From the Bookshelf

June 2025

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the June installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

I love writing prompts, and I hope you have fun with these. They are free for anyone and everyone.

This Month’s Prompt
“My Love,” in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, trans. Keith Gessen and Anna Summers (London: Penguin Books, 2009)

June is finally here. This last week, time seems to have slowed, because I am at a writing retreat by the sea. I’ve had oodles of time to write and read and stare out the window and hang out with a fabulous group of poets in the evenings and, basically, do as I please. I leave today, with lucky stars in my pocket. (I got good work done on the manuscript—hooray!) Without further ado, here is this month’s prompt:

Given time his dreams might have come true, and he might have found himself with the woman he loved, but the road was too long and it brought him nowhere.

We’re going to do something a little different this month, and in fact, I’m going to be experimenting with different kinds of prompts for you in the months ahead. I thought it would be fun to play with sentence structure. The excerpt is the first sentence of Petrushevskaya’s story, “My Love.” I like the clauses in the sentence and how big the scope is. Let’s borrow the structure to create a new sentence that will be the first story of your flash. Here is the skeletal structure; you just need to fill it up with muscle, blood, and skin:

Given time [his/her] ______, and [he/she] ______, but ______ and it _______.

In the end, you might lose the first phrase “Given time” and find another. You might make the scope large, too, so the character is looking back on their life and considering their choices. Or you might shrink it down to something that happened the night before or moments before. Play with it, and see what happens. Pay close attention to sound, as always.

Take this wherever it leads, and have fun!

Cheryl