80 Creative Writing Prompts to Fuel Your Imagination

Not sure what to write next? Or maybe you’re yearning for a fresh challenge but can’t decide how to push yourself? To help you find your next jumping-off place, we’ve come up with this list of 80 creative writing prompts.

We’ve included plot suggestions (that could serve as short story ideas or book prompts), exercises to help you develop particular aspects of your writing, and some genre-specific prompts, so hopefully there’s something here to get your brain firing on all cylinders.

How you use them is entirely up to you, whether that’s to inspire a scene, a short story, or an entire novel—make them work for you.

Story Prompts to Help You Find Your Next Project

Whether you’re looking for short story prompts or something to spark novel ideas, give one of these a try.

• A character fails at what they believe is their life’s ambition. Why did it happen? What do they do next?

• Start with a character making a life-changing decision or facing up to their antagonist, then work backward to understand what led them to this point.

• A character is trapped (figuratively or literally) but doesn’t realize it yet. How do they come to that realization and find a way out?

• A character is going about their day when someone they haven’t seen in years is suddenly standing right in front of them. What happens next?

• There’s a world where an action we consider ordinary is completely forbidden. Why? What impact does it have?

• A character gets exactly what they’ve always wanted and discovers that it doesn’t actually make them happy. Why? What do they do next?

• Start by asking yourself, “What if…?” and keep on asking it, even if your ideas get strange. Read your notes back and look for intriguing possibilities.

Prompts to Get Unstuck With Existing Stories

If you’ve stalled on your work in progress and need a new direction or something to kick-start your imagination again, here are some interesting things to write about.

Don’t worry if what you write doesn’t neatly fit into the plot, as you can always cut it once it’s served its purpose of getting you moving again.

• Throw in an extra obstacle for your characters to deal with, even if it feels really random.

• Start an argument and see where it leads.

• Imagine what might be happening elsewhere in your fictional world.

• Think about how a side character views the current situation.

• Your character has to confront something about their past or something they’re wrong about.

• Your character discovers a document of some kind (like a letter or a page from a book). Include the text as part of the story.

• Another character attempts to take over the plot to further their own agenda.

Prompts for When You’re Craving a Fresh Challenge

If you’re feeling uninspired or like you should push yourself more, here are some good writing prompts to stretch your creative muscles.

• Write from the perspective of a nonhuman character or an inanimate object.

• Tell a story entirely through the medium of written things, like letters, diary entries, emails, social media posts/messages, or even shopping lists.

• Use an unreliable narrator.

• Try to mimic the style of an author whose stories you’ve never really clicked with.

• Write from the perspective of a character who doesn’t want to tell this story and will use any trick to wriggle their way out of it.

• Write in a nonlinear way (where things don’t happen in chronological order).

• Write a story with a technical constraint (a rule you impose on yourself), like trying to avoid using a particular letter or limiting yourself to words of a certain length.

Prompts for Developing Characters

Here are some character development prompts to write about that should help you flesh out a new character or get to know an existing one.

• Imagine you’re watching someone walking down the street. How do they move? What seems to catch their attention? What are they wearing? Build on this until you can answer bigger questions about who they are and where they might be going.

• Come up with three items a character might have in their pocket or bag, and think about how they got there and why.

• Describe a place your character considers their own, whether that’s their bedroom, desk, or even somewhere out in nature. Then, think about how they inhabit that space. Are there any habits, rituals, or strong associations/memories they have?

• Write about a personal tradition your character has. How did it come about? Why is it meaningful to them?

• Let your character describe themself in their own words, then write about how someone who liked them and someone who didn’t like them might describe them.

• Imagine your character had to leave a review or make a complaint. What would they focus on? How would they say it?

• Your character is trying to convince themselves of something. What, why, and how?

Prompts for Crafting Settings

Whether you want to create fantasy realms, step back in time, or vividly represent our own world, these prompts might help you get more comfortable creating settings.

• Imagine a location and let your character show you around like you’re a guest. What can you see? What do they point out that’s significant?

• You’re standing on a street in your fictional world. What can you hear, smell, and see?

• Describe what a typical evening meal would be for the least wealthy people in your world, then the wealthiest.

• Describe the view from your character’s window and rewrite that description a few more times, changing the time of day, the season, or the weather each time.

• Try to come up with a brief description of a setting that evokes one or more of these words: luxurious, shabby, sterile, loved, or eerie.

• Think about a landscape, building, or room that’s stuck in your imagination. What elements can you borrow to create something new?

• Describe a place from multiple people’s perspectives. You could use your own characters or use people of different ages, like a child, a teenager, a middle-aged person, and/or an older person.

