What are some really good prompts for a story?

I once saw a beautiful book of illustraions with one line captions as story prompts published 1994 or earlier.

• I do not know the author/illustrator or publisher. The book had 20 or fewer illustrations and each had a caption line as if taken from a story. I used this as story prompts for my high school English students. I know I am not giving any info to go on, except that I know it was published in 1994 or earlier. The book was presented as a children's book. For some reason I want to think that it may have been listed as 'author unknown' or 'anonymous'.

• Answer:

  If you are unable to find the book, you might want to use post secret. I wouldn't necessarily send your students to the site because some parents will object to some of the content but if you were to take the summer to collect images from the site that you think are safe and then randomly distribute them to people and ask them to use them as writing prompts, they can be very effective. Imagine giving a card written by a girl who has an issue with her body image to a young man . . . and then having him write from this girl's perspective. Then have him write from the point of view of a parent or friend or even have the class write a collection of interwoven stories working in a group. The possibilities are endless with a little encouragement and caution. For instance, today there is one up that looks like a phone message memo. Who wrote the message? What happened? Did they write this message to a friend? If so, why are they no longer talking? The memo says that they will "call again"--how often do they call now? How often did they call before? When will they stop calling? And what about the other person? Why are they not answering the calls? What is it they are judging and why? How do they feel about the distance? How do they feel when the phone rings and it is this person? How will they feel when the calls stop? And what if there is another person involved? What if there is a mutual friend who feels torn between the two? What does he/she think is the real reason behind the rift? What has s/he done to build bridges? Anything? Nothing? Why?