I’ve recently started teaching a student online in a first-sentence writing prompts class. Each week, there’s a genre. Then I have a list of 100 first sentences, which may or may not easily apply to that genre. The student picks a number, and that’s the prompt that we go with for the class. Then we spend about 20-25 minutes individually writing a story based on the genre and the first sentence. If anyone’s interested in having their child take the class or you know someone whose kid would enjoy the class, here’s the link: Creative Writing: Genre-Based Story Prompts class. It’s been fun teaching one student, but I think the class would be even better with multiple students. This one’s for 10-13-year-olds, but there’s also one for high school students.
Because there’s only one student in the class that I’ve been teaching and because I think it’s fun to participate, I’ve been doing the writing prompts challenge. This is my “mystery” challenge attempt with the first sentence of “Wait, don’t go that way!” I heard someone shouting.
The Not-So-Haunted House
“Wait, don’t go that way!” I heard someone shouting.
I looked down the hallway. It looked like a normal hallway. Why shouldn’t I go down it? I turned around. No one was there. Who had said that? I looked to my left. No one. I looked to my right. No one was there either. Where had the voice come from?
I turned back around, and I started heading down the hallway again.
“Didn’t you hear me? Don’t go that way!” the same voice shouted.
I was starting to feel a little creeped out. Who was talking to me? Maybe my friends were right. Maybe this really was a haunted house. They’d dared me to go into the abandoned house on my own. I couldn’t turn down the dare, so of course, I’d gone in the house. It was getting really creepy now.
I again looked around the room, this time expecting to see some sort of ghost. Still nothing. I had to go down the hallway. If I didn’t, my friends would tease me about it forever.
I again started down the same hallway, taking a slow step.
“Seriously? Are you not listening? I said to not go down that hallway,” the same voice shouted.
I again looked around. There had to be a logical explanation. I wasn’t hearing voices. I didn’t believe in ghosts. The voice had to be coming from somewhere. Maybe, someone was hiding somewhere.
I looked around the room. Where could the person be hiding? There was only a table, a chair, and a couch. I was tempted to look under the couch, but not even a small dog would fit under it. The chair likewise didn’t have a space for anyone to hide under it. I looked over at the table. The tablecloth hung over the side. I was pretty sure it wasn’t long enough to hide anyone who was under the table, but it was my only option. I leaned down and looked under the table. No one was there either. Okay, I was getting out of here.
As I stood up, my head bumped into the table, knocking something off of the top of it. As it clattered to the ground, I knew right away where the voice was coming from.
I glanced over at the window. My friends were staring at me from outside the building, laughing. I held up the cell phone. My friends doubled over laughing.
“Okay, you got me there,” I said, walking out of the building.
They really had fooled me.
My Thoughts
I had originally planned to have it be a walkie-talkie rather than a cell phone, but seeing as the class had a 13-year-old student, I wasn’t sure if she’d be familiar with it enough for the story to make sense. Still, it was a fun first-sentence prompt.
It has been interesting to see how my story compares to my student’s story. For this one, she wrote about someone stopping someone from going that way because there was road construction. Hers turned out to be a dream.
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