Creative writing prompts: 147 prompts for stories, poems and memoir

Creative writing prompts are short starting points, such as a first line, a situation, a character or a rule, that give you something to write toward for ten or twenty minutes. The 147 below are original and grouped by what they make you practice: openings, plot, character, setting, dialogue, poetry, memoir and constraints. Pick one in under a minute, set a timer for fifteen minutes and write without stopping. When the timer rings, stop, even mid-sentence: the unfinished line is where you start next time.

For genre sparks, there are separate lists of fantasy, horror and romance prompts. For a full premise rather than a spark, the story ideas page has 120, sorted by genre, and the prompts here don't repeat them. Where two groups below touch the same subject, the form does the separating: a poetry prompt asks for lines and stanzas, a memoir prompt for something that happened to you, a constraint for a rule the prose has to obey.

First line prompts

Write the line, then the next one without stopping. Plenty of finished stories lose the line that started them, so keep it or cut it later. For how published novels open, see the opening lines examples.

1. “My mother taught me to drive, to swim and to lie, in that order.”
2. “Nobody in our family had ever been to a wedding that went to plan, so we brought snacks.”
3. “I was nine when I sold the house, and nobody stopped me.”
4. “The letter said I had won, and it didn't say what.”
5. “By the time the ferry reached the island, everyone on board had agreed not to mention the man in the blue coat.”
6. “My sister keeps a list of everyone who has ever apologized to her, and I'm not on it.”
7. “The dog came home on Tuesday wearing a collar none of us had bought.”
8. “There are two kinds of people in Ardley: those who know about the tunnel, and my mother.”
9. “I took the job because the ad said ‘no experience necessary,’ which turned out to be a warning.”
10. “The first time I saw the ocean, I was forty-three and holding my mother's ashes in a coffee can.”
11. “Every Friday at six, the man in 4B played the same song, badly, and every Friday at four minutes past, someone applauded.”
12. “It was the kind of town where the only stoplight was a matter of opinion.”
13. “She left me the car, the debts and a key to a storage unit in Tucson.”
14. “We were halfway through dinner when Grandpa admitted he had never been to Korea.”
15. “The night I turned thirty, the fortune teller on Canal Street gave me my money back.”
16. “I have been lying to my therapist for two years, and she has been very helpful.”
17. “The river froze for the first time in sixty years, and the whole town walked out to see what it had been hiding.”
18. “Mr. Okafor taught chemistry for thirty-one years and blew up exactly one classroom, on purpose.”
19. “They said the storm would miss us, so we didn't tie anything down, including Uncle Ray.”
20. “When the power came back on, the house was not quite the same shape.”

Situation prompts for plot

A situation prompt hands you a problem that won't wait. Write the scene where it starts, not the backstory, and stop when someone makes a decision.

21. Two strangers reach for the last copy of a newspaper at an airport. One of them is on the front page.
22. A man is asked to give a speech at his own surprise party, which he has known about for a month.
23. A substitute teacher finds out the class is running a betting pool on how long she'll last, and her odds are the worst ever posted.
24. A wedding cake slides off the delivery van two blocks from the venue. The baker has forty minutes and one plain sheet cake.
25. A man buys a secondhand book and finds his own handwriting in the margins.
26. A fallen oak blocks the only road out of a cul-de-sac, and the two neighbors who have been suing each other for years have to clear it together.
27. A tour guide realizes that one member of her group knows the city's history better than she does, and keeps correcting her, politely, in front of everyone.
28. A father and his adult daughter drive six hours to the funeral of someone only one of them liked.
29. A job interview is going well until the interviewer uses the candidate's high-school nickname.
30. Two people arrive at an empty apartment at the same time, each holding a signed lease.
31. A night-shift baker gets an order for three hundred dinner rolls, for tomorrow, from the town's only funeral home.
32. A woman is called to the police station to identify a lost wallet. It's hers, and it's also in her bag.
33. The power fails during the final round of a televised quiz show, and the contestants keep playing in the dark.
34. Someone leaves a baby's sock on the windshield of your character's car every morning for a week.
35. At a company retreat, a trust fall goes wrong, and only one person saw who stepped back.
36. A man drives three hours to return a dog he found, and the owner says it isn't hers. Then the dog runs into the house.
37. A priest hears a confession through the grille and recognizes his brother's voice.
38. A ten-year-old runs the family restaurant for one evening because both parents are at the hospital, and a food critic is sitting at table six.
39. A mail carrier has a letter for a house that burned down last week. The family is living in a tent on the lawn, waiting for it.

