Writing Prompts

  • You are a ghost.  No one can hear you, see you, or feel you.  Recently, you have started to haunt a college student around your age.  They would be your best friend if you could only communicate. You are sure of it.  And then one day, they look up and ask you, "Why are you following me?"
  • Use the first line of a nursery rhyme as the first line of a dark narrative.
  • You are an archaeologist working on a dig.  When you find a thick pane of glass.  You dust the dirt away, and see the inside of a massive bio-dome, hidden for too long.  Only one organism is inside, and it was meant to be forgotten. 
  • At birth, everyone has the date they will die tattooed on their arm.  You were supposed to die yesterday.
  • Every so often, a dream catcher must be "emptied" of the nightmares it has caught.  Who does it and what do they see?
  • You are the last person on the Earth. To feel less lonely, you collect store mannequins as substitute friends.  One day as you walk by one of them, you hear a faint "Help me."
  • My parents think that I am their child. They are wrong.
  • Your phone rings, and the number looks familiar.  You pick up to hear own voice asking for help.
  • After years of gentle persuasion, your best friend since childhood finally agrees to seek professional help for serious mental problems.  Much to your dismay, as she begins to improve, you slowly start to realize that you are her imaginary friend.
  • You just moved to a new neighborhood, and you hear the music of an ice cream truck coming down the street.  As you and your family walk outside, you notice all of your neighbors rushing inside and locking their doors and windows.
  • Art museum security guards do not guard the paintings in fear that someone will steal them. They guard the artwork in fear that someone might get too close and fall in.
  • You are vacationing in a city that you have never been in before.  You suddenly find yourself in a place you've seen hundreds of times in your dreams.  The person you always see is there too, and they slowly turn and ask "Is it really you?"
  • You stumble on an article online detailing a brutal murder.  There are pictures of the victim.  It's you.
  • During a game of hide and seek, you hide in the toy chest in the basement .  After what seems like forever and no one finds you, you decide to get out. You find the basement drastically altered and a layer of over everything.
  • You are getting really sick of your cat always getting in your way and knocking stuff out of your hand.   Little do you know that your girlfriend/boyfriend is constantly trying to kill with traps and poison, and your cat is actually saving your life.
  • Write about a funeral from the dead person's point of view.
  • you have been color blind your entire life, only seeing in shades of gray.  You come across a stranger that appears in total color.
  • Every 1000 years, the gods are reincarnated as humans.  Write about the "god of chaos" and "the god of peace" being born twins.
  • Everyone is forced to wear a warning label.  What would yours say?  Why?
  • She bought the shirt for one dollar at a thrift store and found the key in the pocket a week later.
  • "I thought that I'd made it clear that we have a no abduction policy."  "She wasn't cooperating. What did you expect me to do?"
  • Everyone has a soulmate, but yours dies before you meet them.  Now they have become your guardian angel.
  • She opened her door to hundreds of red roses. She knew they were from him; he had found her.
  • A picture on your mantle unexpectedly falls and crashes to the floor.  As you go pick it up, you notice a note hidden behind the picture.  The message is from the future and written by you.  It instructs you to do something important.  What are you supposed to do?
  • "My domain is time," said the genie. "Instead of three wishes, you get three decisions. Go back and choose again."