Writer, writing tutor and editor Meg Pokrass is well-known for her amazingly inventive prompts. And she uses them herself in her own writing. This is what she says about it —

When people ask me: how did you do that? How did you incorporate that prompt idea? (as though it is a magic trick) this is what I almost always wish to say:
The writer works from the inside out. They live with a feeling, such as loss, for example the loss of love (my favorite) and they use the prompt as a way to explore the feeling in new ways, to “process” it (if we’re being new-agey about it). There is no “trick” it is just letting oneself see your own life differently by using different filters, or metaphors, or situations, and letting oneself feel sad once again, which admittedly sucks (when writing hard stuff, feeling the loss again by looking directly at it). But on the bright side, to express it in some creative way, can create a huge sense of relief.

For November Meg is posting a prompt a day based on her wonderful collection Alligators at Night, which was published this July by Ad Hoc Fiction and which is available from the Ad Hoc Fiction Bookshop. Meg is posting extracts or full stories from the collection and giving you ideas to inspire a story. A great way to write in inventive ways, build up a sequence of fictions and to whet your appetite to read the whole collection. Hop over to her website to take a look. Her illustrative pictures are prompts in themselves.
And just for an added bonus, here’s Meg reading the title story from ‘Alligators at Night’, a flash that was chosen as one of Wigleaf magazine’s list of top 50 stories in 2018.