Here is prompt 24, the falling cake, after fifteen minutes of the method in the introduction: no planning, no stopping, starting with the cake already sliding.

The prompt supplied the fall, the forty minutes and the plain sheet cake. Most of what the draft adds is texture: a name, a street, a christening that never happened. The detail that matters is the question: “How long does a bride look at a cake before somebody cuts it?” The prompt asks what Marisol can save. Her question turns that into a plan she might get away with, which gives the next session somewhere to go. A second pass might tell it from the bride's side, or stretch the forty minutes into real time.

Character prompts with contradictions

Each of these people has a contradiction built in. Put them in a scene where the contradiction costs them something. The character traits list has hundreds more to combine.

40. A pacifist who teaches fencing.
41. A wedding photographer who doesn't believe in marriage and has photographed both of her ex-husband's later weddings.
42. A hypochondriac who works as an emergency-room triage nurse and has never once been sick on shift.
43. A con artist who can't lie to children.
44. A celebrated chef who eats cereal for dinner every night, standing at the sink.
45. A retired judge who shoplifts one small thing every Saturday.
46. A man of ninety who is learning to skateboard to impress his great-grandson.
47. A climate scientist who has never flown, now on a plane to the conference she organized.
48. A divorce lawyer who publishes love poems under a pen name.
49. A small-town sheriff who is afraid of the dark.
50. A professional organizer whose own garage door hasn't closed since 2015.
51. A man who has memorized every train timetable in Europe and has never left Ohio.
52. A preacher's daughter who runs the only bar in a dry county.
53. A teenage chess champion who plays board games with her little brother and always lets him win, badly.
54. A funeral director who laughs at everything except at work.
55. A former war photographer who now shoots dogs for a pet-food company and has never been happier.
56. A beloved children's author who can't stand children.
57. An identical twin who has spent thirty years pretending to be the other twin.
58. A fire inspector who keeps forty candles burning in her apartment every night.
59. A woman who answers every call from an unknown number, because one day it will be her son.

Setting prompts with pressure

A setting does work when it presses on the people in it: it costs them money, sleep, privacy or patience. Describe each place through one person who has to be there, using only the details that person would notice.

60. A truck stop at the last exit before the state line, at 4 a.m. on Christmas morning.
61. The waiting room of an emergency vet clinic on a Saturday night.
62. A karaoke box in Osaka on a Tuesday, booked for six hours by one customer.
63. A self-storage facility, where every unit holds the end of somebody's story.
64. A call center's break room during a heat wave, the day the air conditioning fails.
65. A hospital chapel at 3 a.m., used mostly by people who don't pray.
66. A ski town in July, after the summer hikers leave and before the snow.
67. A highway rest stop where a wedding party and a funeral party pull in at the same time.
68. A public swimming pool in the last hour before it closes for the season.
69. A courthouse hallway on the morning of a custody hearing.
70. The kitchen of a family restaurant during the dinner rush, seen by the dishwasher.
71. An island village of two hundred people on the day the only shop closes for good.
72. The galley of a long-haul flight in the hours when the cabin lights are off.
73. A cemetery groundskeeper's shed, full of things people left on graves.
74. A border town where the main street is the border.
75. A school gym set up as a polling place, from the opening of the doors to the count.
76. The top floor of a parking garage, where teenagers go because nobody else does.
77. A farmhouse kitchen in harvest week, when nobody sits down to eat.

