Reginald went on a treasure hunt that took over an hour. He returned and on the floor near the bed, set a paper bag filled with what he had found.

I usually don’t provide context for these prompts, but in this case, I need to make an exception. It’s important to know that Reginald is on a “treasure hunt” for something to give to someone who is on their death bed. That the person is close to death automatically gives this object a deeper meaning. Here, the word “treasure” is subjective; it could be, in other circumstances, a flimsy, absurd object.

Your prompt is to decide what that object is—the less we would associate it with the word “treasure” the better—and write a scene between the two characters when he opens that paper bag. (Obviously, this can be any two characters!)

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

Here are the details:

Sunday, September 27, 2026
1–5pm (ET)
Online
$80

In this highly generative writing workshop, you’ll write flash fiction using found forms (aka the hermit crab, because you’re “borrowing” a familiar form). The environment will be playful, experimental, encouraging, and most of all, productive. We will borrow from three different forms and everyone will receive feedback on their work—from each other and from me.

Here is my story “Homework,” which borrows the form of a multiple choice quiz.

Details for how to sign up can be found here: https://www.cherylpappas.net/events

I hope you’ll join us!

Cheryl

August 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the August installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“Advice to the Little Peyton Girl,” in Complete Stories, by Dorothy Parker (New York: Penguin Books, 1995)

I’m always up for a Dorothy Parker story. This is a temporary bookshelf resident, because I just took it out of the library the other day. This excerpt shows something I don’t believe I’ve seen done in fiction before, at least from Parker’s era:

“May I speak to Mr. Lawrence, please?” she said, after some seconds. “Oh, he isn’t? Oh. Is this his secretary speaking? Could you tell me when he will be in, please? Oh, I see. Well, if he does come in, will you ask him please to call Miss Marion? No, Marion. No, that’s all—that’s the last name. Yes, he knows the number. Thank you so much.”

Miss Marion replaced the receiver and sat looking at the telephone as if it offended her sight. She spoke aloud, and neither the tone nor the words seemed hers.

“Damn that woman,” she said. “She knows damned well what my name is. Just because she hates me—”

I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a one-sided telephone conversation before in a book. I can well imagine it in a film, for sure. In fact, the whole scene fills my head. She’s possibly wearing an elaborate nightgown, and maybe there’s an ignored cigarette on an ashtray nearby. Her hair is a mess, her nails are shiny and sharp, and her eyes are wild. So much can be gathered from her urgent yet polite tone and from the fact that the secretary has trouble (intentionally or not) with her name. The woman is desperate for this man’s attention. And bitterness punctuates that desperation in the last line.

Now it’s your turn. Write a flash in which a character is on a train, bus, or plane and hears a one-sided conversation that your real-life ears would be pinned to in the same situation, as an unabashed eavesdropper. The topic can be a jilted lover or something else entirely. Maybe it’s absurd, involving a shipment of deer to an island or a trap being planned. Let us infer who the character is by their reactions in the conversation. Are they in control? Are they a little desperate? Are they making faces that don’t match their speech? Show just enough for the reader to figure out the situation, as Parker has done.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

July 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the July installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys (New York: Popular Library, 1966)

I have always wanted to read this book, and now that I’ve begun, I’m eating it fast. My 1966 copy is the first edition printed in the United States; it is worn and battered, and its pages are sandy brown. I jumped ahead and opened to a page with this wonderful passage:

All wish to sleep had left me. I walked up and down the room and felt the blood tingle in my finger-tips. It ran up my arms and reached my heart, which began to beat very fast. I spoke aloud as I walked. I spoke the letter I meant to write.

Oh, I love how the body is called up in these words! The words “tingle” and “finger-tips” together make a great sound, and as I read, I immediately feel that and visualize the fingertips. Inner and outer are conjured. And the energy moves to her heart, the emotional center, marking the transition. Then we get those two anaphoric phrases that emphasize where we are going: A dam is about to break in the form of a letter.

For this prompt, write that letter. Forget what you know about the novel. Just put a new character in this moment, pacing around the room, talking aloud, and let them write what they’ve been meaning to for so long, what they can’t hold in anymore.

Wishing you wild writing,

Cheryl

June 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the June installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Circular Ruins,” in Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Grove Press, 1962)

It’s June. It’s not even hot—not even warm—and yet I’m overcome by laziness. I looked at a few books for this month’s prompt and felt nothing. Then I picked up Borges, and suddenly language is alive again:

With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.

