Academic Dictionary
Home / Writing tools / Story practice
Constraint creates invention

Write the story you would not have invented by yourself.

Every challenge combines unrelated ingredients on purpose. Your job is not to mention them mechanically—it is to make them feel as though they always belonged in the same story.

New challenge
Challenge 862405

Your brief

  • Main character: A gardener who discovers someone has been moving the garden gnomes at night.
  • Setting: A nearly empty commuter train delayed between stations.
  • Relationship: One character used to be the other's teacher.
  • Weather must change: A rainbow appears after an argument, but nobody is in the mood to admire it.
  • Amusing incident: A child confidently introduces two strangers as though they are old friends.
  • Complication: The only witness remembers the sequence backwards.
  • Opening rule: Begin after the main problem has already started.
  • Structure: Set up something in the first quarter that pays off in the last quarter.
  • Dialogue: Let someone change the subject twice for a reason the reader can infer.
  • Ending rule: End with a callback to a phrase used earlier.
  • Tone: Give the story a nostalgic tone without using a flashback.
  • Wildcard: A character carries something for the whole story without opening it.

Use all five words

ordinaryrecklesssplinterstaletrickle

Maximum length: 1,000 characters, including spaces.

Write here

Draft

0 / 1000 characters

Useful test: if a required word feels pasted in, change the story so the word causes something. The constraint should alter the plot, not decorate it.