Writing Prompts

The village baker can bake memories into bread, and today a stranger orders a loaf of a day that never happened.

A retired dragon runs the only inn on the mountain pass. Tonight, the knight who once tried to slay her checks in under a false name.

Magic costs a year of your life per spell, and everyone has agreed to keep it secret that the queen is already two hundred years old.

Write a scene where a council of talking crows must decide whether to tell the humans the volcano is waking up.

Every bridge in the kingdom has a troll who collects tolls in secrets instead of coins. Your protagonist has none left to give.

The apprentice swapped places with her master's reflection three years ago, and only the mirror has noticed.

In a city built on the back of a sleeping giant, someone has just felt it scratch an itch.

A sword will only leave its sheath for someone who has told a lie that day. Your hero has been famously honest.

Begin with a ferryman who has never once lost a passenger, and the day a passenger refuses to get off at the far shore.

Two rival wizards have spent forty years sending each other increasingly petty curses. One of them stops, and the other cannot sleep.

A witch's cottage walks to a new place every full moon. This month it stopped somewhere it clearly did not choose.

Everyone in the valley is born with a tiny key-shaped scar. Your character is the first to find the lock.

The royal taster has just realized the poison is in the plates, not the food, and the plates are a wedding gift.

A goblin market trades in lost things: umbrellas, languages, first loves. Your narrator has come to buy back a name.

Write about a kingdom where the seasons are appointed officials, and Winter has refused to leave office.

A map shows a country that nobody has ever visited, and the ink is still wet.

A young necromancer is terrible at her job because the dead keep giving her unwanted life advice.

The last member of a thieves' guild has been hired to steal back something her own guild took from her grandmother forty years ago.

Every lantern in a seaside town burns a different color depending on what its owner is hiding. Tonight, they all burn white.

A knight is sworn to protect a door. He has never been told what is behind it and has just heard it knock.

In a world where wishes are legal tender, a clerk at the wish bank notices one account is overdrawn by a hundred years.

Your protagonist inherits a library in which the books rewrite themselves whenever no one is reading. One book has started to mention her.

A bard is paid to sing the king's victories, and tonight she is asked to sing one that has not happened yet.

The forest asks for a toll once a generation, and this year it asked for a very specific person by name.

A tower has no stairs, no door and one very patient resident who has just received a letter.

Describe a festival where the whole town trades faces for a day, from the point of view of the one person who cannot take theirs off.

A dragon's hoard is made entirely of broken promises, and a thief has come to carry them back to the people who made them.

Two sisters inherit a lighthouse whose beam is the only thing keeping something in the sea from coming ashore, and the bulb is about to burn out.

A soldier wakes in the middle of a battle with no memory and a sword engraved with the names of everyone who will die today.

An enchanted compass points not north but toward whatever you most regret. Your character wants to throw it away and cannot.

The court magician is accused of treason because his rabbit knew too much.

Write the diary entry of a minor god whose only worshipper has just died.

A boy raises a baby cloud, and it is growing faster than anyone expected and has started to follow him to school.

In the mountain city of stairs, a rumor spreads that the bottom step is gone.

A hedge witch is asked to curse a man, and the more she learns about him, the more she suspects the client has the wrong target.

A queen's most trusted advisor is a flock of one hundred small birds who report on everyone, and they have all gone quiet at once.

The only inn for a hundred miles serves one dish, and travelers swear it tastes of whatever home they left.

Your hero has been told a prophecy is about them, but the prophecy keeps getting their age, name and hair color wrong.

A swordsmith can forge a blade that remembers every wound it gives. Today, a customer asks for one that forgets.

Every year the river gives back one thing it has taken. This year it returned a fully crewed ship whose sailors insist it is still the day they left.

A mapmakers' guild keeps blank places on purpose, and an apprentice has just walked into one.

Two kingdoms have been at war so long that the soldiers have forgotten why, and a messenger arrives with the reason.

A pocket-sized door appears in the baker's wall at dawn. By noon, three customers have asked to go through.

In a land where nobody can tell a lie in the presence of salt, someone has just salted the king's dinner.

Two rival food-truck owners are assigned the same parking spot every Thursday, and the city has no intention of fixing it.