I luxuriate in all the commas in this short sentence. The first three in the anaphoric phrase (with///) serve as a slow buildup to the realization at the end, which is put off a beat more with the fourth comma after “illusion.” The wonderful concept of being dreamt by someone else is reserved for the very last beat. It’s a good reminder to leave your most significant idea until the end of your sentences (and your stories). We’re left there, dangling, ready to ponder what it means. What a gift.

You might play with sentence structure in the same way for this prompt, but I think it might be more inspiring to go with the concept given here instead: Write a story in which a person’s is a dream of another. Interpret this any way you wish, as long as it’s a character dreaming another character (who is not a writer, obviously).

Wishing you wild writing,

Cheryl

May 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the May installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald (New York: New Directions Press, 1995)

I opened The Rings of Saturn to this lovely setting captured in two sentences:

The rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I took my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town. Darkness was falling, and only the lighthouse with its shining glass cabin still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon.

In my copy, there is a black and white photograph of a lighthouse below this text, but the image is superfluous: this is painted so clearly. The first thing to notice is the scale: Where do the eyes go? From the rain clouds in the wide sky to the narrator’s body walking along streets and lanes, back to the sky for its near darkness (maybe we add a few leftover strands of clouds in there) to a tall lighthouse and then immediately to the fine point of the glass at the top of the lighthouse, which reflects the “last luminous rays” from the western horizon, which takes us from the glass back to the open sky.

Most readers won’t notice that their “eyes” are doing so much work, of course. But this variation in scale (near and far) is helping them stay engaged. Note, too, how the darkness is played against the light in the glass of the lighthouse. So there’s not only a variation in vision; there are contrasts, as well.

Now it’s your turn to paint a scene: Write a flash that begins with a person walking or waiting or doing anything boring; enliven it by moving the camera in their surroundings from large to small, near to far. Don’t worry about what the story is about yet. Just animate the scene with visuals while this person is doing something. Try to end by focusing on the same place you started (as Sebald does, with the sky).

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

April 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the April installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Child of Death,” in Fearless Girls, Wise Women & Beloved Sisters: Heroines from Folktales around the World, ed. Kathleen Ragan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998)

I grabbed this collection of tales from my son’s bookcase, where it was collecting dust. I think it will go back to mine now. I opened up to a folktale from Vietnam, which begins:

Just a month before she was to have become a mother, a young peasant woman was carried away by a sudden illness to the Land of the Dead.

I like how time is working in this line: It could have read “Eight months pregnant, a young peasant woman was carried away by a sudden illness to the Land of the Dead.” But no, we are in a present moment imagining a future one that, we learn, will never occur. It’s a lot to do in one sentence, especially the opening one. How wonderful, too, that we’re reminded about who she was “about” to become: a mother. Somehow that word connects better to new life than “pregnant.” It heightens the contrast to the “Land of the Dead.”

Now your turn. Write an opening line for a flash with a similar construction: “Just a [span of time] before [she/he/it] was to become a [noun], a[character] was [verb] by a [noun ] to [place ].”

This is wide open. It does not have to be a folktale. Go in any direction you like.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

March 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the March installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“Of Course,” in The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (New York: Noonday Press, 1999)

I took this book off the shelves the other day to re-read Jackson’s “The Lottery,” so it’s doing double duty as my From the Bookshelf pick this month. Here is the wonderful excerpt, from the beginning her story “Of Course.”

Mrs. Tylor, in the middle of a busy morning, was far too polite to go out on the front porch and stare, but she saw no reason for avoiding the windows; when her vacuuming or her dishwashing, or even the upstairs bedmaking, took her near a window on the south side of the house she would lift the curtain slightly, or edge to one side and stir the shade. All she could see, actually, was the moving van in front of the house, and various small activities going on between the movers; the furniture, what she could see of it, looked fine.

Look at how the word “fine” is doing double work here, meaning both high quality and acceptable (to Mrs. Tylor). This beginning sets up the unspoken neighbor approval process that happens throughout the story.

I want to mention, too, that the lengthy sentences and semicolons mimic the hurried movements of Mrs. Tylor, who moves from one spot to the next as she spies through the window. The last phrase is the shortest phrase and serves as punctuation for the end of the paragraph. It is also the only one that includes an appraisal, giving its meaning more weight.

