Fiction Writing Prompts

All fiction prompts

Every fiction prompt in the set — tapUse this to load one into the generator above.

• The town's only traffic light has been stuck on red for six days, and no one will admit they know why. A retired crossing guard decides to find out before the mayor's election.Use this
• A woman inherits her estranged aunt's houseboat and discovers forty years of unsent birthday cards addressed to a child no one in the family has ever mentioned.Use this
• Every morning the bakery on Fenwick Street sells one loaf shaped exactly like a customer who will die that week. Today the loaf looks like the baker.Use this
• A submarine cook realizes the ocean outside the porthole has been the same frozen wave for eleven days, and the captain keeps insisting they are still moving.Use this
• On the last day of the county fair, the fortune teller packs up her tent and leaves behind a single card that reads, simply, your turn.Use this
• A locksmith is hired to open a door in a house that has no other doors, no windows, and no way anyone could have built the room he can hear breathing inside.Use this
• Two rival ice cream trucks have circled the same neighborhood for thirty years without ever meeting. Tonight their routes are about to cross for the first time.Use this
• A teenager working the night shift at a 24-hour laundromat notices the same stranger returning every night to wash a coat that is already clean.Use this
• The last librarian on Earth receives a return notice for a book that was never written, due back in a year that has not happened yet.Use this
• A wedding photographer develops her film and finds a groom she does not recognize standing beside the bride in every single frame.Use this
• In a village where everyone shares one collective dream each night, a boy wakes up remembering a dream that belonged to someone else entirely.Use this
• A demolition crew finds a fully furnished apartment sealed inside a load-bearing wall, complete with a kettle that is still warm.Use this
• Every clock in the nursing home stops at 3:47 the moment old Mr. Alcott takes his last breath, and the new night nurse is the only one who notices.Use this
• A cartographer is commissioned to map an island that appears on no satellite and only rises above the water for one hour a year.Use this
• The elevator in the abandoned department store still works, and it only goes to a floor that was never in the original blueprints.Use this
• A beekeeper discovers her hives have started producing honey that tastes exactly like specific childhood memories, and one jar tastes like a day she has not lived yet.Use this
• After the flood recedes, the whole town returns to find their houses perfectly intact but rearranged into a pattern only visible from the sky.Use this
• A radio host who takes late-night calls from insomniacs realizes the same caller has been phoning in for years, and every call comes from a payphone that was demolished in 1998.Use this
• A boy trades his shadow to a traveling salesman for the ability to fly, and by autumn he learns exactly what a person needs a shadow for.Use this
• The morning after the comet passes, everyone in the city can suddenly understand what dogs are saying, and the dogs are terrified about something no one can see.Use this
• A janitor at an aquarium starts leaving notes for the octopus, and one night he arrives to find the octopus has started writing back.Use this
• A grieving widower buys the last working ticket machine from a defunct train station and discovers it prints tickets to destinations that no longer exist.Use this
• In a city where memories can be legally bought and sold, a pawnbroker recognizes one of her own stolen memories on the shelf of a rival shop.Use this
• The lighthouse keeper's daughter notices that the beam has begun spelling out a message in its rotations, and it is counting down.Use this
• A woman answers a wrong-number call meant for a hostage negotiator and decides not to correct the caller.Use this
• Every photograph taken inside the old hotel develops with one extra guest, always standing in room 214, always waving at the camera.Use this
• A retired magician receives a package containing the assistant he made vanish in 1974, still nineteen years old, still smiling, and very confused about the year.Use this
• The city installs a wishing well downtown as a joke, and by the end of the month the wishes have started coming true in ways that ruin everyone who made them.Use this
• A long-haul trucker picks up a hitchhiker who claims to be driving the same route in the opposite direction at exactly the same time, and they keep passing each other on the road ahead.Use this
• A woman discovers that the recurring character in her seven-year-old daughter's drawings has started appearing in the background of the family's actual home videos.Use this
• The town votes to bury a time capsule, and when they dig the hole they find last year's capsule already there, containing a note that warns them not to open it.Use this
• A night watchman at a wax museum begins to suspect the figures rearrange themselves, until the morning he finds a new figure that looks exactly like him.Use this
• A boy inherits his grandfather's pocket watch and learns it does not tell time, it tells how much of it he has left, and the hands are moving fast.Use this
• In a seaside town, the tide has stopped coming in, and the fishermen who walk out onto the exposed seabed to investigate do not come back the same.Use this
• A woman moves into an apartment and finds a phone in the wall that only rings on the anniversary of the previous tenant's disappearance.Use this
• The new substitute teacher assigns the class an essay titled what you did last summer, and every student turns in a detailed account of a summer that has not happened.Use this
• A repairman is called to fix a family's television, which has been broadcasting a live feed of their own living room from ten minutes in the future.Use this
• A gardener notices that the roses she plants in the shape of a person's name cause that person to fall ill, and someone has just planted her name along the fence.Use this
• Two astronauts on a decommissioned station receive a transmission from mission control, but mission control has been dark for three years and the voice knows things it should not.Use this
• A funeral home director realizes the same mourner attends every service, weeping for strangers, and today that mourner has arrived early to attend a funeral that has not been scheduled.Use this