She has been writing anonymous notes to the stranger who returns her lost umbrella every week. Today, he leaves one back.

A wedding planner who does not believe in love is hired to plan her ex's wedding. The bride is her oldest friend.

Two people are snowed into a train station overnight, and the only open shop sells nothing but jigsaw puzzles.

Write a first meeting at a funeral for someone neither of them liked.

He teaches ballroom dance to widows on Tuesdays. A new student arrives who refuses to touch him.

A lighthouse keeper and the supply boat captain have exchanged letters for ten years without ever being in the same room.

Their families have feuded over a vineyard boundary for three generations, and now the fence needs mending by two people who like each other.

She is a translator, and he is the author who keeps insisting she has misunderstood what he meant.

A single dinner reservation was made for two under the wrong name. The other person with that name has just sat down.

Two night-shift nurses share a locker in turns and have never met, but they have been leaving each other notes taped inside it.

Begin with a proposal that goes wrong because the ring was swapped with a stranger's at the airport.

A fake relationship started as a favor for a grandmother. The grandmother is now planning the wedding.

He fixes old clocks. She keeps bringing him one that already works.

Two strangers share a crowded elevator that stops between floors, and one of them is late for a job interview and the other is the interviewer.

The new baker across the street keeps copying her recipes, and she has no idea he is secretly trying to impress her.

She returns to her hometown to sell her late mother's bookshop and meets the man who has kept it open every day since the funeral.

Write a love story between two people who can only talk through the pipes between their apartments.

A cellist and a sound engineer realize, on the last day of recording, that they have been falling for the sound of each other's mistakes.

A stolen taxi, a missed flight, and a stranger who says, "I think we're both going the same way."

He proposes with a crossword puzzle, and she insists on solving it before saying yes. It takes her three weeks.

Two strangers on a hiking trail realize they are carrying each other's lost phones.

She paints the lighthouses on a coast of postcards. He is the only person who ever tells her the colors are wrong.

A bridesmaid and a groomsman have been seated together at four weddings in a row. The fifth is theirs.

On a long-haul bus, a woman falls asleep on a stranger's shoulder, wakes, and discovers he has been awake the whole time, not moving.

He has loved her since school and never said so. She is about to move abroad with a one-way ticket and a very small suitcase.

Write a scene in which two people pretend to be married to get a better table, then are asked about their honeymoon.

A woman inherits her grandmother's matchmaking notebook and finds a page about herself, dated twenty years ago.

The only two people in the village who still send paper postcards keep sending them to the wrong addresses, and to each other.

A carpenter builds a bookcase for a customer who never picks it up. Then the customer's sister arrives to explain.

Two chess players meet every Sunday in the same park and have never spoken a word, only moves.

She hires a stranger to be her date to her sister's wedding and then discovers he knows the groom.

Write a love letter from someone who may only use words that start with the letter S.

He runs a failing greenhouse, and she is the inspector sent to shut it down, and neither of them has ever seen a tomato this good.

A sudden power cut traps two neighbors on a stairwell with one candle and a long-delayed argument.

Their first date ended in a flooded restaurant. Their second is on a ferry that has just lost its engine.

She was his teacher once, and now he has come back to town as the new mayor, and she is the only person who hasn't voted for him.

Two interpreters on opposite sides of a peace negotiation keep improving each other's sentences.

A woman who sells wedding dresses has never worn one. A man comes in to return a ring, not to buy a dress.

After ten years, an old friend returns to town and asks to rent the room above the shop, and neither of them mentions why.

She keeps a list of reasons not to fall for him. Today the list is crossed out in someone else's handwriting.

Write the moment two people realize the person they have been texting for months has been sitting at the next table.

A locksmith is called to open a safe in a house where, according to the neighbors, nobody has lived for thirty years.

The victim's smartwatch recorded a heartbeat for six hours after the time of death.

A librarian notices that someone has been returning books she never lent out, each one with a page marked.

Your detective has just discovered that the confession she spent a year chasing was written before the crime.

A man wakes in a hotel room with a key to a different hotel room and no memory of how he got either.

A lighthouse log is missing exactly one night's entry, and the page has been carefully torn along a ruler's edge.

