Every month, Switch-Lit releases new story prompts to help launch your next collaborative fiction journey. You can find them on the Switch-Lit “Prompts” page, or revisit our full archive of prompts here on Substack.
This month’s theme: Ice
In the summer of 1965, Colombian writer and novelist Gabriel García Márquez was living in Mexico and driving to Acapulco for a vacation with his family when he suddenly imagined the beginning for a new book. He turned the car around and drove back to their home in Mexico City.
For the next year and half, he wrote what would become One Hundred Years of Solitude, the beginning of which not only had the power to thwart his young family’s summer vacation, but age timelessly into one of the most notable opening lines in the history of literature:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
When did you first discover ice? And if this is also a summer of solitude for you, then could we rediscover ice together from wherever we are in the world?
Explore our new prompts below inspired by the emotional range of frozen water, and perhaps with a writer or poet in your life who is from a different country?
Hotter than a bottle rocket 🧨,
– Ken
S••L Editor
Prompt 1
One summer over 5,300 years ago, a neolithic man was murdered in the Italian Alps and preserved naturally in ice until he was discovered accidentally by two German hikers in 1991. "The Ice Man" had 61 tattoos, a deep cut to his right hand, a flint arrowhead stuck in his left shoulder, and an innovative copper axe. Write the backstory behind the real-life murder of this glacier mummy named "Ötzi".
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 2
I waited until the last ice cube melted in my glass, and then made my move.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 3
She always ordered one scoop of vanilla ice cream with crushed salt and vinegar chips as a cool reminder.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 4
Write a short play or parable about two lovers separated by a wall of ice broken only by their confessions to one another.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 5
In a world where undocumented people are barred from dreaming and sleep cycles are policed by the state, a compliant worker in the forensics division of the "Imagination Corrections and Enforcement" (I.C.E.) department sorts through contraband dream fragments and suddenly discovers one with her in it.
by Switch-Lit
🌹Inspired by one of our monthly prompts, but don’t have a writing partner? Join our monthly prompts-based Subrosa round to write with a stranger.
🔥Writers will be paired on a weekly basis (Fridays at 12pmPST).
Deadline for writer pairing: July 31st, 2025
Don’t forget…
Check out our other Subrosa rounds for individual writers in need of partners:
