Dystopian writing prompts: 100 dystopian story ideas and first lines

A dystopian writing prompt gives you a society that promised something, such as safety, equality, plenty or happiness, and a character who has started to notice the price. The 100 prompts below are original and grouped by how the regime keeps control, from watching and rationing to keeping everyone comfortable, with ten first lines at the end. Pick one, show the rule at work on an ordinary morning, and let your character break it for someone they love.

Thomas More coined utopia in 1516 from the Greek for “no place,” and John Stuart Mill used “dys-topians” in an 1868 speech. A dystopia is a society that still works, for someone. If you want a world after the collapse rather than a world under control, the post-apocalyptic group in the science fiction writing prompts is the place to start.

Surveillance and social score prompts

Most dystopias watch. These go past the discovery that someone is watching and make it personal: who sees, what they score, and what a character will give up for a better number.

1. Every apartment door in the city shows its tenants' combined citizen score. A widower's score has dropped every week since his adult daughter moved back in, and he has to decide whether to tell her why.
2. The city has one blind spot, a bench in the botanical garden that no camera covers. Everyone knows about it and nobody admits to using it, and this morning a woman sits down there and finds a letter addressed to her.
3. Journals are compulsory and read monthly by the Ministry of Feeling. A sixteen-year-old keeps two: the one she hands in, and one she writes in the margins of her chemistry textbook.
4. An analyst in the watching service is given a new subject: her own mother, flagged for “unusual quiet.”
5. Every kitchen has a listening panel that flags certain words. The Mensah family has spent ten years building a private language out of recipes, and their youngest has just used it at school.
6. Every door opens only to a scanned face, so the underground sells masks of dead citizens with clean records. A mask maker is asked to copy a face from a photograph and recognizes her sister, who the state says is alive and well in the eastern provinces.
7. The state awards points for reporting neighbors. An old man reports himself every week, for small invented crimes, to keep his granddaughter's points high enough for university.
8. A technician sent to fix a district's cameras discovers they have never been connected to anything. The only person she can tell is the man who installed them, now the minister of security.
9. A boy's school tablet watches his face during lessons and reports his attention to his parents. He has learned to look interested while thinking about anything else, and his little sister can't.
10. A new law lets citizens buy one day a year off camera. A cleaner saves for eleven years to buy hers, and the whole block wants to know what she will do with it.

Laws of everyday life

A dystopia is clearest in its small laws: what you may eat, wear, say or name a child. Give a character a reason to break one that the reader agrees with.

11. Every child is named from a state list of four hundred. A couple want to give their daughter her grandmother's name, which was taken off the list the year the grandmother was arrested.
12. Curfew falls at nine, and a night-shift nurse's bus gets her home at 9:12. For eleven years she has paid the fine, and tonight the fine becomes a prison sentence.
13. Marriages must be renewed every five years before a state panel. A couple married for forty years fail their renewal interview because they can't agree on how they met.
14. Novels may be read only by citizens over sixty, who are judged too old to be dangerous. A seventy-year-old starts a book club, and the young people start coming.
15. Only the ruling family may wear blue. A tailor dyes a wedding coat the darkest gray she can, so dark it looks blue at dusk, and the inspector has to decide whether it counts.
16. Each citizen may speak two thousand words a day, counted by a chip in the collar. A schoolteacher runs out at noon with an afternoon of classes still to teach.
17. Locks were outlawed under the Transparency Act. A woman who has kept one room in her house bolted for twenty years gets a visit from the inspector.
18. Every family must move house every three years, so that nobody grows attached to a place. A boy learns that his father has been bribing the housing office for six years to keep them in the same apartment, and then he learns why.
19. Private celebrations are banned, birthdays included. Every March, a woman bakes a cake for a daughter the state doesn't know she has.
20. Music is licensed by the hour, and humming in public without a license earns a fine. At her husband's funeral a grandmother starts to hum, and the whole street joins in.

Work, class and debt prompts

Many dystopias are caste systems with good paperwork. Decide who does the dirty work, who decided they should, and what it costs to change places.

21. Debt passes to children at birth. A baby is born in the Low Wards owing four hundred thousand credits, and the hospital won't release her to parents who can't sign for it.
22. Jobs are assigned by lottery at eighteen, for life. A boy who drew “executioner” has a week to find someone willing to trade.
23. The rich live above the smog line, and the only people who move between the levels are window cleaners. One of them is offered a fortune to carry a child down.
24. Workers in the logistics zones may sleep four hours a night, and more must be bought. A shift supervisor sells her own sleep hours to her son so he can study for his exams.
25. Prison sentences can be served by paid substitutes. A man who has served nine years for other people is offered a tenth, for the judge's son.
26. Every citizen sits the Ranking each spring, and the scores decide housing, rations and whom you may marry. A proctor sees her own son cheat and has the reporting form in her hand.
27. Wages in the mining colony are paid in company tokens that expire every Friday. A miner who has never saved anything in his life finds a jar of tokens minted before the expiry rule.
28. Each year the Ministry approves one application to move up a class. The clerk who decides has nine thousand on her desk, with her brother's on top.
29. The retirement age was abolished, and ninety-year-olds still clock in at the cannery. A foreman hides an exhausted old woman in the supply closet whenever the inspectors come.
30. Food is graded by class, and a chef who cooks for the top tier smuggles the leftovers down to the bottom one in the bins. Her new sous-chef asks too many questions about the bins.

Bodies, birth and medicine prompts

Who decides about birth, illness, age and death is where many of the darkest dystopias begin. Keep the camera on one body and one decision.

31. At seventy, every citizen is honored with a Completion ceremony and does not come home. The woman who has led the ceremony for twenty years turns seventy on Friday.
32. Parenthood requires a license, and the exam includes a home visit. A couple who failed twice are visited a third time by the inspector who failed them, who is now pregnant herself.
33. Illness is a civic offense, and the sick hide it to keep their jobs. A pharmacist who sells cough syrup under the counter is caught by her own daughter, a health warden.
34. Everyone under twenty-five must give blood monthly to the Longevity Service. A student nurse traces where her own blood goes.
35. Every citizen is weighed on the first of the month, and rations are adjusted to the gram. A family of five has been feeding their underweight grandfather from their own plates for a year, and the scales have noticed.
36. A drug in the water has ended grief. A girl born immune to it is the only person in the city who cries at her mother's funeral, and the ministry wants to know how.
37. Burial was outlawed to save land, and every body goes to the state compost. A son digs a grave for his father at night, in the last forest.
38. A woman's employer owns her apartment, her insurance and her calendar, and her contract forbids pregnancy for the first ten years. She is four months along, and the annual medical is on Tuesday.
39. Twins are illegal, and one of every pair is given away at birth. Two strangers in a ration line realize they have the same birthmark and the same laugh.
40. The state collects one kidney from every citizen on their thirtieth birthday, as a tax. Three days before he turns thirty, a man learns whose name is already on his.

History, news and records prompts

Control the record and you control the past. These put a character inside the machinery: an editor, a translator, an announcer, an old man who remembers.

41. The national history textbook is revised every September. This year its editor is told to remove a name from chapter nine: her father's.
42. The state permits one news sentence a day, read at noon by a single announcer. After thirty years, she changes one word.
43. Owning a map from before the Unification is a crime, because the borders on it are wrong. A schoolboy finds one sewn into the lining of his grandfather's coat, with their town on the other side of the line.
44. Every year the state dictionary loses five hundred words. Its oldest lexicographer has started hiding the deleted ones in the lullabies she sings at the state nursery.
45. A photo retoucher has spent twenty years erasing disgraced officials from official pictures. In every one, she leaves a single hand on someone's shoulder.
46. Every year the city celebrates the Battle of Hollin Ford, which the state invented. The last soldier who fought in what really happened there is ninety-four and has been invited to speak.
47. Books are no longer burned. They are rewritten, a sentence at a time, by an office of editors who change nothing a reader would notice. A junior editor realizes that a children's classic has been changed so often that the villain is now the hero.
48. Every new leader resets the calendar to Year One. A woman who has lived through six Year Ones keeps the true count in a notebook, and her granddaughter wants to know how old she really is.
49. Foreign news reaches the country through one office of translators, who soften every report. A new translator renders one exactly, and it airs before anyone checks.
50. Citizens over eighty must record their life stories for the national archive, and each one is checked against the official history. A retired ferryman keeps failing the check because he remembers too well.