Write about a night watchman who realizes the museum's security cameras show visitors who are not there.

The witness swears the getaway car was blue, and every other witness swears it was a bicycle.

A small-town baker finds a handwritten ransom note baked into the middle of a loaf. The loaf was ordered by the sheriff.

Two strangers receive the same anonymous invitation to a dinner, and neither knows who the host is.

A forensic accountant finds a charity that donates exactly the same amount every month to a dead man.

A retired thief is asked to break into her own old house.

The suspect has the perfect alibi: he was on live television, and the studio audience all remember him leaving at the break.

Write the first chapter from the point of view of the person who found the body and is lying about why they were there.

A courier is paid to deliver a sealed envelope to a stranger on a bridge. The stranger, when she arrives, is already holding the same envelope.

An art restorer realizes the painting she is cleaning has a fingerprint in the paint dated after the artist died.

A private investigator is hired to find a missing person, and on day two receives a message from the missing person asking her to stop.

A train conductor notices that one first-class seat is always reserved and never filled, and the reservation has just been canceled by a name he knows.

In a village of forty people, someone has been poisoning the well with sugar. The question is why.

A teenager discovers that every photo she took on a school trip contains the same stranger in the background.

The only copy of a witness statement was typed on a machine that was scrapped five years ago.

A detective inherits her late mentor's last cold case, and the first page is a note that says, "Don't trust the file."

A hacker finds a hidden folder on an old laptop she bought at an estate sale. It contains a countdown.

Write a scene in which two lawyers realize they are defending the same client under different names.

A diner waitress overhears a booth conversation that is clearly a murder plan, and then the two men ask her for a recommendation.

The perfect crime goes wrong because the burglar stops to feed the cat.

A chess champion receives, by post, a move from a game she has never played.

Your protagonist is a translator hired to interpret an interview, and slowly realizes the suspect is begging her for help in a language the detectives do not know.

A famous author disappears, and the final chapter of his unfinished novel is found, perfectly describing the room in which his editor is now standing.

A museum guard notices that the portrait on the wall has changed its expression three nights in a row.

The mayor's missing dog is found with a coded message on its collar. The key is hidden in the town's old church bells.

A woman finds her husband's phone buzzing in the garden with a message from his own number.

A diving instructor finds a locked case on the ocean floor with her own initials on it.

The detective realizes the murder weapon has been in the evidence room all along, labeled as something else.

Write about a call-in radio host whose most frequent caller keeps describing crimes before they happen.

A house sitter notices that the family photos on the mantel change every time she leaves the room.

At a charity gala, the auction item everyone wants is a locked box, and every bidder has a different reason for needing it open.

Two cousins, both heirs, find a second combination for the old family safe written in their grandmother's recipe book.

A pilot is told by air traffic control to land at an airport that does not exist on any map.

A bus stops at a station that has been closed for twenty years, and a single passenger gets off carrying a suitcase.

Every Tuesday, a stranger leaves a single red glove on the bench outside the police station.

A juror realizes she knows the defendant, and he knows it too.

The last person to see the missing woman was a security camera, and the footage has just been posted online, edited.

A mountain rescue team finds a hiker's tent with two sleeping bags and one set of boots.

A colony ship's AI has been quietly lying about how long the voyage will take. The reason turns out to be kind.

A dockworker on a space station discovers a crate addressed to herself, shipped from a planet she has never visited and dated tomorrow.

In a city where memories can be rented by the hour, your protagonist wakes up with one that nobody claims.

Write about the last human tour guide on a planet where the museums are run by robots, and the day one asks her for help.

Gravity fails for exactly eleven seconds every day at noon. Your character has found out why.

A janitor on an orbital lab finds a message scratched on the inside of an airlock, dated seventy years before the station was built.

The settlers of a distant planet have just discovered their sun is a decade older than they were told.

A woman's teenage clone has been living her life for ten years, and has just filed for the right to be someone else.

Humans have finally decoded the alien signal. It is a recipe.

A deep-sea miner on a water world finds a door on the ocean floor, and the door is not locked.

A time traveler arrives in the wrong decade and decides to open a bakery rather than fix it.

Your narrator is an AI assigned to write obituaries, and has just been asked to write her own.

