Writing Prompt 2: The Everyman Hero

When I went on a creative writing course last summer, one of the guest speakers - Tom Mogford - talked to us about writing crime novels (the title of his lecture was The Everyman Hero: Writing Your First Crime Novel). During the course of his talk, he explained that by Everyman Hero, he meant a protagonist, or main character, who is not a policeman or some sort of secret agent or anything - he or she is just a normal person who has been embroiled in this crime, whatever it may be, through other means - by a misunderstanding, perhaps.

The example Mr Mogford gave to us was that your innocent character has been randomly approached - on the street, maybe - by a complete stranger who offers money for your character to assassinate somebody your character has neither met nor heard of. The hypothesis behind this, Mr Mogford explained, is that most murders are committed by somebody the victim knew - often intimately. But what if somebody is murdered by somebody completely unrelated? If your character knew that because of this there was a 100% chance of them never being discovered (let's just say it's 100% for the sake of this), what would they do?

I can neither remember the exact beginning sentence which Mr Mogford proposed we use for the writing exercise we then did nor find the piece of writing I wrote beginning with it, so this is just an approximation, but, nevertheless...

Based on the idea outlined above, this week's (two days late) writing prompt is to begin your story thusly:

My name is... [insert your character's name here] ...and I have been asked to kill another human being.

Good luck and enjoy writing!

Writing Prompt 1: Real And Fictional Places

So this is how this is going to work:
Every week on this day I am going to post a writing prompt. Some of these will be ones that I made up, some of them will be from my school creative writing club, and a few might be from a week-long creative writing course I went on this summer just gone, and other sources. Some may well be for more than one writer to collaborate on. Bonus points if you manage to include Ross's Weird Word Of The Week in your piece! (We'd love to hear if you do!)
If you want to share what the prompts inspired you to write with us, then please do! Post it in the comments if it isn't too long - or maybe just your favourite paragraph or line.

And here's the first prompt!

All books and stories need a setting; it's one of the things you learn to put in a story when you're in primary school. Choose a place that you know well and then choose a character - it would work best if you choose someone from a fantasy or future/dystopian world, or from a different culture, or someone from a historical novel. Now put that character in that place. Bearing in mind that this setting is by no means one that they are familiar with, what are their thoughts about this place? Describe it from your character's point of view: what does someone seeing it for the first time see that someone who sees it on a more regular basis might not?