Write a 500-word flash that begins with a character watching a new neighbor move in across the street. What is their reaction? How do their movements reflect that? Are they furtive or do they run downstairs and greet them? Build up to that first interaction and see what transpires after that.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

February 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the February installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Nose,” by Nikolai Gogol, trans. Mary Struve, in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders (New York: Random House, 2021)

It is February, and the light changes this month in New England. Every day, a little more light will stay, which is much needed.

Today, I picked up George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: an analysis of stories by four great Russian writers: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. In its own way, it is a writing manual. He kindly includes the original stories in the book. This month’s excerpt is from Gogol’s “The Nose”:

On March 25th there took place, in Petersburg, an extraordinarily strange occurrence . . . [goes on for two more paragraphs]

For the sake of propriety Ivan Yakovlevich put a tailcoat on over his shirt and, sitting down at the table, poured out some salt, got two onions ready, picked up a knife and, assuming a meaningful expression, began to slide the bread. Having cut the loaf in two halves, he looked inside and to his astonishment saw something white. Ivan Yakovlevich poked it carefully with the knife and felt it with his finger. “Solid!” he said to himself. “What could it be?”

(It is a nose!) What patient writing this is; a flash-length story might just have him discover the nose in his bread right away, but this scene lingers. The slowness of the telling makes it funner. In three paragraphs, we still don’t know what the object is. The meticulous detailing of Ivan’s morning routine sets us up for the inanity of him finding the strange object in his bread. The humor is baked in (sorry), with the tailcoat hastily shoved on “for propriety”—a ridiculous gesture—and his astonished and not disgusted response to the object (“Solid!”). He’s innocent, in a way, which makes us think he’s not very smart, which is funny.

I’d like you to write a 500- to 1,000-word flash that takes its time showing a character in their daily routine who is as ridiculous as Ivan, and then have them stumble upon something fantastic and strange. How do they respond? If you’ve done the work setting up their character, their response should come naturally. Is someone they know with them when they make the discovery or are they on a busy city street full of strangers? Showing them taking their time is going to be the hardest challenge here in flash, so you really have to rely on compelling characterization to keep the reader interested.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

January 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the January installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“Souvenir,” by Jayne Anne Phillips, in Black Tickets (New York: Vintage Books, 2001)

Here we are, in a new world of a new year, when many of us want to let old habits die and usher in something new. In the spirit of breaking a familiar pattern, I offer this excerpt of a Jayne Anne Phillips story:

Kate always sent her mother a card on Valentine’s Day. She timed the mails from wherever she was so that the cards arrived on February 14th. Her parents had celebrated the day in some small fashion, and since her father’s death six years before, Kate made a gesture of compensatory remembrance. At first, she made the cards herself: collage and pressed grasses on construction paper sewn in fabric. Now she settled for art reproductions, glossy cards with blank insides. Kate wrote in them with colored inks, “You have always been my Valentine,” or simply “Hey, take care of yourself.” She might enclose a present as well, something small enough to fit into an envelope; a sachet, a perfumed soap, a funny tintype of a prune-faced man in a bowler hat.

This time, she forgot.

That last line is all we need to set the action of the story in motion. We have moved from how things went generally to how it went this year. We know we’re on the precipice of finding out what has changed in the relationship between the daughter and mother to make the daughter stop sending the cards. We might assume lots of things here: maybe the daughter is upset with the mother. Maybe she just wants to get on with her own busy life. Maybe she thinks her mother should get over her father’s death. Maybe the daughter hated him and was sick of pretending her parents’ relationship was a loving one.

It’s a rather simple structure that yields so much. Let’s try something similar.

In just a few opening sentences, track that progression from someone “always” performing some behavior or ritual to them stopping it. Set up the reader so that they need to keep reading to figure out why. It makes sense to make the person be doing something for another person, so we question the changing dynamics of the relationship.

Now, flip it around and have the character never doing an activity and show when they start to do it without an explanation. What happens to our expectations when the progression moves in the opposite direction?

Have fun with this one, and Happy New Year!

Cheryl

December 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the December installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Autumn Night Is Long,” by Zhang Yuniang, in The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China, ed. Wilt Idema and Beata Grant (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004)

The poem below appears in a book over 900 pages long. It’s a wonderfully rich and thorough examination of Chinese women writers who lived from about 221 BCE to 1911. The huge timespan explains the book’s length.