The elevator to the space tether has stopped between floors, and the only other passenger is a diplomat from an uncontacted civilization.

A botanist discovers that the plants on Mars have been rearranging themselves to spell the same word every morning.

In a world without sleep, a tired child asks his grandfather what dreaming was like.

Write a scene where two astronauts on a failing ship argue about whose turn it is to say the last words.

A repairman for household robots gets a call from a customer whose robot has started apologizing for things it has not done.

A generation ship's history teacher realizes the founding documents have been quietly edited.

The last radio station on Earth plays one song at midnight and has done so for sixty years. Someone has finally written back.

A courier crosses a border between two timelines, carrying a letter from the version of her who made different choices.

A spaceport customs officer finds a single seed in a traveler's luggage, from a plant that has been extinct for four hundred years.

A museum curator receives an item from the future with a label that reads DO NOT DISPLAY.

On a planet where it is always night, a boy is born able to see light that does not exist yet.

A city runs entirely on a shared dream, and a single resident has stopped dreaming.

An engineer realizes the starship's final destination has been changing slowly over the last two hundred years.

The first person born on the moon is asked to choose a nationality, and chooses none.

A detective on an orbital station investigates a murder where the victim and the suspect are the same person, a day apart.

A translator for first contact is asked to translate a lie and does not know whether the aliens will understand it as one.

Write the diary of a robot whose job is to wave goodbye to departing ships, and who has started to wave a little longer.

In the year the sea gave back every ship it had ever taken, an oceanographer is the only person who recognizes one.

A medic on a frontier colony finds that every patient's blood work shows the same impossible marker.

A smuggler's cargo hold is full of silence, sold by the kilogram.

A space station is built inside an asteroid with a secret chamber that has been quietly growing.

People can now upload themselves, and a woman tries to convince her father, who refuses, that he is already half-digital.

A farmer on a terraformed world digs up a buried door in her field, and the door has a mailbox.

A teenage hacker discovers the city's traffic AI is quietly diverting cars away from one neighborhood, and the reason is not what she expects.

Write a love story set during a six-year relativistic voyage, told through letters that arrive faster than the ship.

A librarian on a drifting ark finds the only book that has not been digitized, and the book seems to be waiting for her.

Every night at three, the ship's lights dim and the crew hear a knock from the outside of the hull.

An archaeologist digs up a city that has not been built yet.

A colony's only doctor realizes she is the oldest person alive, and nobody has told her how she got here.

Two couriers carry the same package from opposite ends of the galaxy, each convinced it is meant for the other.

The planet's daylight comes on a timer, and tonight the timer is off.

A child on a space station asks, for the first time, what rain feels like, and the whole deck falls quiet.

A family moves into a house where every clock is stopped at a different time, and the times are counting down.

Your narrator finds a voicemail from her own number, left tomorrow.

The new neighbor keeps a perfectly tended garden of plants nobody has ever seen bloom, and tonight they are all facing the window.

A night-shift security guard counts the same number of visitors entering the building as leaving, but one is always missing.

A lullaby has been sung in a village for centuries, and tonight a child sings a verse nobody taught her.

Write about a house where the stairs have one more step at night.

Every photograph of the new babysitter shows her standing a little closer to the child.

A hiker follows a trail marker that gets newer the deeper he goes.

The town's radio station plays a weather report for a storm that never arrives, and the people who believe it start to disappear.

In a motel on a deserted highway, every door is numbered, but there is a room 0, and it has a light on.

A woman finds a second set of footprints in her fresh snow, leading from the bedroom window back out.

The funeral home has a locked basement, and tonight the lock opens from the inside.

A child's imaginary friend has begun leaving drawings that show things the child could not have known.

A farmer's scarecrow has moved a few feet closer to the house every morning for a week.

Write a scene told entirely through messages on a baby monitor.

A diver surfaces to find the boat empty and the radio playing his own voice.

The old well in the garden is covered, but a child asks who the lady who waves from it is.

A woman is certain that the person who answered the door was her husband, and he is still asleep upstairs.

A small town has one rule: never answer when someone knocks after midnight. A tourist hasn't been told.

A house sitter finds a room that is not in the floor plan, and the door is already warm.

