I’m good at starting stories, but I’m not so good with coming up with compelling conflict and I’m even worse at wrapping things up. Most stories I write get rambly and bogged down in details and go unfinished, and yet opening lines tumble through my brain on a nearly constant basis. I thought it might be fun to put some of them here in the hopes that you writerly types might see fit to use them as story prompts. If you do, just come back here and leave a link in the comments so we can all go read your story. <\/p>\n
\u2022 When she finally took her hands off his neck, he still wasn’t dead.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Lucinda Belle Craddock n\u00e9e Van Mott clutched her bucket of quarters and pulled the lever one more time, for Frank.<\/p>\n
\u2022 It had skidded across the road and landed at the foot of Seth’s lawn chair, and had it had just a smidge more momentum, it would have taken him out with it.<\/p>\n
\u2022 He hated his name and always had.<\/p>\n
\u2022 “You said you would show me the scars.”<\/p>\n
\u2022 Margaret was fairly sure that when she wrote her marriage-counseling book, she was going to include a chapter titled “Sleepfarting.”<\/p>\n
\u2022 Caitlin had kept her eyes closed for ten seconds, just like Dr. Smoltz had told her to, but when she opened them, it was still there, looking at her and not blinking.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The things random passersby threw into the gravel pit never really surprised Daniel, until today.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Hitomi remembered the awful tension everyone felt the year the census numbers showed that cyborgs outnumbered humans.<\/p>\n
\u2022 His hands, from the right angle, looked like gnarled tree roots, but they knew her body better than they knew anything else in the world.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The smoke brought him into this world, and now it looked like it was bound to take him right back out.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The building was obviously alive, the way it sighed and shuddered and sometimes even shrieked.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Tom left her the day after their fiftieth anniversary, and all she had of his was his gold watch \u2014 a memento too bitterly ironic even for her dark sense of humor.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The so-called invasion was decades behind them.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Abel had never asked for the visions, never wanted them, never indulged them, but suddenly the entire class was gathered around him, begging him to tell them what was going to happen.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Tilly had heard the rumors about David \u2014 “Doggin’ Dave” they called him \u2014 but it wasn’t until she clicked the video link some anonymous e-mailer had sent her that she realized just what he had got up to.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Mandy sat by the empty crib for three days and three nights.<\/p>\n
\u2022 The man in the cell was hollerin’ something fierce, his face white as a sheet, but Deputy Mason didn’t speak Spanish and so just stood there, wide-eyed, unable to comprehend the commotion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m good at starting stories, but I’m not so good with coming up with compelling conflict and I’m even worse at wrapping things up. Most stories I write get rambly and bogged down in details and go unfinished, and yet opening lines tumble through my brain on a nearly constant basis. I thought it might be fun to put some of them here in the hopes that you writerly types might see fit to use… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[115,585],"tags":[1606,1607,1157,2259],"class_list":["post-4436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-internet-is-fun","category-writing","tag-meme","tag-opening-lines","tag-short-stories","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-19y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4437,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4436\/revisions\/4437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}