Inspiration Month: Day 18

Throughout the month of June, we'll be posting you a daily creative writing prompt. Sometimes these will be a single word, sometimes a storyline to follow. It might be an exercise, it might be an idea to get you started. Make sure you check back every day for your new prompt, and let us know on Facebook and Twitter how you've used them. We're looking forward to seeing what you do with them:

Do you remember this exercise from April WM p14? Write the news story and then turn it into a synopsis.

Turn this information into a news story, putting the most important information into a lead paragraph and then writing the rest of the story as an inverted pyramid:

A fire in a furniture shop next to the main bus garage in your local town took place in the late afternoon on the last Friday before Christmas. It shut down all the traffic to and from the area for several hours, including a van of students returning from volunteering with refugees in Calais, a coach containing pensioners coming back from a festive trip to the Christmas market in Munich and a woman whose dog escaped from her car. Witnesses said the woman was crying and the dog was running up and down the hard shoulder but it came back eventually. Local services were affected and theatre and restaurant takings on the night were also badly affected. Thieves took advantage of the chaos to ramraid a local department store. There were no serious injuries but damage to the business, which has been owned by the same family since 1937, was estimated at £1.5 million.

Write this today. Tomorrow, we'll give you a new Writing Magazine prompt.

For all the latest creative writing news, subscribe to Writing Magazine or download our app
Register and sign up for our newsletter for late-breaking news, more competitions and exclusive content