Scarcity, rationing and border prompts

When there isn't enough, someone decides who gets what's left. Make the rationing specific, down to the coupon, and put a character on the wrong side of it.

51. Water is rationed by the liter, and each household's allowance depends on how many people live there. A family of four has been reporting five since their grandmother died.
52. The last temperate city opens its gate once a year to a hundred people chosen by the ministry. This year a gate guard's own mother, deported a decade ago, is in the line holding a pass that isn't hers.
53. Clean air is sold by the room. A teacher whose classroom filter breaks buys her pupils an hour a day out of her own pay, until she can't.
54. Power comes on for two hours a night in loyal districts and never in the others. An electrician is paid to run a secret line across the boundary to a children's hospital.
55. Home gardens are illegal under the seed patent laws. A retired botanist grows tomatoes in her bathtub and has to decide whom to share them with.
56. A floating detention city of a hundred anchored ships has its own markets, schools and elections. Its new harbor master is ordered to cut its water by half.
57. Hot water is rationed to one shower a week, taken at the public bathhouse. The bathhouse is the only place without microphones, because they rust, and the regime has just announced waterproof ones.
58. Each family in the drought provinces may send one child north to the cool zone. Two sisters have one permit between them, and their mother has to write in the name.
59. A printer who forges ration coupons has kept half the district fed for a year. The ministry offers her a job designing the new ones.
60. Every tree in the province is numbered and owned by the state, and cutting one is a crime. In the coldest January in a century, a forester finds a family burning their furniture beside the numbered tree outside their door.

Corporate and machine rule prompts

Some dystopias have no dictator, only terms of service. These put a company or an algorithm where the government used to be, and a character who reads the small print.

61. The city of Halcyon is owned by one company, and residents are “members” who can be canceled. A boy's mother is canceled on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday her photo is gone from the school's parents' wall.
62. An algorithm approves every marriage, with an approval rate of 99.8 percent. A couple fall in the other 0.2, and their appeal will be heard by the algorithm.
63. National elections have been replaced by a customer satisfaction survey sent to every citizen in December. A pollster notices the results have been identical, to the decimal point, for nine years.
64. Everyone in Pell River works for the company, banks with it, rents from it and is buried by it. A junior accountant finds a line in the budget labeled “Contingency: town.”
65. Every door in the city opens only after a fifteen-second advertisement. A firefighter has to get through nine of them to reach a child.
66. The country's head of state is a cartoon mascot, voiced by a rotating team of actors. One of them goes off script during the New Year address.
67. Every citizen signs the Agreement at sixteen, all four thousand pages of it. A law student who actually reads it finds a clause on page 3,906 that comes into force next week.
68. The machine that runs the government has made every decision for thirty years. Now it asks for one human to make a single decision, and it won't say which.
69. A shipping company buys a small nation's debt, and with it the right to name its streets, set its exams and choose its anthem. A music teacher refuses to teach the new anthem.
70. All work is posted as micro-tasks and bid on by the minute. A man whose daughter is missing posts the job of finding her, and fourteen thousand strangers take it for a few cents each.

Paradise with a price

The most unsettling dystopias look like utopias from inside. The price is hidden, and somebody has agreed not to look.

