Give these fiction writing prompts a try.
Fiction writing prompts are a great way to stimulate creativity when you’re in the mood to do a little writing but need some fresh story ideas.
Prompts and other creative writing exercises can trigger your imagination. Sometimes, prompts and exercises help you come up with new ideas for projects you’re already working on, and other times, they give you ideas for projects you haven’t started yet. They’re also a great source of motivation.
10 Fiction Writing Prompts
The fiction writing prompts below are story starters. Try starting the first sentence of a new piece with one of the prompts and run with it, or write a story that includes one of the prompts somewhere in the text. As an alternative, use the prompts to generate story ideas and plan a story around a prompt (you don’t have to include the actual prompt anywhere in the story). You can even use one of the prompts as the final sentence in a story and use your imagination to fill in what happens leading up to it.
Feel free to alter any of the prompts to your liking. Use one or use them all. Have fun.
- She rolled over and felt her body push up against something hard.
- My wife disappeared on August 28, 1998.
- Sonny jumped up against the chain-link fence, wagging his tail furiously.
- Mom says it happens to all girls, but I think she’s just trying to make me feel normal.
- I’ve been to nine planets in twelve years and it’s starting to show.
- They say Old Weezie’s been reading palms out of her run-down shack for a hundred years or more.
- Acronyms give me a headache in general, but PBRT gives me a migraine.
- Ashley stared at the fruit, so lost in amazement that she didn’t think to comment on its size.
- Every day the sun comes up and every night it goes down again.
- When the elven guard put out a call to action, their plea went unheard and what followed was sheer terror.
Bonus challenge: Write a story that includes each and every one of the ten prompts above. That would be quite a feat!
Looking for more fiction writing prompts and story starters? Some of today’s fiction prompts appear in 1200 Creative Writing Prompts, available in paperback and ebook.
