Prompt #0: Water Under the Bridge
To kick off our series of hourly prompts, write a flash about forgiveness or reconciliation. Use water in your story in some way, but do not use the phrase 'water under the bridge'.
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Prompt #1: Mudlarking
This year's anthology is called Mudlarking, the practice of searching an exposed riverbed at low tide for objects lost, discarded, or forgotten. Mudlarks find Roman coins, Victorian clay pipes, Tudor shoes, wartime buttons. The river gives things back, eventually, on its own schedule.
Write a flash in which the past surfaces unexpectedly. It does not have to involve a river or a physical item, but use the image as inspiration in some way.
To make this prompt extra challenging, avoid the following: a deathbed revelation, a found will or letter, a character discovering they were adopted, cancer, dementia, and ghosts.
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Prompt #2: The Arch
Write a flash of no more than 100 words that starts and ends with the same sentence. The opening and closing sentence should feel different in meaning by the time we return to it.
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Prompt #3: What the River Knows
Write a flash from an unusual point of view, one that is neither human nor animal. You might consider writing from the point of view of a bridge, a stretch of river, a piece of salvage, a tide, a building watching people cross below it.
To make this prompt extra challenging, your narrator should not be omniscient. They should only know what they can directly observe or have directly experienced.
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Prompt #4: A Bridge to Nowhere?
Write a flash in the form of directions from one place to another. The destination may be real, emotional, impossible, long-lost, underwater, fictional, or not a place at all.
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Prompt
#5: Erosion
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Prompt #6: Advance
Take a look at Joanna Campbell's painting, 'Advance'. This artwork features a skyline backdrop and figures casting long shadows as they move forward across a textured landscape.
Write a story about a group of people journeying toward a shared, unknown destination at either dawn or dusk.
To make this extra challenging, the journey must not be the result of a war, funeral, or real-life political event. What strange, exciting, or mysterious event are they walking toward?
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Prompt #7: Bridge the Gap
Write two separate flashes, each no more than 100 words (and shorter is fine), that can stand alone but are connected by a single element: an object, a phrase, a location, a gesture. The element should appear in both but mean something different in each. Let this element bridge the gap between these two distinct pieces.
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Prompt #8: Strange Connection
The word bridge gets used a lot as a metaphor. For this prompt, write a flash in which a bridge — an actual, physical, structural bridge — does something unexpected, means something unusual, or is used in a way bridges are not normally used.
To make this prompt extra challenging, the following are not allowed: a bridge as a suicide location, a bridge as the setting for a romantic proposal, the phrase 'build bridges', any bridge that collapses, etc. This is your invitation to some place new, strange, uncanny, off-kilter, silly or just plain weird!
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Prompt #9: Single Crossing
Write a flash using no word more than once, and yes, this includes small words like the, and, I, and is. The minimum word count is 75 words. Bonus points for longer stories.
This is fiendish. We recommend drafting freely first and then editing ruthlessly.
You may wish to use a tool like https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp to check that you've not unintentionally duplicated a word.
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Prompt #10: Finders Keepers?
To start us off, write a flash in which a character finds something unexpected. Make it a physical object, not a person, an emotion, or a memory. Where is the person? Where was the object before it was discovered? What does the person do with what they find?
To make this prompt extra challenging, the following are not allowed: the object cannot be a letter, a key, a photograph, a ring, or a body. Optional bonus points if you make us smile.
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Prompt #11: Fragments
Mudlarkers often find broken things, things like shards of pottery, stems of clay pipes, and rusted keys.
Write a story told entirely in fragmented, disconnected vignettes that, when read alongside each other, piece together a larger narrative.
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Prompt #12: Heron
Take a close look at Joanna Campbell's painting, 'Heron'. The painting features cool, watery teals and a lone bird standing amidst textured, shifting tides. Write a story centred on a moment of profound stillness, patience, or solitary observation.
To make this extra challenging, we ask you to avoid the following topics entirely: grief, mourning, illness, or dementia. Instead, lean into themes of discovery, anticipation, or quiet contentment.
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Prompt #13: River's Edge
Write a story set entirely on the banks of a river. Include two or more characters who interact in some way, but avoid using any dialogue, direct or reported. Focus heavily on the sensory details of the environment: the smell of the silt, the sound of the tide, the texture of the mud. Use this sensory detail to help with the storytelling....