71. Rennick has had no crime in forty years, and its only detective spends his days tending the station's roses. Then a bicycle goes missing, and the council begs him not to investigate.
72. In Eloise everyone has a garden, a pension and a view of the sea. No one has ever left, and when a girl tries to buy a train ticket, the clerk can't find the button.
73. Parents in Garden City visit their children every Sunday at the Nursery, where the children are happier than any family could make them. A father asks to take his son home for one night.
74. Every year the referendum on the Gardener's rule passes with a hundred percent of the vote. This year the count finds one ballot marked no, and the whole country waits to learn whose it is.
75. Everything in Amity is free: you only have to ask, and every request is posted in the square. A teenager needs something she can't ask for in public.
76. Nine million people live in the Dream, and three hundred caretakers keep their bodies alive. A caretaker falls in love with one of the sleepers, who has never been awake in her life.
77. Unhappiness is treated free of charge at any clinic, and nearly everyone is cured. A poet keeps missing her appointments, and the clinic starts sending a car.
78. Concordia has known no war, hunger or poverty for a century, and its prosperity rests on one law: nobody from outside may enter. A fisherman pulls a half-drowned stranger out of the sea.
79. Every citizen is assigned a hobby for life at twenty-one. A man assigned to watercolors has been building a boat in his garage for nineteen years, one plank a month.
80. The happiest country on Earth has topped the world rankings for fifty years. A foreign journalist on a seven-day visa is given a cheerful guide, who on day five asks, very politely, to be smuggled out in her luggage.

Rebels, informers and bystanders

Most people in a dystopia neither rebel nor rule. They get by. The strongest stories put one of them where getting by stops working.

81. The leader of the resistance dies, and the movement needs someone to play him on its broadcasts. They choose his barber.
82. An informer joins a resistance cell and slowly realizes that four of its five members are informers, each reporting to a different ministry. The fifth is the one she was sent to catch, and the only one who trusts her.
83. A border guard who has turned back thousands of people lets one family through without knowing why. The next morning her commander asks her to explain it in writing.
84. The resistance's pirate radio station is a twelve-year-old with a homemade transmitter. The officer hunting it is his father, who is starting to suspect.
85. After the regime falls, a woman who typed its arrest lists is asked to testify. She typed her own mother's name in 1998, and she kept the carbon copy.
86. The regime's best poster artist has hidden a second picture in every poster for ten years, one that shows only in the rain.
87. A schoolteacher forges travel papers for the resistance at night. On Monday the ministry sends her a new pupil: the daughter of the man who checks the papers at the border.
88. A senior minister walks across the border and asks for asylum. The free country next door is sure he's a spy, and the only person who believes him is the junior clerk typing his statement.
89. A clerk who has never broken a rule in his life is photographed stepping, by accident, on the leader's portrait. By morning the resistance has made him a hero, and the regime wants him to apologize on television.
90. The regime falls overnight, and the ministry cook is the only senior employee who doesn't run. The new government needs someone who knows where everything is.

Dystopian first lines

Write the line, then the next one without stopping. Each implies a rule, a place and a voice that has learned to live with both.

91. “On the day they took the clocks, my mother hid the kitchen timer in the flour.”
92. “The announcement came at noon, as always, and for the first time in my life I didn't stand up.”
93. “We were allowed one photograph per family, so Grandmother chose the one with the dog.”
94. “By the age of ten, every child in Harrow Block could tell a real smile from a compliant one.”
95. “I was eleven the first time I saw someone cry in public, and the whole tram looked away.”
96. “Nobody had used the word ‘tomorrow’ since the Planning Office took it over.”
97. “My father was a loyal man, which is why it took the ministry so long to notice he was gone.”
98. “The sky was rationed too, in its way: the dome went clear for one hour on Sundays.”
99. “When the inspector asked what I'd done with my extra ration, I told him the truth, which was the worst thing I could have said.”
100. “The day the river was declared state property, my grandfather went down to it and apologized.”

Build a dystopia from a prompt

A prompt gives you a rule. These steps build a society around it and put a person inside.

1. Write the promise

   A regime usually offers something before it takes anything: safety after a war, order after a collapse, an end to hunger, sickness or grief. Write the promise in the regime's own words, as a slogan or the first line of its constitution. A promise that sounds tempting makes the regime easier to believe. The promise usually carries the book's theme, such as freedom against safety, and the guide to common themes in literature lists more.

