AUTHOR TOOLS | PROMPTS
These Authors Really Made Their Characters Squirm!
Fiction, prompt responses, and author secrets
Published in
4 min readDec 13, 2023
Our November prompts at ‘the Den’ were about making your characters squirm. They were some of our most popular ones yet:
And perhaps there is an author secret to why that’s the case. Fiction writers sometimes joke about how cruel they are to their characters. One of Kurt Vonnegut’s tips for writing short stories is:
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
The stories that responded to the prompts really demonstrated that with verve and creativity! Here are the responses to the prompts so far.
Idea 1
“You (or your protagonist) are lying in bed, trying to sleep when you hear a scratching noise from outside the window…”
