I’m playing a word association trick with you today.

What’s the first thing you thought of when you read the title, “bugs?”

Sometimes the shortest words can have the most meanings, depending on context.

I deliberately didn’t post a photo (like I am wont to do) when presenting a writing prompt, because I didn’t want to influence what your initial reaction might be to the word “bugs.” I assure you, there is a picture.

Here’s Your Prompt:

• Write a story, poem or journal entry about the first thing you thought of when you read the word, “bugs.”
   
• Take the first thing you thought of, and see how it applies to an old memory. Write about that memory involving bugs.
   
• Write about a flu bug, cold germ or cooties.
   
• Write about a room being bugged.
   
• Write about someone who bugs you (or a time when you bugged someone else). Write about things that bug you.
   
• Write about a master computer programmer who inadvertently programs a bug into a program. Writer about a hacker who deliberately puts a bug in the program. Write about one person this bug affects, and how he or she solves the problem.
   
• Write literally about bugs: flies, ants, cockroaches, bedbugs, head lice, spiders or stink bugs.
   
• Write a favorable (or at least, not negative) poem about a much-disliked bug, like a roach. For example:

  How delightful to suspect
  All the places you have trekked:
  Does your long antenna whisk its
  Gentle tip across the biscuits?

  Do you linger, little soul,
  Drowsing in our sugar bowl?
  Or, abandonment most utter,
  Shake a shimmy on the butter?

  (From Nursery Rhymes for the Tender-Hearted, by Christopher Morley, 1921. Read the full poem here.)
   

• Write about catching a bug, a wild enthusiasm or obsession, for something.
   

Good luck!

p.s. If you want to see the photo that made me think of bugs, here it is.