Poet Zhang Yuniang (1250–1277) offers today’s inspiration:

The Autumn Night Is Long

The autumn wind makes for a chilly night,
The chilly wind prolongs the autumn night.
But I so love to watch that harvest moon—
Let the clear dew soak my skirt and gown!

Flash writers borrow from poets all the time, and this 13th-century poet can help us craft a three- or four-sentence story. Notice how the pairing of autumn/chilly and wind/night in the first line are repeated and transposed in the second line (autumn wind/chilly night to chilly wind/autumn night). The pairing is closed by a period. Then, as if the speaker can’t help herself, she breaks the closed pattern with “But I so love to watch that harvest moon—.” It’s as if she’s saying, never mind all that, look at that moon. A bit of passion comes through, and we have a turn. In the last line, exuberance has fully won over: “Let the clear dew soak my skirt and gown!” That exclamation point matches the energy of the line, which is full of sensuality. “Chilly night” doesn’t make you feel much at all. But you can feel the dew soaking clothes through.

So now it’s your turn. Write a three- or four-sentence story in which you use two adjectives and nouns in the first sentence and repeat and transpose them in the second, just as Zhang has done here. You might take nature as a subject, but you can write about anything you want. Just try to keep it minimalist and staid in the first two sentences. Then, in the third sentence, bring about the turn with an interjection, such as “But.” You might end the phrase in an em-dash. In the last sentence or phrase, let all the senses come in. Pay attention to how you use punctuation throughout. What is the energy of a comma, an em-dash, a period, an exclamation point?

One thing you’ll do that Zhang doesn’t is create a narrative. Her poem is full of longing. How can you make something happen that encompasses a sense of longing? Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you want to write a four-sentence prose poem. Just follow wherever you’d like to go. And there’s no reason to write just one! You could write five in a day!

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

November 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the November installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“leave,” The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language: Encyclopedic Edition (New York: Lexicon Publications, 1987)

I had trouble finding the right book this morning. After walking around my bookshelves, tracing my finger along spines of potentials, it finally stood out to me: my 1987 copy of the New Lexicon dictionary. It is so large (over 1,149 pages) that I have to place it on its side, because the shelf isn’t tall enough. Here is an image of the book, because you need to see it to believe it.

My father had it for years and gave it to me for college. The book doesn’t appear to be still in print, and it feels more of a cherished relic than before. It’s probably 5 pounds. I always saw it as a treasure box when I was younger; I would open it up to a random page and just start reading an entry. Not one pixel involved. (There is an essay that’s already likely been written about how writers may find themselves staunchly turning away from the digital to reclaim reading only printed books like this, to appreciate how much we had without realizing it.)

And I found my word today, one with a deliciously long entry, which I’m excerpting here:

leave, 1. v. pres. part. leav•ing past and past part. left (left) v.t. to depart, go away || to cease to reside in a certain place, attend school, serve an employer etc. || v.t. to allow to remain by oversight, he left his hat on the train || to deposit before going off, to leave a tip || to cause to remain as a consequence, sign etc., the wound left a scar || to be survived by, he leaves a wife and three children || to produce as a remainder, 4 from 6 leaves 2 || to let remain, his interpretation leaves room for argument || to bequeath, he left her all his money || to omit to eat, don’t leave any of your dinner || to put off dealing with, he’ll leave the letters till tomorrow.

There are several more meanings of this word listed, but this is enough to get you started. Those italicized sentences are just itching to form a story. I hope you can already see it! The man tips the waiter on the train going to London (or the café car attendant on an Amtrak going to Boston, etc.), leaves his Yankees baseball cap on the train, which his late father had given him when he graduated high school . . .

You see what I’m getting at. You can either create a hermit crab flash using this dictionary entry form and create a narrative with these wonderfully tiny sentences (using a variant of these or making up your own) or just take these sentences out of the entry form altogether and tell a story using multiple forms of “leave.” Again, you can use your own or make slight changes to what is already here. I prefer to mostly use what’s given, because the more restrictions there are, the more free you are to play. If you keep it in entry form, what might you do with the definitions? I wonder, too, if you might mix up the order of events in the story, so it’s not strictly chronological. And, of course, you could choose another word. There’s just so much to work with here.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

November 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the November installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“leave,” The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language: Encyclopedic Edition (New York: Lexicon Publications, 1987)

I had trouble finding the right book this morning. After walking around my bookshelves, tracing my finger along spines of potentials, it finally stood out to me: my 1987 copy of the New Lexicon dictionary. It is so large (over 1,149 pages) that I have to place it on its side, because the shelf isn’t tall enough. Here is an image of the book, because you need to see it to believe it.

