Story Prompts | November 2024
by Switch-Lit
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: Egg
How did we get here? What keeps us alive?? Where is our world heading??? We need answers more than ever and the egg may be the most ridiculous one of all.
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Well first, it is no surprise that all of us got here because human fertilization is the union of a male’s sperm and a female’s egg, a process that we did not understand until the late 19th century (now, that’s the real surprise).
Nevertheless, we’ve stayed alive long enough to eventually figure that detail out thanks in part to eating plenty of chicken eggs along the way as a high-quality source of protein and nutrients necessary for our cognitive development. Today, we eat over a trillion eggs laid by chickens every year.
But which came first: the chicken or the egg? We’ve busied ourselves with this intentionally loopy philosophical question of origin and cause since an ancient Greek philosopher named Plutarch was the first to pose it in the 1st century.
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And you know who loves that kind of question? “Eggheads”, or the people considered out-of-touch with ordinary folks and lacking in realism, common sense, or sexual interests on account of their intellectual ones.
As our eggheaded world has turned to chaos and disorder, let us look now to a literal egghead – Humpty Dumpty, who sat on a wall and had that great fall. Why a king (i.e. male in power) would think horses could be helpful in putting Humpty back together again could be overlooked by children learning to read, but what about scientists of the artistic sort?
Scientists have used the tale of a lone Humpty Dumpty and his subsequent shattering to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, which is associated with disorder, randomness, and uncertainty:
“The disorder of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time and therefore isolated systems evolve towards equilibrium where the disorder is highest.”
In short, certain processes are irreversible whether we understand them or not. We can only move forward from where we are.
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How do you like your eggs?
– Ken
S••L Editor
Prompt 1
I buried the strange egg in my neighbor’s garden because I thought it would be safe there.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 2
It was her last egg so she put it in the freezer.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 3
After she died, we sat down and ate hard boiled eggs for lunch.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 4
One writer is a chicken and the other is an egg. The story is a delicate unfolding of their relationship as told from their first-person perspectives.
by Switch-Lit
Prompt 5
I closed my eyes, dropped the egg out the window, and waited for what I might hear next.
by Switch-Lit