2. Write the price, and who pays it

   Then write what the promise costs and who pays: one class, one age group, everyone a little or a few people a lot. The gap between who benefits and who pays is where your conflict lives, the character-against-society kind covered in the guide to types of conflict.

3. Show the rule in an ordinary morning

   Skip the history lesson and the info dump. Show the rule at work in something small, such as breakfast, a line at the bus stop or a school register, and let the reader work out the rest. For the society behind the routine, the worldbuilding template has sections on power, belief and daily life.

4. Choose a narrator with something to lose

   A born rebel sees the regime from outside. A believer, a clerk or a parent with a good job sees it from inside, and has more to lose when it cracks. A narrator who believes is often an unreliable narrator as well: the reader sees what they can't.

5. Make the rebellion personal

   Ideology rarely moves a character on page one. Love, grief, a child's question or a friend in trouble does. Let the first broken rule be for one person, and let the cause come later, if it comes at all.

6. Choose the kind of ending

   Decide early whether the regime wins, the character escapes, the system cracks or the character becomes part of it. Each ending says something different about the promise, and every rule you show should point toward it.

Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1920–21, and it reached readers in English in 1924, in Gregory Zilboorg's translation. Its narrator, D-503, is a mathematician building the state's great spaceship, the Integral, and he describes the daily timetable with pride:

Zamyatin doesn't stop to explain how the state came to schedule breakfast. He shows the schedule through a narrator who finds it beautiful, and the reader's unease grows in the gap between that pride and the spoons rising at the same second. One routine does the work of a history chapter, faster.

First line 91 does the same in a single sentence: “On the day they took the clocks, my mother hid the kitchen timer in the flour.” No one explains the regime, yet the reader infers a great deal from one ordinary object. The state has taken the clocks, so it wants control of time itself. The ban is thorough enough to cover a kitchen timer, or she wouldn't hide it. Searches are expected, or flour wouldn't be a hiding place. And the narrator's mother thinks keeping one is worth the risk. The story can start the moment somebody looks in the flour.

Prompt 3 can open through documents, with the same trust in the reader:

The two documents do the explaining. The journal shows what the state wants to hear, the margin shows what it costs, and the gap between them is the plot. A story told this way is a cousin of the epistolary novel, and the margins can carry a whole book.

Dystopian clichés to avoid

Readers of the genre have seen a lot of regimes. These are the moves that make a new one feel secondhand.

• A regime with no promise. If nobody could ever have wanted it, it's hard to believe anyone accepted it. Give it something people were glad to get, at least at first.
• The chosen teenager who sees through it at once. Let your character believe first. Doubt that grows over chapters is more convincing than doubt that arrives with the first page.
• A world with no economy. Who grows the food, who empties the bins, who fixes the cameras? Follow one supply chain and the society starts to feel real.
• The rebellion that wins in a weekend. Regimes are kept running by ordinary people with jobs and families. Show what it costs each of them to stop.
• Factions sorted by one personality trait. People in real systems hold mixed loyalties: a guard who hates the regime and loves his pension. Give your factions arguments inside them.
• A stupid regime. A government that can be fooled by a disguise is hard to fear. Competent opponents are frightening, and they make the hero's small wins count.
• A copy of the famous ones. If your state watches like Orwell's in Nineteen Eighty-Four and burns books like Bradbury's in Fahrenheit 451, readers are likely to see the seams. Take one mechanism and push it somewhere those books never went.

A long draft makes the regime's rules easy to break by accident: curfew at nine in chapter two and at ten in chapter twelve, a ration that changes size for no reason. Keep a Rules document with one line per rule: the law, the penalty, who enforces it and the chapter where the reader first sees it.

Once the draft is long, attach the Rules document and ask the Strokes Assistant to review the project against it. It tells you what's inconsistent, such as a character out after curfew with no consequence. Not every broken rule it finds is a mistake: some are the plot.