Update

I wrote the stupid story. I handed it in thirty minutes before midnight, so technically within the deadline. It was shit, but maybe I've already gotten what I needed from this course.

24 Hours to write the Great American short story

I've finished the activities in the fiction section of the textbook. Tomorrow I have to submit a short story for the second assessed assignment. I haven't started it. I've had other things going on. I don't have a story that I really want to tell. It's one of the weird things about this course - it's a creative thing, so the content comes from you, but then you're expected to write certain things at certain times like any other course. I have no interest in short story telling right now, but I'll have to come up with something in the next day.

Choose a topic from a previous exercise and write the start of a story, using a particular genre

As the moving van wound its way through the streets, I realised for the first time that this was to be my home - my domain. These streets, these corners and traffic lights and lamp posts would be familiar to me in good time. A new life, a new start. And no men, absolutely no men whatsoever.
When the van pulled up outside number 23, I could see a few faces staring out from behind windows. I tried to ignore them as I unlocked the front door and let the removal men in. It took the better part of two hours to get all my things inside, after initially telling them to leave things near the door then having to move those things out of the way when I realised they were blocking the way. I started to get flustered by the whole affair and when they asked me if I needed help taking things upstairs I utterly failed at explaining where I thought things should go, lost the ability to speak coherently and just told them to go, thanking them for their help.
I sat down in a heap on a pile of boxes, exhausted despite a lack of any great effort, and contemplated where to begin. What would my new home look like? Did I want to reconstruct the old one, albeit in rooms of a slightly different shape? It didn't seem like a good idea. The big leather armchair - if placed close to the TV and opposite the couch - would become Tim's chair again. The memory was too strong. The top drawer would have to be filled or it would become a shrine to his shirts and underwear and worn socks. The sheets he'd made fun of would always be those sheets, the ones they'd woken up with on Sunday mornings, and stayed in, reading, fooling around, until noon. Change then, but how much?
As she lay pondering a clever new furniture configuration, the doorbell went. An unfamiliar sound, and it felt odd to get up in response to it. There was a man at the door - tall, short spikey black hair and just the right amount of stubble to look handsome without appearing lax with regard to person hygiene. "Hi," said the stranger. "I live next door and I was wondering if you needed anything."

Write a story including the techniques of repetition, dramatic present, dramatic action, habitual time, flashback, foreshadowing, starting 'in medias res'

Uncle Hogarth was in the middle of a coughing fit when I came through with the entrees. Aunt Silvia, from my father's side, was rubbing his back and trying to keep him calm. He looked worse than usual.
I was thinking about it last week, when I was putting up the tree. I always do it about a week before. If I took my cue from the tv it'd be up in October. I recalled, as I sorted the ornaments out so that the colours would be evenly spaced, how half of them had come off the previous year when Uncle Hogarth had crashed into the tree during a musical number. It was practically a tradition, his pre-lunch sherry opening an afternoon of drinking that inevitably culminated in him challenging one of the children to a game of snap, or him launching into an impromptu and inappropriate song before falling asleep in the corner armchair. He is not, I am told - year after year by Auntie Bel - a heavy drinker in everyday life. He saved his merriment for Christmas. I've never minded all that much, in fact I think I even find it comforting. Since my parents died it has been this cast of oddball aunts and uncles that have kept Christmas familial. Familiar.
By the time everyone had some food on their plates, Uncle Hogarth seemed to have settled down. He was certainly in the spirit of things - first, as usual, to offer a cracker to one of my cousin's children, first to put on a party hat, first to set a record in target shooting with the party poppers. But his breathing sounded heavy throughout, and it worried me to think that for the first time he seemed old. He had always been old from my perspective, of course. Anyone over fifty is 'old' when you're a child. But now I noticed how wiry his frame looked, how dishevelled his face, how thin his hair. His smile, however bright, threw a hundred wrinkles into relief. I realised that, to an extent, I had been living as a child for the past twenty years, preserving youth through Christmas day. When one of them, these wonderful old maniacs, passed away, the illusion would die with them. It would be the last Christmas for all of them.

Write a paragraph story with one repeating element and one repeating but altered element.

He picked up the scissors and comb, cut away a layer of the damp, grey hair, folded back, repeated. The hair dusted the floor in fine layers. The operation disgusted him. His neighbour, Beth, was doing Mrs Morland. She had better materials to work with. The scissors went up and delicately trimmed the bouncy blond locks. How I hate you, he thought.

Foreshadowing. It happens.

When they first came to couple's counselling, Anna didn't know she was pregnant again If we had known, perhaps the whole endeavour would have been pointless. On that first day, they walked sheepishly into my office as if they'd been called in for being naughty. Many couples are nervous or embarrassed, but these two seemed united in a sense of being unsure as to whether they should be there. They sat down, eyes flitting nervously between each other and myself. I asked them their relationship history and they told me how they'd met at university, how after graduating Tim had got a job in Yorkshire to be closer to Anna, and how they got married two years later. "...and we have a daughter," Anna added, as if coming to the root of the problem. "Abby. She's twelve."
A cloud of uncertainty seemed to fall upon the room after that. It's not good practice to make assumptions, however, so I asked, "And how can I be of help?"
Anna looked at Tim uncertainly. I couldn't read his expression, but he glanced at his wife and said, "Well. Go on, then."
Anna tried to start a sentence but failed. "You can't even say it can you?" said Tim. "Well I don't blame you." He turned to me. "She's jealous," he said. "Of our daughter. Of our twelve-year-old daughter."

Write the start of a story using five habitual elements of a character's life.

(Since my stories never seem to start this way, I thought I'd go with it this time:)

Sam was a simple man who relied on simple things. Simple things, as he considered them. He relied on polished shoes and designer suits. He relied on the chip shop downstairs for his Friday fish and chips. He relied on the sleeping pills he got from the chemist to knock him out before the regular train passed by his flat and messed up his sleep schedule. But if there was one thing Sam didn't like to rely on, it was other people. Other people were unknown variables in the equation of his life. Relying on them - trusting them, would mean knowing them, and that would take more time than he was willing to invest. His mind was consumed by the calculation of worthwhile investments.
This morning, however, Sam was to find that not all the things he relied upon were as, well, reliable, as he believed. The traditional analogue alarm clock that had woken him up for the last ten years at six didn't go off. The milkman, who usually came a little after six, and whose tinkling of bottles below his bedroom might have disturbed his light sleep, didn't show up. His telephone, which the office tried again and again to contact him on when he hadn't shown up by 9.30, had fallen off the bedside table and its vibrations were muffled in his laundry basket.
When eventually overwhelming fact of daytime eased him from his narcotic slumber, it was almost eleven. The realisation made him feel sick. He hadn't been late for work in almost four years, and the last time hadn't been remotely his fault. What should he do? It would be embarrassing to walk into work at this time, with all eyes on him. Calling in sick, then? A disgusting thought. He hadn't had a sick day since they sent him home that one time he'd collapsed in a board meeting. A moment of weakness he didn't want to repeat. He didn't even take regular holidays, except at Christmas, to visit his parents.