Read John Updike’s story “A&P” and Tobias Wolff’s story “Bullet in the Brain” from The Art and Craft of Fiction. Think about the difficult choices that each of these characters face.
Your prompt for second story also comes from Pamela Painter’s book of writing exercises What If?:
“Write a story in which a character must face a moral dilemmaa situation that offers no solution. Any action taken would be painful and costly. You would have no chance of solving this dilemma in real life, but youre a writer, and it costs nothing to explore it with imaginary people in an imaginary setting, even if the outcome is a tragic one. Some writers use newspaper stories to generate this sort of idea. The situation is there in the bland black and white of this mornings news. But who are these people, and how did they come to be in such a mess? Make it up, think it through.”