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10 Writing Prompts from Hans Christian Andersen
I’ve had my fancy leather-bound collection of Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales for ages now and been trying to find the time to read some of them. Then it dawned on me. I have a link for you but I did not use the stories from the site to write this article. There may be discrepancies in the title or details. The site does list all the stories in chronological order with the date of original publication, which I have included here. The book that I am using says this about the translation: “The stories in this edition are taken from Heinrich Oskar Sommer’s translation Stories & Fairy Tales by…
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10 Writing Prompts from Egyptian Mythology
There are few areas of human history as interesting as Ancient Egypt. For me it’s the age, the time involved. There were Ancient Egyptians living in the shadow of already ancient monuments. They have so many deities and figures to include in their stories it’s hard to keep track. So much time passed that things changed, gods took on new roles and pharaoh’s rose and fell from favor. It’s easy to get lost in the history of Egypt. For this list I used two sources, Ancient Egypt: the Mythology and Ancient History Encyclopedia. Please forgive spelling discrepancies as there are many ways to spell most of the names and I…
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10 Writing Prompts from Bulgarian Folklore
The inspiration for this post came from Yana, a reader. Thank so much Yana! You can check out her blog here. I never knew how rich Bulgaria’s culture is and how many fascinating tales they have in their folklore. Many of them take directions the reader isn’t expecting and that makes them even more fun to read. Enjoy these brief summaries and the prompts that I came up with from reading them. I got the first story from a wonderful video Yana showed me. It’s absolutely beautiful, please watch it. The rest are from the websites fairytalez.com and theculturetrip.com. Title photo By Okotuki [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons 1)…
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10 Writing Prompts from Norse Mythology
Here we are again looking to ancient mythology to inspire stories. If you are into this sort of thing, I have two other posts you might like about Greek Myths, Irish Myths, and Bulgarian Folklore. This one was fun to do. Norse mythology is popular right now thanks to Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and the new God of War game. For a more thorough reading of the stories I encourage you to check out Gaiman’s book. He is a wonderful storyteller. For my purposes I used Norse-Mythology.org. They have good, concise retellings that are often followed by scholarly commentary. Below I have summed up ten myths and then given you prompts…
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10 Writing Prompts from Irish Mythology
This week’s prompts come from Irish mythology. This was quite a challenge for me than the post on Greek Myths as I knew basically nothing about it before I started. (Now also have a list based on Norse Myths and Bulgarian Folklore!) I used Wikipedia a lot and a helpful website called Bardmythologies.com. I encourage you to check this site out and read all of the myths, they are truly fascinating. Two books also came in handy during my research that I would like to highly recommend. One is The Book of Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland compiled by W. B. Yeats and the other is Heroic Landscapes: Irish…
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10 Writing Prompts from Greek Mythology
Not sure what you want to write your next story about? Need some inspiration to add life to a current project? Ever thought about using writing prompts from Greek mythology? Storytelling has been around since there have been people with language. Humans need to experience their world through stories and through connections to others. These are stories that have been around for thousands of years, which means there is something compelling about them. Getting your writing inspiration from Greek Mythology can be a fun way to revitalize your own storytelling methods. The Greeks had some pretty amazing stories. Even Shakespeare was influenced by Greek mythology. Romeo and Juliet is an…