My father had it for years and gave it to me for college. The book doesn’t appear to be still in print, and it feels more of a cherished relic than before. It’s probably 5 pounds. I always saw it as a treasure box when I was younger; I would open it up to a random page and just start reading an entry. Not one pixel involved. (There is an essay that’s already likely been written about how writers may find themselves staunchly turning away from the digital to reclaim reading only printed books like this, to appreciate how much we had without realizing it.)

And I found my word today, one with a deliciously long entry, which I’m excerpting here:

leave, 1. v. pres. part. leav•ing past and past part. left (left) v.t. to depart, go away || to cease to reside in a certain place, attend school, serve an employer etc. || v.t. to allow to remain by oversight, he left his hat on the train || to deposit before going off, to leave a tip || to cause to remain as a consequence, sign etc., the wound left a scar || to be survived by, he leaves a wife and three children || to produce as a remainder, 4 from 6 leaves 2 || to let remain, his interpretation leaves room for argument || to bequeath, he left her all his money || to omit to eat, don’t leave any of your dinner || to put off dealing with, he’ll leave the letters till tomorrow.

There are several more meanings of this word listed, but this is enough to get you started. Those italicized sentences are just itching to form a story. I hope you can already see it! The man tips the waiter on the train going to London (or the café car attendant on an Amtrak going to Boston, etc.), leaves his Yankees baseball cap on the train, which his late father had given him when he graduated high school . . .

You see what I’m getting at. You can either create a hermit crab flash using this dictionary entry form and create a narrative with these wonderfully tiny sentences (using a variant of these or making up your own) or just take these sentences out of the entry form altogether and tell a story using multiple forms of “leave.” Again, you can use your own or make slight changes to what is already here. I prefer to mostly use what’s given, because the more restrictions there are, the more free you are to play. If you keep it in entry form, what might you do with the definitions? I wonder, too, if you might mix up the order of events in the story, so it’s not strictly chronological. And, of course, you could choose another word. There’s just so much to work with here.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

October 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the October installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Bridge,” by Russell Edson, in Micro Fiction, ed. Jerome Stern (New York: Norton, 1996)

Every so often, I’ll rifle through a book of stories and read the first lines to see how they grab me. What makes me turn the page? What keeps me tuned in? If the sentence is too long and general, I move on. If it’s long and the language is there—if there’s music—I’ll probably stay. But if it’s short and suggestive of a kind of dream? I’m very much in. And that’s why I’ve included this first line from Edson’s micro “The Bridge.”

In his travels he comes to a bridge made entirely of bones.

I’m interested right away in how the familiar phrase “In his travels” leads to something wild that may or may not be true. Usually “In his travels” is followed by phrases like “he came across several scenic waterfalls” or “he encountered snobbery toward Americans.” But no, it’s a bridge made of bones. We don’t know what kind of bones—horse bones? Human bones? And if human bones, is this a dream? It’s really important to leave that open so curiosity is piqued at its highest level. And beyond those questions is the more subtle one: Will he cross it? When you “come to” something, there’s a suggestion that you’re stopping to look at it. You’re pausing before this bridge. What a first line wants is a question that you need the answer to.

All this from one line.

Now it’s your turn. Write a first line that begins with a familiar setting or situation but ends with something strange that may or may not be true. (Another famous first line, by Franz Kafka, does this same thing, of course! “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”) Begin with the familiar and end with something absurd.

Then keep writing to see where it leads. The more curious you are, the more curious your reader will be!

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl

September 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the September installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
Mr. Palomar, by Italo Calvino, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1985)

I just purchased this wonderful book, and it hasn’t even made it to my bookshelf. I’m fudging the rules a bit, but I couldn’t resist. It’s new and I’ve been waiting to read this. I am deep in novel revisions, and Calvino is one of my inspirations.

And so here I present a passage from a page opened at random:

This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr. Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. “It is only after you come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.”

Indeed. This is an appropriate time to pay attention to the surface of things, with the goal of understanding what’s underneath, isn’t it? You can get stuck, however, in the noticing, as Mr. Palomar implies.

