From the Bookshelf

February 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the February installment of my series From the Bookshelf, in which I create a prompt based on an excerpt of a book I pull from my shelves. The excerpt is presented without context intentionally. The monthly prompts may be for flash fiction or nonfiction, and they may be inspired by all kinds of books: a travel guide, a book of essays, poems, or fiction, a dictionary, a biography . . .

These prompts are free for anyone and everyone. Enjoy.

This Month’s Prompt
“The Nose,” by Nikolai Gogol, trans. Mary Struve, in A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders (New York: Random House, 2021)

It is February, and the light changes this month in New England. Every day, a little more light will stay, which is much needed.

Today, I picked up George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain: an analysis of stories by four great Russian writers: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol. In its own way, it is a writing manual. He kindly includes the original stories in the book. This month’s excerpt is from Gogol’s “The Nose”:

On March 25th there took place, in Petersburg, an extraordinarily strange occurrence . . . [goes on for two more paragraphs]

For the sake of propriety Ivan Yakovlevich put a tailcoat on over his shirt and, sitting down at the table, poured out some salt, got two onions ready, picked up a knife and, assuming a meaningful expression, began to slide the bread. Having cut the loaf in two halves, he looked inside and to his astonishment saw something white. Ivan Yakovlevich poked it carefully with the knife and felt it with his finger. “Solid!” he said to himself. “What could it be?”

(It is a nose!) What patient writing this is; a flash-length story might just have him discover the nose in his bread right away, but this scene lingers. The slowness of the telling makes it funner. In three paragraphs, we still don’t know what the object is. The meticulous detailing of Ivan’s morning routine sets us up for the inanity of him finding the strange object in his bread. The humor is baked in (sorry), with the tailcoat hastily shoved on “for propriety”—a ridiculous gesture—and his astonished and not disgusted response to the object (“Solid!”). He’s innocent, in a way, which makes us think he’s not very smart, which is funny.

I’d like you to write a 500- to 1,000-word flash that takes its time showing a character in their daily routine who is as ridiculous as Ivan, and then have them stumble upon something fantastic and strange. How do they respond? If you’ve done the work setting up their character, their response should come naturally. Is someone they know with them when they make the discovery or are they on a busy city street full of strangers? Showing them taking their time is going to be the hardest challenge here in flash, so you really have to rely on compelling characterization to keep the reader interested.

Have fun with this one,

Cheryl