May 2025 The Great Substack Prompt Celebration

Your Inspiration Invitation

Welcome back to The Great Substack Prompt Celebration!

Let’s begin by explaining what this is and why we think you should join us.

What is The Great Substack Prompt Celebration?

Fictionistas was created to support you in the fiction you are already writing and sharing on Substack, but as we grew, we took the opportunity to encourage you to embrace this growing writing community, stretch your writing muscles, and stop writing alone. Each month, Nicole Rivera of the Stop Writing Alone substack community and Jackie Dana, writer of Unseen St. Louis (nonfiction/local history) and Story Cauldron (fiction), will host a month-long Writing Prompt Celebration.

Our monthly writing prompt celebration begins with a live writing prompt party where we share a writing prompt, set a timer and write, and finally read aloud a first draft of a short fiction piece with fellow Fictionistas members. (This post includes this month’s invitation and link to that writing prompt party.) To continue the celebration – and to ensure no one misses out on what Nicole playfully calls “writing fitness with friends” – the prompt is then shared here on Fictionistas, along with an invite to share your polished fiction based on the prompt on the Fictionistas Substack page. In between we like to engage the community in conversations about their writing and writing process, within our posts so we can continue to learn about each other and share tips, tricks, experiences and lessons learned.

In the end we hope that our ever-growing community will get a chance to find your Substack page, read your fiction, and share it with their own followers in their social media spaces. Active participants will get a chance to write in and outside their comfort zones, meet fellow fiction writers in the trenches with them and, perhaps best of all, read lots of new-to-them writers.

Let’s begin for our chat topic of the week:

Let’s Talk About Save the Cat!

Based on our previous prompts, it might seem long overdue that we talk about helping out our feline friends, instead of just putting them all through the ringer in our fiction — Jackie Dana has even taken this a bit literally by taking in a new feral fur friend, Buster — but I am not talking about the literal creatures stretching out their nine lives in our homes, yards and neighborhoods, this week’s chat is all about a story structure.

Does your writing fall into the “beats” of the Save the Cat story structure?

In the Stop Writing Alone community we are currently steeped in conversation about this structure, popularized by Blake Snyder’s book on screenwriting, and brought to the novel writing world by Jessica Brody’s book Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. As we are studying the structure and the novels Brody uses to demostrate it, we are all asking ourselves, “Is this right for me and my writing?” To that end, I’m curious about your own interactions with it in your writing!

Mark Your Calendar & Grab Your Link

You officially have one week to warm up before this month’s fun begins. Remember, Fictionistas who join the Writing Prompt Party will be the first to get this month’s prompt and the first to get some real-time reactions to their first drafts!

Your Official Invitation to Party

The February Writing Prompt Party will be on Thursday, May 8, 2025 at 6PM Eastern. We would love to see you there (but keep in mind, if you can’t make it, we will be posting the prompt to Fictionistas after the meeting)!

Topic: FICTIONISTAS Writing Prompt Party MAY 2025

Time: May 8, 2025 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89636663598?pwd=89Ug0gbq2jfWgel0IeoKjxVYSK7RCD.1

Meeting ID: 896 3666 3598

Passcode: MayFICTION

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I’m Jackie, a fiction author, freelance writer, and historian, I enjoy rooting for the underdog and stirring up trouble. Unsurprisingly, my alignment is Chaotic Good. My Substacks are Unseen St. Louis and Story Cauldron,

I’m Nicole creator of all things Stop Writing Alone including a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a Substack community hosting multiple monthly Live Zoom Events for writers seeking community. If you are ready to truly stop writing alone, join here.

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