A lighthouse keeper hears someone climbing the stairs, but the stairs were boarded up twenty years ago.

A boy finds his own name carved in an old tree, with a date twenty years ahead.

The doll in the attic has been moved, and nobody in the house admits to it.

A mirror in an antique shop shows the room behind you with one extra person in it.

Write about the longest night of a woman who realizes the voice on the phone has been describing her room.

Every year on the same date, one more name appears on the school's lost-and-found list, and the owners never come to claim them.

A bus driver's last route of the night includes a stop that is not on the schedule, and there is always someone waiting.

A woman discovers that the old house's wallpaper hides a pattern of tally marks, and the last mark is fresh.

A woodcutter's axe keeps coming back clean, though he has never cleaned it.

The ice on the lake is perfectly clear, and a girl sees someone looking up at her.

A man finds a door in the basement that wasn't there when he went to bed.

A new student's desk sits empty on the first day, and the teacher keeps calling a name nobody knows.

Write a scene where a family sits down to dinner and realizes there is an extra place set, and the extra food is already gone.

A radio astronomer listens to a signal that sounds, unmistakably, like someone breathing.

The attic of a rented cabin is full of children's shoes, each pair worn out in a different decade.

A woman joins a late-night online chat and slowly realizes that every other user lives in her house.

A town's church bell rings thirteen times, and everyone who counts it correctly feels strange afterward.

A child describes the man at the bottom of the stairs in great detail, down to the missing button on his coat. The father owns a coat like that.

The campfire stories change slightly each time the counselor tells them, as if someone is correcting him from the dark.

An old hospital's night staff keep a log of rooms that should be empty, and the log has begun listing visitors.

A hunter finds his own trail in the forest, running ahead of him.

A woman waking in a hotel room notices that someone has carefully tucked her in.

An elderly man teaches himself to cook every dish his late wife made, and keeps getting them slightly wrong on purpose.

Write about a family dinner where the argument is about nothing, and everyone knows it.

A woman reads her mother's grocery lists after the funeral and learns more about her than she ever did in conversation.

Two brothers sell their father's house, and each has taken a different item from it that the other secretly wanted.

A bus driver on the night route notices the same rider each evening and builds a whole life for him in her head.

A teenager spends the summer repainting the town's fading mural and finds out who painted it first.

Write a story that takes place entirely on the stretch of road between a hospital and a home.

A translator slowly realizes she has been softening an author's harshest words for ten years, and he has just noticed.

A retired teacher receives a postcard from a former student, thanking her for something she doesn't remember.

A man returns a borrowed lawnmower to a neighbor who died three years ago and finds the neighbor's widow waiting at the door.

Describe a marriage through the contents of a shared kitchen drawer.

A young woman takes a job as a house cleaner and begins to understand her clients by what they throw away.

The last member of a choir holds a rehearsal alone.

Write about two sisters who have not spoken in a year, and a single phone call that begins with a wrong number.

An immigrant grandmother cooks for her family from a recipe card the grandchildren cannot read.

A widower begins leaving the porch light on every night for no reason he can explain.

A man spends a year photographing the same tree and notices he is the one who has changed.

A woman finds out that her father kept every letter she ever wrote him, unopened.

Write about the last day of a family restaurant from the perspective of the dishwasher.

A boy wakes before dawn every day to help his father at the market, and learns what his father's silence is made of.

A child learns that her grandmother's stories were never meant to be true, only comforting.

In a small town, a woman is known for always carrying an umbrella, and no one knows why until the storm.

Two old friends meet at a train station, each pretending not to have arrived early.

A man tries to teach his granddaughter to fish and slowly realizes he is teaching her something else.

A woman keeps her late husband's answering machine message, and the machine is beginning to fail.

An elderly piano tuner visits one more house, where the piano has not been played in decades.

Write about a person who leaves a city and the one thing they keep mailing back to themselves.

A father builds a treehouse for a child who no longer wants one, and builds it anyway.

A couple's argument about directions covers a long drive and a longer marriage.

Tell the story of a house through the family that lived in it, one room at a time.

A man inherits his uncle's boat but doesn't know how to sail, and spends the winter learning in secret.