Prompts for Honing Your Writing Style

Here are some creative writing prompts you can use to work on aspects of your craft as a writer.

• Write a scene where you use all five of your character’s senses.

• Write a scene where you only show the reader things, rather than telling them. How can you demonstrate your character’s feelings or reveal things about the environment without mentioning them directly?

• Write a story in a tense or perspective you wouldn’t usually write in.

• Write a story using the omniscient narration style (where the narrator can see into every character’s head simultaneously).

• Write a story that’s all dialogue.

• Start with an action scene, then transition to a quieter one. Pay particular attention to your sentence length and how you can use it to change the pacing and sense of urgency.

• Write from the perspective of a character with a really distinct voice. How can you use their language choices to add to their characterization?

Fantasy Writing Prompts

• Write about an ordinary person observing the world-shaping events that usually happen in fantasy novels, like a tavern customer watching a quest being planned. What do they make of it?

• A prophecy is made. Who made it and how do they feel about it?

• A character is crafting a magical item that’s going to be very significant in the future. Do they know that? How do they make it?

• Write a story from the perspective of a villain’s minion.

• Write a newspaper article about the final, epic battle, or the completion of a quest.

• There’s a magical power that comes at a terrible cost. Do people still choose to use it? How do they cope?

• Take a well-known magical creature and invent something that nobody knows about it (yet).

Sci-Fi Writing Prompts

• Start with a game or sport that might exist in an alien or futuristic world.

• Think of a piece of tech you wish existed and write about what the consequences might be.

• Your character wakes up on an old space station or in a ruined futuristic city that appears to be abandoned. What happens next?

• Write a road trip story set in space or a dystopian landscape.

• Your character is peering through a microscope or telescope and is so alarmed by what they see that they have to take a step back. What have they discovered?

• Imagine a character working as an engineer on a top-secret project and build a story based on their notes.

• Write about someone trapped inside an escape pod.

Mystery/Crime Writing Prompts

• Write a story that takes the form of a confession to a crime.

• Look around you and choose five random objects, then write a monologue from a detective explaining how each was a crucial clue that led them to the solution of a mystery.

• Write a story where someone solves a crime completely by accident.

• Start with the crime scene that doesn’t, at first glance, look like a crime scene.

• Write a story about a detective looking back on solving a crime that they wish they hadn’t solved.

• Your character receives a postcard, which is blank except for the initials MQ. What happens next?

• Write about someone who has been wrongfully accused but will let people think they’re guilty.

Romance Writing Prompts

• Start by writing about your character’s online dating profiles.

• Tell a couple’s story through brief snapshots of their dates or the gifts they give each other.

• Start with the moment when everything falls apart for a couple and flash back to how they fell in love.

• Try to write the opposite of a “meet cute,” perhaps by making the couple’s first meeting as dull or lacking in chemistry as possible.

• Write an unusual or “unromantic” confession of love.

• Write about a romantic gesture that goes spectacularly wrong (and optionally, turns out for the best anyway).

• Write a romance from the perspective of an observer watching it unfold, like a server at the couple’s favorite restaurant.

Writing Prompts for Journaling, Memoir, or Autobiography

• Think of a smell that really appeals to you and reflect on why. What memories or feelings does it conjure up?

• Think back to a time when you felt a powerful sense of anger, protectiveness, or injustice. What happened?

• Describe a room from your past and include as much vivid, sensory detail as you can.

• Think about someone you haven’t seen in a long time and try to describe them.

• Pick one of these everyday things and write a piece about your relationship with it, including any memories that might resurface: grass, strawberry, mirror, key, or coat.

• Reflect on a gift you received or gave that has stayed with you.

• Write about why you write.

Build Your Own Creative Writing Prompts

If none of these creative writing ideas is quite scratching your itch, why not create your own?

• Grab a book and use a random number generator to give you a page and a line number. Pick a word in that line to inspire you.

• Go out and choose a landscape, a person, or something you overhear as the basis for a story.

• Put your music app on shuffle and use the next song as a prompt. You could take inspiration from the lyrics, a particular bit of imagery, or just the general mood/vibe.

Conclusion: Pick a Prompt and Get Writing

Hopefully, you now have plenty of ideas to write about. If you’re still not sure where to start though, just pick one of these prompts at random and play around with it for a while. You might surprise yourself with what you come up with.

And once you’ve written something, try ProWritingAid to help you shape and polish it. Whether you’re looking for help editing big-picture story elements, perfecting sensory details, or making your pacing punchier, ProWritingAid identifies areas where your writing could be improved and shows you how to elevate it. Sign up for free to discover more.