The excerpt reminds me of a talk I recently heard by the wonderful Aimee Bender, in which she suggests writers spend time defamiliarizing objects in their environment.

Let’s do it, then. Let’s get stuck in the noticing. The more you pay attention, the more you pay attention. It’s a muscle that can grow stronger, and it’s the writer’s most essential tool in their toolbox. By looking closely at one object for a sustained period, you are saying This is the only object in my life right now. You are saying This is the most important moment, this present moment of noticing. It’s ridiculous, but it clears the cobwebs.

Do not worry about how this will emerge in your next story. Trust that it will yield rewards.

The prompt: Find an object in your house, the more familiar the better. Your job is to see what you’ve stopped seeing. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write everything you notice about the object. Note its shape, its shadows, colors, lines, etc. If it’s a large object, walk around it. Absorb it completely (even if whoever living with you thinks you’re acting strange.) Do not write anything about the object’s meaning or purpose. Imagine you’re writing a very elaborate alt text. The point is to defamiliarize the object so you can see it fresh.

If you’d like, tomorrow do the same thing with the same object. What is uncovered in the second 10-minute session? How has the light changed? How has your perception changed?

Have fun with this one, and happy noticing,

Cheryl

It’s such a dark painting. The fading sunlight is not foregrounded, as it might be in other paintings. The focus is on the depth and enormity of the forest, which is ever so softly illuminated. The surprise of finding two people walking in there always moves me, because it’s the last element to register. It’s deeply comforting to me to view a world in which humans are not centered.

I just came back from visiting Acadia National Park for the first time, and on our last day, I watched the boys look for crabs in tidal pools against the backdrop of a row of tall pines perched on raised land covered in boulders. I realized that what is so appealing and calming about spending time in “nature” is that I am witnessing deep geological time. So rarely are people able to do that. So rarely are we able to grasp the minuteness of our lives so instantly.

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And that experience is what draws me to Rousseau’s painting.

It is my favorite painting at the Met. Whenever I go, I pay it a visit. If you haven’t seen it in person, it’s hard to express how enormous it is. It’s immersive, and if you’re the least bit sensitive, you might start hearing twitches of leaves falling to the ground, the sound of low voices, a bird or two. Rousseau worked on it through most of his life, and he never finished it. Why not? I don’t know why, but I like that about it. I like that he was obsessed with it. Did the tone start out lighter and keep getting darker? Did he add in the figures later, or were they always part of the plan?

I once tried to write a story about the two peasant women. There was some intrigue about a lover back at the homestead. I heard their voices clearly, but I never did finish the story. I might return to it. I might not.

What do you think of the painting? What story might you write about the two women?

August 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the August installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (New York: Norton, 2023)

A friend lent me this book last fall, and I have yet to read it or return it. I’m glad I pulled it down from the bookshelf, because I will now remember to give it back. I can be very forgetful of things like this, and I have to deliberately put aside books people lend me so I always know where they are.

Happy August. I’m about to go to Maine for a family vacation, and I cannot wait to be by the ocean again, to bike and hike with the kids, who will not be staring into their phones, and— quite important—to not do any dishes. But first, this month’s prompt.

Sophia Tolstoy stayed up late with a candle and a magnifying glass and the day’s pages of War and Peace.

She copied War and Peace seven times, I told my husband while he read online reviews of propane heaters.

That’s a lot, he said.

Phew. We are very familiar with this scenario. The woman does a lion’s share of the work while the man gets the credit. Whether in the context of writing a book or just the general domestic situation, we’ve read this a million times. And it’s still totally true. Regardless of how Sophia felt about her task, we have the situation. That the speaker here, the wife talking about Sophia, is saying this to her husband while he is distracted with something else immediately picks up on the same 1860s vibe. The wife is bringing this up for a reason. So we have a pattern within a pattern.

In the lines following this sequence, Bachelder and Habel open up and play with this trope, deepening it. But let’s begin with their beginning here, when our instinct tells us we’ve seen this play out before, when our assumptions pour in. Let’s change that.