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Prompt #14: The Long Haul
Write a flash that spans a significant length of time — at least a century — in no more than 250 words.
You choose how to move through time. Jump cuts, fragments, a single image per decade, a list...whatever works for the story.
To make this prompt extra challenging, we ask you to avoid: a single person's life cycle and any ending that involves a death, funeral, or cognitive decline.
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Prompt #15: Fifteen
It's the fifteenth hour of the fifteenth National Flash Fiction Day, so to mark the occasion, we challenge you to write a story in exactly 15 words.
Add a title. Your title does not count towards the 15 words.
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Prompt #16: Bridge Closed
Write a story in the form of signs, warnings, notices, announcements, or instructions. The reader should be able to work out what happened from what is being forbidden, redirected, repaired, or apologised for.
Aim to make the 'what happened' something unusual and specific.
Bonus points if you can insert some levity and/or humour.
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Prompt #17: Flooding
Today, NFFD's sister project FlashFlood
is publishing one story every five to ten minutes. Find a story you
admire and choose five interesting words from it: strong nouns, verbs,
adjectives, etc. (Articles, conjunctions, and common verbs don't count,
so avoid things like 'an', 'the', 'with', 'and', 'is', 'said' and lean
into things that are super specific or evocative.)
Write a flash of no more than 150 words using all five words on a subject that is different from the source story.
The title does not count toward the word count. Please note in your submission which FlashFlood story you drew from (and a link would be greatly appreciated), as well as your list of words. You may use a story from this year's Flood or previous years.
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Prompt #18: Busy
Look at Joanna Campbell's painting, 'Busy'. This piece is filled with warm, chaotic energy, stark angles, and scattered silhouettes all moving in different directions.
Write a flash fiction piece where at least three different characters cross paths in a bustling environment, but their internal goals are completely different.
To make this extra challenging, we ask you to avoid crime, accidents, or tragedy.
Bonus points if you can write a story where the intersecting chaos results in something serendipitous, humorous, or surprisingly joyful.
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Prompt #19: Burning Bridges
Write a story about a character intentionally severing a tie with someone or something, but frame it as a positive, freeing, or necessary act rather than a tragedy.
To make this extra challenging, avoid the themes of leaving a romantic relationship, an abusive relationship, or parents/relatives/partners who don't understand or approve of the narrator. Also, avoid using the words 'goodbye', 'leave', 'fire', or 'finally'.
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Prompt #20: The Span
A bridge spans the distance between two points crossing a gap.
For this prompt, write the shortest possible flash that you can manage that spans all 26 letters of the alphabet: you must use each letter of the alphabet at least once.
Make sure to give your flash a title, and yes, letters used in the title count.
You can double check your letters here: https://legacy.cryptool.org/en/cto/frequency-analysis (and don't forget to click the 'Sort alphabetically' option at the top right for convenience).
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Prompt #21: Future Mudlarking
Write a flash from the point of view of someone in the future who has found an object from our present day. Let them misunderstand it beautifully.
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Prompt #22: Lost and Found
Write a flash in the form of a 'Lost and Found' poster or public advertisement for something intangible (like a lost afternoon, a missed opportunity, or a sudden realization) dropped near a river.
To make this extra challenging, avoid themes involving dementia or general memory loss. A loss of memory about something very specific and usual (words involving the letter 'r', the colour blue or the existence of insects, say) is fair game!
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Prompt #23: Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Anyone who has ever read for a journal, contest or write-in
knows that often the queue contains a lot of darkness. As we're moving
toward the end of the day, we'd love to see some light in our inbox.
For this prompt, write a joyful flash with a genuinely happy ending. What counts as happy is entirely up to you, but it should feel earned.
If you're struggling, we encourage you to persevere; this is a challenging ask. It can be much harder to write joy than misery, but we know you can do it!
We'll be back at midnight with the final prompt for 2026....
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Prompt #24: Last Crossing
We've reached midnight here in the UK, and the last of this year's Write-In prompts.
Write a microfiction of no more than 50 words about an ending that is also a beginning.
The title does not count toward the word count.
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