The Ink Well Prompt #102 - Plus Weekly Challenge and Prize Announcement

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Hello and welcome to the The Ink Well weekly fiction prompt and prize announcement! The Ink Well is a Hive blockchain-based social media community of creative writers. If you love to write short stories, we invite you to join us. Or peruse the work of our community members.

Note: We always launch our prompt posts with important information. So be sure to check it out first! Then we invite you to read on and see what we have in store for this week's prompt.

Special Reminder: In addition to the weekly fiction challenge we offer a monthly challenge. Check out January's Prompt Post. 10 Hive to the winner!

Important FAQs about The Ink Well!

What Is The Ink Well All About?
The Ink Well is a creative writing community. Here are answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about The Ink Well.

  • No novels, chapter stories or multi-part stories
  • No poems
  • No introduction posts
  • No memes

The Ink Well is all about creativity, quality, community, and engagement. As such, we ask the following:

  • Please take the time to get to know the community and read other writers' work. Everyone who posts in The Ink Well is expected to read and comment on at least two other stories for each piece you post.
  • See our catalog of fiction writing tips and make use of our resources. (Many of our writers are developing awesome skills, and you can too!)
  • Put effort into your posts. Review and edit your content for errors before publishing.

What are the community rules?

You can find our community rules at the top of The Ink Well community (right side of the page).

Please read the rules before posting in The Ink Well, as we outline the "do's and don'ts." If you can't find them, you can read them here.

Our community rules are designed to make our community a safe, welcoming, plagiarism-free space for self-publishing original short stories. We do not allow stories depicting violence, brutality, or abuse of women, children or animals. If you have questions, please read this article explaining our stance on violence.

What does it take to get rewards in The Ink Well??

We refer you to the above description of what The Ink Well is about. If you are not getting great rewards, it is likely for one of the following reasons:

  • Your story has many grammatical errors. (This is easily fixed with the tips in our post, Help for the Grammatically Challenged.)
  • Your story lacks some important elements of good fiction, such as character development, dialog, scene details or a story arc. (See our catalog of fiction writing tips for information on these important aspects of short stories.)
  • Your story lacks originality or does not follow our community rules.

Important tips!

  • Among the factors we look at is quality of engagement with others in the community
  • Please make sure your story is clearly inspired by the prompt.
  • Remember to link your story to the prompt post.

Weekly Challenge and Prize Announcement

Time for the prize announcement and new challenge!

Last week's prompt was Vision and the skill challenge was to write a great hook. This community really came through with surprising, amazing stories!

Many of our writers created original, memorable stories in response to the prompt. Our selections of this week's winners and honorable mentions reflect how well writers dealt with this prompt and skill challenge.

Update! We are excited to share that in addition to our first place winner, we are awarding a second and third place. We also will be selecting honorable mentions. For second and third place we are awarding Hive Basic Income (HBI). The third place winner receives 2 HBI and the second place winner receives 3 HBI.

Here are this week's honorable mentions, all of them writing in response to the prompt and skill challenge.

Honorable Mentions

For weeks, David laid in his bed, lost in a darkness he could not escape. He refused to pick up his guitar, convinced that without his sight, he could not create the music he loved. His family and friends tried to reassure him, telling him that he could still make music, but David's mind was set, nothing could convince him.

Winter is approaching, and as in previous years, Samuel prepares to stock the basement stores, so he can maintain his routine of winter menus without missing a single thing that is normally missing in the supermarkets in winter.

The creatures stopped when they heard her voice and one of them approached her. Ella stretched her hand to touch it when she heard a sharp knock on her door.
She turned to look who it was and it turned out to be her maid.

Silence took over the space as his majesty made his way to the sacred judgment seat made of burnt clay at one corner of the courtroom. He was mumbling words all to himself as he walked. Perhaps something bothers him, but no one could tell. In their silence, all the family members of the two gentlemen who had been at loggerheads over a piece of land looked bewildered at the appearance of King Abulu.

After about fifteen minutes of walking, they got to their hideout and began making plans to rescue their leader, Persius when the map started glowing in Elina's breast pocket. She brought it from the pocket and opened it.

Third Place: Wins 2 HBI

In college, he traveled Europe, learning about other cultures, new languages, different religions, and strange rituals. After graduating from law school, he worked as a lawyer in New York City. But even though he loved working with humans every day, he felt more alive when he explored worlds that didn't quite exist. So he quit his job and set out to see the world; all seven continents.

Second Place: Wins 3 HBI

Ethan agreed to the treatment, and to everyone's surprise, it worked. He could see again after years of being blind. He was overjoyed, but also overwhelmed by the new experiences and emotions that came with his newfound sight. He was amazed by the beauty of the world, and all the colors and details that he had never been able to see before.

And the winner of the Vision/Writing a Strong Hook challenge is...@gabrieladifazio, with the story The Vision of Being Completely Happy. Congratulations, @gabrieladifazio. You will receive 5 Hive!

Where was the giggling child who was proud to have finished his book about the dinosaurs that were lost on the moon? Where was all that creativity that overflowed from his pores without fear of what others would say? Since when did it affect him when his father told him that writing was not a real job and that he should leave that fantasy behind?

