From the Bookshelf

January 2026

Dear Writers,

Welcome to the January 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
“Souvenir,” by Jayne Anne Phillips, in Black Tickets (New York: Vintage Books, 2001)

Here we are, in a new world of a new year, when many of us want to let old habits die and usher in something new. In the spirit of breaking a familiar pattern, I offer this excerpt of a Jayne Anne Phillips story:

Kate always sent her mother a card on Valentine’s Day. She timed the mails from wherever she was so that the cards arrived on February 14th. Her parents had celebrated the day in some small fashion, and since her father’s death six years before, Kate made a gesture of compensatory remembrance. At first, she made the cards herself: collage and pressed grasses on construction paper sewn in fabric. Now she settled for art reproductions, glossy cards with blank insides. Kate wrote in them with colored inks, “You have always been my Valentine,” or simply “Hey, take care of yourself.” She might enclose a present as well, something small enough to fit into an envelope; a sachet, a perfumed soap, a funny tintype of a prune-faced man in a bowler hat.

This time, she forgot.

That last line is all we need to set the action of the story in motion. We have moved from how things went generally to how it went this year. We know we’re on the precipice of finding out what has changed in the relationship between the daughter and mother to make the daughter stop sending the cards. We might assume lots of things here: maybe the daughter is upset with the mother. Maybe she just wants to get on with her own busy life. Maybe she thinks her mother should get over her father’s death. Maybe the daughter hated him and was sick of pretending her parents’ relationship was a loving one.

It’s a rather simple structure that yields so much. Let’s try something similar.

In just a few opening sentences, track that progression from someone “always” performing some behavior or ritual to them stopping it. Set up the reader so that they need to keep reading to figure out why. It makes sense to make the person be doing something for another person, so we question the changing dynamics of the relationship.

Now, flip it around and have the character never doing an activity and show when they start to do it without an explanation. What happens to our expectations when the progression moves in the opposite direction?

Have fun with this one, and Happy New Year!

Cheryl