Gail Carson Levine's Blog

2025 Sixth Workshop Prompts

The secret was revealed, but it didn’t make anything better.Outdoors in the middle of the night, barefoot, he/she/they twice crossed the rough ground between the orphanage and the empty house.“Everyone knows,” the elf said, “and they blame you. Don’t feel bad.”I would rather listen to a jackhammer breaking rock than to hear that name again.Snow White said, “Happy endings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

2025 Fifth Workshop Homework

Imagine a moment in history and put it in a story. Here are four possibilities, but you can picture a different moment that interests you:

George Washington did not chop down a cherry tree or confess to his father that he did, but it is certain that someone said he did and wrote it down. Here’s a link to how the story was invented. https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cherry-tree-myth. Make your own story out of the truth.This is a link to a w...

2025 Fifth Workshop Prompts

Turn a bit of your own family history into a story. This can even be an event in your own life, as long as it’s more than five years ago.

These are not true, or probably not true:

The ancient Greeks probably did conquer Troy but not with a wooden horse packed with warriors. Make up your own story of what may have happened.The explorer Ponce de León didn’t really search for a fountain of youth in Florida in the sixteenth century. Make up your own story about what he was actually lo...

2025 Fourth Workshop Homework

An insult poem is just what you’d think, a poem that insults someone. We don’t want to hurt anyone, though, so if you are really insulting someone you know, either change the person’s name and disguise the person or don’t show the poem to your victim.

Try for fourteen lines or more in your insult poem, but please write at least ten. If you like, your poems can rhyme, but they don’t have to.

Examples:

This short one from ancient Greece:

            Lift sunward your considerable nose,...

2025 Third Workshop Prompts

Give your characters a flaw or two that will make success in whatever they do more difficult. (They will also have good qualities that may help or hinder them.) Pick one of the options below for your story with these flawed people.

Two siblings run away from home together. You decide why. A day or a week later, they learn that some disaster has struck their home town. You decide what. Now, they’re desperate to get back but the disaster has created obstacles. Write what happens.One char...

2025 Third Workshop Homework

Choose one of these prompts that involve villains:

The tooth fairy has gone over to the dark side. In the middle of the night, instead of taking the tooth from under the pillow and leaving money, the fairy is taking the child and leaving a note that says, “IOU your precious little one.” You decide what she’s doing with them. The police have had no luck finding and rescuing the kidnapped kids. Two friends who have lost their younger siblings join forces to save their siblings. Meanwhile, the ...

2025 Second Workshop Homework

Please remember to send me up to four pages, double-spaced in 12-point type, as a Word or Google document. Please email it to me by Sunday at noon. Please put your name and the prompt you’re using at the top of your pages.

You can add characters and change anything about the prompts below.

Two characters who don’t trust each other are trapped together—you decide how and where. Also, the characters don’t have to be human. For example, one could be a dragon and the other an ogre. They have ...

2025 Second Workshop Prompts

Five friends go together to the State Fair and visit the fortune teller’s tent. Each receives a different fortune:

Beware of a girl with a pony tail.You will be given a thousand dollars. Don’t keep any of it.Don’t get on a boat this year.Stay at home on August 12th and close the windows and curtains. Lock the door.Accept an impossible challenge.

Pick one friend or two friends and write what happens as a result of the fortune teller’s advice, which may be followed—or not.

First Class 2025 Prompts

Use one or more of these in a story. They can be dialogue, as I have it, or woven into the narration. They can be a beginning or an end or show up in the middle. You may not finish your story in the time you have. Just write as much as you can.

Keep in mind as you write that everything in fiction is connected. Dialogue reveals character; character produces dialogue (or even silence).  

“Do you think these fangs are just for show?”

“You’re staring at me.”

“You’re not me. I’m me!”

“...

First Class 2025 Homework

You can continue what you started during the workshop or do one of the options below. Email me no more than five double-spaced pages in 12-point type as a Word or Google document. If it’s a Google document, please remember to give me permission to edit it.

Make one of these adages the title of your story and write how the precept works out for your characters—which can be disastrously or perfectly. (You can change the title later if you come up with something you like better.)

Better safe...