Writing Prompt Reviews Part 3

Here we go again with another round of Writing Prompt Reviews! If you found any of the prompts from last time to be insightful, let me know in the comments. Feel free to explore any of the prompts with your own opinions, observations, or even some creative text!

I want to also call your attention to a new section on the side bar of the website called “Special Content” – the Writing Prompt Reviews will be catalogued here, along with a new feature coming very soon called “Friday Science Highlights.” Keep your eye out for it.

This month’s prompts come from blogger Mandy Wallace who has an excellent list of 58 Science Fiction Writing Prompts to choose from. These topics are so varied, however, that you shouldn’t feel limited to Science Fiction. I can easily see how many of these could be interpreted as Fantasy as well. The beautiful part of writing prompts is that you don’t have to feel chained to the original intention of the prompt. You can be inspired in any direction you choose to take it.

#1. “After eons and light years of travel, I’ve learned only one thing of any consequence: there’s nowhere far enough that her memory doesn’t follow.”

I love quotation prompts – they can generally belong to anyone in any situation if they are constructed to be open enough for wide interpretation. The only thing this quote tells us for certain is that the character has been travelling for a very long time (But at what speed? Does relativity come into play here? How much time has passed from the character’s perspective?) and that the character has interacted in the past with another character, female, who seems to be haunting them somehow.

The way this prompt is phrased makes me immediately think of the character as not quite human. Picture an android, or a computer-based being perhaps, that has felt the pain of human love and endured the loss. But, being effectively immortal, it must continue on indefinitely with the pain of remembrance, storing every visual, every sound clip for all eternity, no matter how far it attempts to get away from the point of origin.

Or perhaps this prompt could be used to spur a story of the age-old space travel problem. The character has been world-jumping, travelling at such high speeds that the generations of those on stable Earth have passed them long by, and though the woman they remember has for centuries been lost to the memory of their home world, the traveler cannot manage to let her slip into the obscurity of time as well.

It’s a beautiful prompt full of enough mystery and feeling that it makes me want to ask, and answer, all sorts of questions.

#2. Gold-fingered gods arrive in chariot-emblazoned space crafts claiming to be the Roman Pantheon back from vacation.

Comedy gold here, ala-Good Omens. This idea screams farcical humor and you could twist it to fit in multiple genres. They don’t even have to be Romans – what about ancient Egyptian deities coming back for a stroll through the modern day Middle East? People already say aliens built the pyramids anyway, so that’s a funny piece you could play off of.

It would be amusing to see what these “gods” opinions on human improvement would be. You’re not still using the aqueducts we built you? How primitive. We leave for the odd millennia and you revert right back to your barbaric ways. And what’s this? You haven’t even made it to Mars yet? We were all wondering why you didn’t answer Ares’ dinner party invitation. He was most put out – even threw a few asteroids your way. Missed of course, but you know how he gets when he drinks.

#3. A man decides to climb Mars’s Olympus Mons. He’ll finish in three years, just in time for his wife to emerge from cryogenic freezing.

Being a great lover of backpacking and as a result having an avid interest in mountaineering stories, this prompt caught my adventurous spirit and immediately made me wonder if there really are mountains on Mars large enough that they would take three years to climb. The research required to pull this story off is promising, but unfortunately the prompt as written is so narrow that it would be difficult to construct two stories that varied from each other enough to be considered original. However, the things you could discover looking up facts about Mars’ mountains could spawn all kinds of other rabbit trails for you to follow. Science-fiction tourism is not a new idea, and I can think of a few topics off the top of my head that have all been covered several times, each one unique and exciting in its own right. The setting is important, but not as important as the problem that you introduce for the characters to deal with.

For this prompt specifically, I’m interested to know why the man’s wife is cryogenically frozen in the first place. And why for three years exactly?

Additionally, mountain climbing is incredibly dangerous as it is on Earth. Throwing in the fact that Mars’ atmosphere is thin and full of solar radiation, not to mention the surface temperatures are vastly different that far from the sun, it becomes clear that mountain climbing on Mars of even the mildest difficulty would be an extremely hazardous undertaking. So tackling a three-year climb sounds almost suicidal. What was the deciding factor for this man to do so? And is he going alone?

I would probably choose the basic premise of this prompt as my beginning if I were going to use it and come up with my own outlying factors. It’s very interesting in that it poses a lot of problems that need to be answered. All of which could be covered through a narrative train of thought while the man performs his task. From personal experience, I can tell you that you have a lot of time to think when you’re slogging up the side of a mountain (when you’re not busy chanting “left foot…huff puff…right foot…huff puff…”).