A librarian notices that one elderly patron checks out a children's book every week and never has a child with her.

On the last day before the factory closes, a worker teaches the new hire every trick she knows.

A woman spends a morning with her estranged father at a laundromat, because it's the only place his car will take him.

Write about the footsteps in the apartment above and the life you invent for the person who makes them.

A boy is given his grandfather's watch and an instruction he doesn't understand: never wind it.

A taxi driver and a passenger fall into a conversation neither of them will ever repeat.

A young nurse sits with a patient who refuses to say his name, and asks him one question each night.

A town's only bakery closes, and the line of mourners goes around the block.

A woman's mother begins to forget her name, so she decides to introduce herself each day in a different way.

Write a story about the last family photo and the person who has been cut out of it.

A man tells his daughter, for the first time, why he left the farm.

Your school mascot has gone missing, and the only clue is a trail of glitter leading to the principal's office.

A girl discovers that her backpack opens into a different place every morning, and today it opens onto the bottom of a lake.

The new kid in class claims he can talk to squirrels, and then one of them shows up at lunch with a note.

A boy accidentally adopts a dragon the size of a hamster and has a week to hide it from his mother.

Write about a treehouse that grows one new room every time someone tells a secret inside it.

Two best friends discover a hidden elevator in the school basement with a button for every floor except the ones that exist.

A robot vacuum begins leaving little drawings in the dust, and the family realizes it is trying to tell them something.

A class pet hamster escapes and becomes the leader of a very organized school-wide adventure.

A girl finds a map in her grandmother's attic that leads to a treasure on her own street.

Your character's shadow decides to take a day off.

On the last day of summer camp, the campers realize the lake monster has been waiting all summer to be invited to the talent show.

A boy inherits a mysterious key and a note that says, "The door is closer than you think."

A librarian turns out to be the guardian of a book that eats other books, and tonight it is hungry.

Write a story about a bake sale that accidentally summons a very polite ghost.

A girl invents a machine to make homework disappear, and it works a little too well.

The town's old clock tower has been striking thirteen, and only two kids notice the extra hour.

A boy discovers that his grandmother's kitchen drawer opens into the pantry of a very busy wizard.

A stray cat leaves a gift on three doorsteps, and each gift turns out to be a clue.

A girl who is afraid of the dark meets a very small, very nervous creature who lives in her closet.

On picture day, every student in the class blinks at exactly the same time, and the photographer insists it was magic.

A boy and his dog find a door in the garden shed that opens onto a bright, silent beach.

The smallest kid in class finds a pair of boots that make her giant for exactly one hour.

A snow day lasts three weeks, and the neighborhood slowly builds a city out of snowmen.

A class trip to the museum goes wrong when a painting wants to come to lunch.

A pair of twins finds an abandoned boat in the woods, with a map and a pot of paint inside.

The new babysitter is a retired pirate who insists on bedtime stories with swords and sandwiches.

A girl realizes her pet goldfish has been giving her directions in bubbles for weeks.

Write about a kid who wins a contest to name a new star and has to pick a name that will last forever.

The school bus takes a wrong turn and ends up at a carnival that only opens for people who are lost.

A boy discovers that every library book has a tiny door at the back, and one of them is slightly open.

A girl's umbrella lifts her over the town every time it rains, and today she sees something strange from above.

Two friends find a forgotten tunnel behind the school and a very old note that says, "Meet me at the end."

A kid discovers that every night her stuffed animals hold a secret meeting, and tonight she has been invited.

On the first day of school, a boy's lunchbox begins to talk, and it has opinions about his sandwich.

The town has banned all fun on Tuesdays, and a girl has a plan.

A boy finds a pair of glasses that shows him a world of invisible creatures, and one of them is lost.

Write about a bakery where the cake of the day changes the mood of whoever eats it.

A girl finds a message in a bottle from a kid across the ocean who needs help with a very big problem.

A group of friends builds a fort so well that it begins to build itself.

A lost mitten leads a girl through a winter wonderland to a hidden village of mitten collectors.

A boy's new puppy turns out to be the long-lost prince of a very small kingdom.

At the end of the school year, a teacher gives each student a seed and a secret instruction: do not plant it until you know why.