ALex HIAM 

Imagine a magical doorway. Does the door have a dial above it with four differently colored options each representing an exterior...

Exercise for writers: Try using or adapting a famous first line to start a story of your own. I.e.: “It was a dark and stormy night.”...

Your first line needs to entice, intrigue, surprise. And to get their attention & trust for long enough to allow your (wonderful and...

A writing prompt from Alex Hiam, author of the Silent Lee series We all know that riding-for-a-fall feeling when someone says, “What...

It happens like this: A well dressed man in an expensive car is talking on his cell phone as he pulls up to a stop sign. He doesn’t...

In Making Writing Exciting, we reviewed recent winners of the Bulwar Lytton Prize, which is awarded to the most atrocious first sentence...

The weather looms large in the plots of many of the greatest stories. In War and Peace, the ice and snow challenge all the characters and...

(Most writing prompts produce some paragraphs, but not a whole story. This one is designed to generate entire short stories. That’s why...

“Are you so dazed by this man’s hocus-pocus, that all the world, save him, is out of focus?” asks Cléante, addressing Orgon in Moliere’s...

Something Comedian Paul Rodriquez said about hunting is often quoted, although it doesn’t stop anyone who likes hunting from doing their...

As any English Prof will tell you, avoid clichés like the, well, plague. It’s an instant F to start any story with, “It was a dark and...

The 1939 play that gives us the term ‘gaslighting’ is set in a building in which several floors of apartments share the same gas supply...

India Landry was expelled from her public school in Houston because she did not stand for the pledge of allegiance. To introduce my...

Omne trium perfectum. Latin for ‘sets of three are perfect’.  In modern writing, it’s the Rule of Three. Simply put, triads often make...

Drip, drip, drip… Imagine a huge block of ice melting. It’s been frozen for a very long time. Something is in it. Something that was...