Okay, let's review fiction entries from last week's prompt and launch a new one.

Stories From the Previous Week

@marriot5464
@mrenglish
@nathy33
@arduilcelebren
@maryann
@nelson-george
@gabrieladifazio
@iyimoga
@fantom22
@treasure-joshua
@universoperdido
@kemmyb
@lrscarmen
@faithetim
@elentiyaroberts
@royaldiadem
@lightpen
@dante31
@loveah
@iskafan
@kei2
@kingsleyy
@amiegeoffrey
@rammargarita
@jackdeathblack
@george-dee
@seki1
@edystringz
@lydiapauline
@bahnhoft
@babambo03

Thank you to everyone who posted a story for last week's prompt!

This Week’s Prompt

The Ink Well is fortunate to have many members who are eager to write. It would be wise to use talent on the best story you can write so you can receive the optimal curation. Remember, Quality over Quantity.

Please Note: The Inkwell curators read many creative submissions each week. Ideally, we would comment and curate each piece. However, there are physical limitations, which include time. It may be the case that stories are submitted and are not curated. We do try to curate every piece but that may not happen.

At last, the prompt of the week!
This week's prompt is Sympathy. Our skill challenge will be to create a memorable character for your story. @jayna has written a great essay about creating memorable characters in the Catalog of Fiction Writing Tips.

**When you write for the prompt, you don't have to use the exact word. Derive inspiration from it. Sympathy has many applications, more than may come to mind at first. Use your imagination and come up with an original interpretation of this prompt.

Here are some ideas about how to use the prompt, Sympathy. You can probably come up with much more interesting ideas of your own.

  1. The soldiers searched each house as they hunted down rebel sympathizers.
  2. Signals from the sympathetic nervous system begin in the spinal chord.
  3. "Crying does not make you sympathetic," Vanessa sneered. "It makes you look weak."
  4. "I have no sympathy for those of you who did not study," the teacher announced at the start of the exam.
  5. We should send a sympathy card to that family.
  6. It is important that the audience feel sympathy for the tragic hero in a play.
  7. Anyone observing the children on the playground could see that there was great sympathy between Mark and Edgar.
  8. It is difficult to read stories about the homeless because my sympathy for their plight saddens me.
  9. One needn't feel sympathy in order to be kind. Sometimes kindness is a moral choice.
  10. I could see from Enrique's cold manner that nothing in the child's story had moved him.

A week from now, we will select a winning story that demonstrates this skill and utilizes the prompt. Of course, we will also be looking for overall quality in the winning story. Good luck!

Note: As always, please avoid violent, gory, bloody, brutal, sexist or racist themes and language, erotica and other NSFW (not safe for work) content, and stories featuring abuse of women, children or animals. (We have a complete article about The Ink Well stance on violence and brutality for more information.)

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:

Weekly Prompt Rules:

  1. Deadline: You have a week to write for the prompt, until the next one is posted. (Note: You can write for any of the prompts anytime. This is just a guideline to be included in the weekly round-up in the next prompt post.)
  2. Story link: Post your story in The Ink Well community, and post a link to your story in a comment on this post.
  3. Hashtags: Please use these hashtags: #fiction #writing #inkwellprompt #theinkwell and #dreemport, if you are also posting your story to the DreemPort site.
  4. COMMUNITY SUPPORT: Visit the work of at least two other community members and comment on their work.
  5. Title: The title is up to you. You can come up with any title you wish. You do not need to name it after the prompt or include the prompt word.
  6. Images: Please only use images from license free and creative commons sites, like Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels. Images you find on the Internet are copyright protected and cannot be used. Be sure to provide the source link.
  7. Length: We request that story word counts are a maximum of 1,500 words maximum length (preferably 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. Thank you!

Reminder: Be sure to also read our community rules. The reason for the repeat reminder is that we see many stories describing brutality of women, children, or animals, or that have excessive gore or violence, and we must mute them. Please do not post these stories in The Ink Well. We want our community to be a safe and comfortable place for all readers.

Here are the past prompts if you would like to use them or refer back to them:

Thank you for being a part of The Ink Well!
@jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @yaziris and @itsostylish

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Interested in joining our community? Start by joining Hive!

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Already a Hive member? Click Subscribe at the top of The Ink Well community home page.

Questions? Ask The Ink Well on Discord.

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We invite lovers of creative writing to visit The Ink Well, a Hive community started by @raj808 and @stormlight24 and run by @jayna, @agmoore, @gracielaacevedo, @yaziris and @itsostylish.

How to Follow Our Curation Trail

You can follow our curation trail by going to our hive.vote curation trail page and clicking the follow button.

How to Delegate to The Ink Well

We welcome delegations! These support our community in many ways, including helping us to provide support to quality content creators through curation and contests.

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A big thank you to all of our delegators:
@jayna, @felt.buzz, @zeurich, @marcybetancourt, @agmoore, @marlyncabrera, @stormcharmer, @generikat, @iamraincrystal, @preparedwombat, @gracielaacevedo, @chocolatescorpi, @samsmith1971, @grindan, @stuartcturnbull, @arduilcelebren, @itsostylish, @josemalavem, @morey-lezama, @evagavilan2, @popurri, and @mrenglish.

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