Dialogue prompts for voice

These train the ear. Some are opening exchanges and some are rules for a whole scene. Draft without dialogue tags, then add only the ones the reader needs. The guide to writing dialogue covers the rest.

78. Two people argue about the dishes and are really arguing about whether to have a child.
79. One character asks a question, and the other answers every line with another question.
80. Two old friends meet after twenty years. Each has heard a rumor about the other, and neither will mention it.
81. A phone call where the reader hears only one side.
82. A job interview in which the candidate is plainly more qualified than the interviewer, and both of them know it.
83. Open with: “Don't take your coat off. We're not staying.”
84. Open with: “I'm only going to say this once, and then I'm going to deny it.”
85. Open with: “Is that my sweater?” “Define ‘my.’”
86. A breakup in which neither person says the word “over.”
87. A parent explains death to a child who keeps asking practical questions.
88. Two people who share no language get something important across.
89. A customer-service call in which the customer is calm and the representative is falling apart.
90. An interrogation in which the suspect is in charge.
91. Open with: “You can't be here.” “And yet.”
92. A dinner party where everyone at the table knows something the host doesn't.
93. Two siblings divide their late father's tools, and every tool comes with an argument.
94. One character lies three times. The reader catches every lie, and the other character catches none.

Poetry writing prompts

Each of these sets a formal move as well as a subject: an address, a persona, a list, a found line, a word rule, a fixed length, a shape on the page. The move is what makes the draft a poem rather than a paragraph with line breaks. They sit beside the 100 poetry prompts rather than repeat them. Write long, then cut to the lines that still surprise you.

95. Write a poem to the person who lived in your home before you, one line for each thing they left behind.
96. List everything you have ever been told to stop doing, and let the list turn into a poem.
97. Speak as a road sign that has stood on the same corner for fifty years.
98. Take a sentence from a safety notice, on a ladder, a train or a hair dryer, and make it the last line of a love poem.
99. Write one stanza for each room of the same house, all at the same minute.
100. Write about the weather as if it were gossip, in couplets, one rumor to each.
101. A love poem to something unlovable: a parking ticket, a dentist's drill, Monday.
102. A poem that lasts exactly as long as it takes a kettle to boil.
103. The poem your phone would write about you, from inside your pocket.
104. A poem whose title asks one question and whose last line answers a different one.
105. A poem in two columns that can be read across or down.
106. A job you have done, using only the names of its tools and the verbs.
107. Rearrange the subject lines in your inbox until they make a poem.
108. Write to a stranger who will read the poem in a hundred years.

Memoir and personal essay prompts

These are for things that happened to you, so the rule is the truth: change nothing you remember, and say so where memory runs out. Each points at one scene, not a decade, and several tell you where to begin. Write the scene first and the reflection after. For gentler, private writing, try the journal prompts. For shaping the pages into a book, see how to write a memoir.

109. The day you found out a family story wasn't true.
110. A skill nobody taught you, and how you found out you had it.
111. A meal at which someone told you news that changed your life. Start with what was on the table.
112. A hospital waiting room you have sat in. Write only what you could see from your chair, and stop before anyone comes through the door with news.
113. A stranger whose name you never learned who changed what you did next.
114. The worst haircut of your life, and what else was happening that year.
115. A time you were the new person at a school, a job or in a country. Begin at the door.
116. A place where you used to hide, and what you were hiding from.
117. A rule in your house growing up that you only later realized was unusual.
118. A phone call you remember word for word. Before you write a line of it, write down where you were standing and what you were looking at.
119. The first time you saw a parent cry, or a time you expected to and didn't.
120. Your name: who chose it, what it has done for you, whether you would keep it.
121. A trip that went wrong in a way you are now glad about.
122. A night you got lost, and who found you or how you found the way.
123. The first time you heard music played live, and what you did afterward.
124. A promise you broke, and the person you broke it to.
125. A piece of clothing you kept long after it stopped fitting.
126. A secret you kept for someone else, and what it cost to keep it.
127. The moment you realized you had become your mother or your father. Tell it as a scene.