Write a 300-word flash in which a character mentions a detail about a famous historical relationship to their husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend, or even a very good friend, that fits within a familiar trope and then proceed to turn it over on its side. The fun at first will be tracking down such a historical situation. Then set the scene. Maybe you will have a man bring it up at a museum, taking about the artist and his “muse,” maybe a woman will be talking to her friend over lunch about how someone in the long ago past left his wife for the maid, or maybe one person is obsessed with the biography of a historical figure and can’t get past one of their traits. Be very aware of what your reader will assume about the pattern being called up. Then, instead of using that situation to reflect exactly what the present relationship is (which is too easy), flip it. Show us how their relationship is not like the historical one. Let it be a wondrous surprise to feel that difference. Upend our expectations.

You can do anything you want with this. Have fun!

Cheryl

I’ve seen this image floating around the internet, but I’ve never really looked at it. I’m sure the colors are oversaturated in Photoshop, but no matter. Those orange trees living inside the house look so soft and cozy nestled in there. I’m in. I wonder about the half-moon window near the top of the house. Who once looked out there, if anyone? A child during a storm? A dog, waiting for his owners to come home? Or was it just an attic filled with once-loved books?

Imagine you are part of the family who grew up in this house. What would be the first thing you’d tell a stranger about what it was like living there? What happened there that you will never forget? Tell us about your mother, your father, your brothers, your sisters, your wanderings in the nearby woods. Tell us a fairy tale.

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the July installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
Family-Focused Behavioral Pediatrics, by William Lord Coleman (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 2001)

The author of this slim volume of guidance on pediatrics is Dr. Bill Coleman, a pediatrician from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and this book was my first ever freelance editing project. Bill was incredibly kind, funny, genuine, and generous, and I will never forget my time with him. But we are here for the writing prompt, so let me proceed.

Family life cycle changes, such as becoming a family with adolescents or with elderly grandparents, require adjustments that can be stressful . . . Many families cope well with these transitions unless additional changes are imposed upon the family life cycle (e.g., internal stressors, such as divorce or the formation of a stepfamily, or external stressors, such as the loss of a job or the move to a new city or state). Then the family’s coping ability may be overwhelmed.

Let’s write a hermit crab! This is a story in which you borrow a familiar text, such as a recipe or a doctor’s report (!) and make a story with it. The form here will be the doctor’s visit report, which is different from “visit notes,” which are what the family sees on an online portal for the doctor’s office. These will be notes the doctor writes that are for the doctor’s office only. Using as much formal language as possible, describe the particular situation of a family and what happens during the doctor’s visit. One thing I learned by editing this book, and what I remember decades later, is often a parent—after the medical issue has been addressed—will ask something offhand, just as their hand is on the doorknob (“the doorknob question,” Bill called it). This is what they really want to talk about, and it rarely has to do with a medical issue. In this excerpt, there is mention of one of the “family life cycle changes” that can be overwhelming. Pick a sudden change that affects the family. Usually a whole family is not allowed in the examination room, so you will be limited to one or two characters. Maybe a mother is with her 10-year-old son or a father with his 6-year-old son and toddler daughter. But of course, the family members who are absent can also be evoked in the scene. Here is a template for a doctor’s report. And here is a link to examples. Make sure to include the medical reason why the patient has come in, and describe how the “life cycle change” comes into play during the visit.

You can do anything you want. Have fun!

Cheryl

June 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the June installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
“My Love,” in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, trans. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (London: Penguin Books, 2009)

June is finally here. This last week, time seems to have slowed, because I am at a writing retreat by the sea. I’ve had oodles of time to write and read and stare out the window and hang out with a fabulous group of poets in the evenings and, basically, do as I please. I leave today, with lucky stars in my pocket. (I got good work done on the manuscript—hooray!) Without further ado, here is this month’s prompt:

Given time his dreams might have come true, and he might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere.

We’re going to do something a little different this month, and in fact, I’m going to be experimenting with different kinds of prompts for you in the months ahead. I thought it would be fun to play with sentence structure. The excerpt is the first sentence of Petrushevskaya’s story, “My Love.” I like the clauses in the sentence and how big the scope is. Let’s borrow the structure to create a new sentence that will be the first story of your flash. Here is the skeletal structure; you just need to fill it up with muscle, blood, and skin:

Given time [his/her] ______, and [he/she] ______, but ______ and it _______.

In the end, you might lose the first phrase “Given time” and find another. You might make the scope large, too, so the character is looking back on their life and considering their choices. Or you might shrink it down to something that happened the night before or moments before. Play with it, and see what happens. Pay close attention to sound, as always.

Take this wherever it leads, and have fun!

Cheryl