Last week, my 3 year old nephew set me a challenge – to write a story about a talking watermelon.
He gave me this idea with such a twinkle in his eye, I just had to give it a go. I shared this idea (getting a story prompt from a 3 year old) with other writers, and I set to work.
It took me a little time to work out the story. The two things I realised was that a talking watermelon would be constantly spitting out pips, and they have no ears. The other specification was that there should be no bad guys in this story. Even though my nephew really likes ninjas and superheros, he doesn’t like bad guys at the moment.
The result is a short story called Lewis and the Talking Watermelon. It involves a wish, a fart, and brothers.
I read it to my nephew today. It’s a first draft, and my nephews thought it was very funny.
My next challenge comes from my 8 year old nephew: An evil octopus in underwater isolation.
My plan at this stage is to write these stories and put them in an anthology (this one is too rough to share right now)… they will be silly stories aimed at kids with prompts provided by my nephews. I have 5 nephews, so the prompts could be just about anything!!
Watch this space to see how I’m going.
