Mar 18, 2013 / Topic Ideas

Creative Writing Challenge: 2AM Photo

For some of us, blogging is personal. Others are trying to educate or entertain; many more are hybrids. Yet we’re all storytellers. Creative Writing Challenges help you to push your writing boundaries, show off your blogging chops, and, hopefully, spark more post ideas.

To participate, tag your post with DPchallenge or leave a link to it in the comments. (It would also be great if you could link to this post to encourage people to take part – the more the merrier!)  Your post should be specifically written in response to this challenge. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorite posts on Freshly Pressed on Friday.

If you’ve been living in a bunker or are just the kind of person that doesn’t check The Daily Post… daily (what’s wrong with you?), you may have failed to notice that we’re smack-dab in the middle of Phoneography Month. With that in mind, today’s creative writing challenge is all about phones and photos. See what we’ve done there?

onenewmessage

Image based on You Have One New Message by bixentro, CC-BY-2.0

It’s 2AM and your phone has just buzzed you awake, filling the room in white-blue LED light. You have a message. It’s a photo. No words, no explanation. Just a photo. Tell us all about it. And what happens next.

Enough Already?

If that has your imagination racing, leave this post now. Go. To the writing cave! If not, read on, and we’ll throw out some more questions to stir your thoughts.

My Mind Is Blank But I Must Scream

Still here? Not in the writing cave? Ok, let’s think about what this photo could be. Who it could be of. What it might be the start of.

  • Is it from someone you know, someone you don’t know, or is it too mysterious to figure out?
  • Why would they have used a photo instead of just calling or texting?
  • Why are they sending it at 2am?
  • Does it feel threatening?
  • Does it feel like an invitation?
  • Does it feel like a clue or a puzzle?
  • Does it make you laugh? Or shiver?
  • Does it feel like it might have been sent to you by mistake?
  • Is the photo of a man, woman, mineral, vegetable, place?
  • Is it the first of several photos? Or the only one you get?
  • Are you going to reply? What would happen if you did? Or didn’t?

You could go as far as describing the photo, or take it up a notch and write a full-blown Scooby Doo mystery, replete with unmasking the ghoulish figure only to find out that it was Old Man Johnson all along. It’s in your hands.

Now, to the writing cave with you, and don’t come back until you’ve got a comment or trackback to share.

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    1. I m going to attempt this….as long as I stay on topic, are there any other rules? Length? I haven’t written on someone else’s topic since graduating college many years ago, but I m up for the challenge!

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    2. Done. The link is below (didn’t think I should double link). We did end up reversing it. Hope it’s okay that it’s a little different than what was asked for. It’s a 2 AM phone photo and personal account of taking it, as opposed to getting it, but it was inspired by this challenge nonetheless! For future reference, is it ok to creatively bend the rules in this way?

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  13. This is quite exciting, as it happened to me last night. Can’t wait to dive right in and weave up something fun… this post will be on a completely different wave length from the beauty posts that I write… Loving the challenge! 😀

    Juliana x
    http://buzzingtrends.wordpress.com

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  15. Ha! What a nice try. Someone like me don’t write often because we take life too serious to engage in chit chat. Please don’t get me wrong it very good to have a writing culture. It just that one is just lazy to do that. The competition method you are bringing out may break some of the inertia to writing.. The mist important point is the fear that your write up maybe may be laughed at. Further more word press should have an editing service on the blog to assist non English speaking bloggers in publishing there write-up on their site

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  18. Oh great, just what I need at 5:00 AM. (yaaaawn) I need more sleep. But, to the bat cave Robin… oops, I mean writing cave.

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  22. I could say all kinds of things about this photo…but should I? Do you really want to know the dark places that dwell in my head at times? I donot think so. So, to the cave I gooooooo……..

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      1. the theme woke the curious mystery writer in us, didn’t it? 😀 😀 😀 i have some kind of continuation in my head but if i wrote it here then it won’t end up a mystery~ lol XD thank you!

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