Constraint and form prompts

A constraint takes choices away, which often pushes you past the first idea, the one most writers would have. Raymond Queneau told one trivial incident on a Paris bus 99 different ways in Exercises in Style (1947). Start smaller. These rules are for prose. The poetry and journal lists have their own.

128. A drabble: a story of exactly 100 words, one of the named forms of flash fiction. Leave the title out of the count.
129. A story told through a train station's lost-and-found log, one entry per line.
130. A story told in the minutes of a homeowners' association meeting.
131. The instructions one house-sitter leaves for the next.
132. A scene written backward: start with its last line and end with its first.
133. A story in which each paragraph is one sentence longer than the one before.
134. One five-minute incident, three times: as a police report, as gossip and as a love letter.
135. A story told entirely in one-star reviews of the same hotel, over twenty years.
136. Second person, future tense: “You will wake at six, and you will not call her.”
137. A complete argument between two people, with no dialogue at all.
138. A story that happens in real time, in the five minutes it takes to read.
139. A year of voicemails one person leaves, none of them answered.
140. A story in which the narrator never says the one word that would explain everything.
141. A eulogy for someone who is still alive.
142. A story told in footnotes to a document the reader never sees.
143. A 500-word story with no names and no pronoun but “we.”
144. A museum audio guide for the house where it happened.
145. A packing list, with crossings-out.
146. A letter to a company's complaints department that lets the real story leak through. It's the epistolary novel's method on one page: the reader learns more than the writer means to say.
147. A fairy tale retold as a news report filed from the scene, using only what a reporter could confirm.

How to use a writing prompt

A prompt is a way past the blank page, not an assignment. These steps work for every group above.

1. Choose in under a minute

   Read down one group until a prompt gives you a picture, and take that one. Choosing carefully can turn into a way of not writing. If two catch you, take the stranger of the two.

2. Start inside the moment

   Set the timer for fifteen minutes and begin in the middle of what the prompt describes: the cake is already sliding, the confession has already started. Writers call it starting in medias res. Whatever came before can arrive later, in a line.

3. Don't stop to fix anything

   Misspellings, wrong names, sentences that go nowhere: leave them. Stopping to judge can turn the prompt back into a blank page. If you stall, write the next thing the character sees.

4. Stop mid-sentence

   When the timer rings, stop, even halfway through a line. An unfinished sentence is usually easier to pick up tomorrow than a finished page.

5. Read it back and name it

   Now decide what the draft wants to be: a scene that wants to grow, a poem hiding in three lines, an essay about your own life in disguise. The poetry, memoir and constraint prompts set the form in advance. With the others, let the draft show you.

6. Change one thing and write it again

   The second pass is where a prompt becomes yours. Change the point of view, the tense, the length or who is telling it, and see what the change shows you.

Why prompts stop working

Prompts tend to lose their pull in a few familiar ways. Each of these has a simple fix.

• Collecting instead of writing. Saving lists of prompts feels like progress without putting a word on the page. Copy five into a document and use them before you look for more.
• Writing the prompt instead of the story. The first paragraph often restates the prompt and the story starts in the third. In revision, try the draft without its first two paragraphs.
• Stopping where the prompt stops. Most prompts describe a beginning. The story is what happens after somebody chooses. Keep going until a choice has been made and paid for.
• Treating the prompt as sacred. Change the name, the city, the century. A prompt you have bent out of shape has done its job.
• Only ever doing warm-ups. Fifty fifteen-minute drafts and no finished piece is a common way to stall. Make every tenth draft one you revise until it's done.
• Choosing the comfortable group. It's easy to keep picking the kind of prompt you're already good at. Once a week, take one from the group you avoid. If the blank page itself is the problem, the guide to writer's block goes through the causes one by one.

If your prompt drafts are documents in one Strokes project, ask the Strokes Assistant to review the project once a month. It tells you what's repetitive across the drafts, such as the same opening move or every ending on a door closing.