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72 writing prompts, each one a scene you can start now

Written for this page and found nowhere else. Each one is a scene rather than a theme: a person, a place and a reason the next ten minutes matter. Write this opens the prompt on the first line of the Author Sweets editor, with no account; what you write stays in your browser until you choose to keep it.

They are yours to use in anything you write, published or not, with no credit owed.

How to use a prompt

  • Set a timer, not a target. Twenty minutes, no stopping and no reading back. A prompt is for getting words down, and a timer settles the question of whether they are good: it does not matter yet.
  • Start inside the scene. Not the morning of the day, not the backstory: the moment the prompt names, with someone in it who wants something.
  • Change one thing. If a prompt does not fit, swap the place, the century or who is telling it, and it is yours before the first sentence.
  • Follow it when it goes somewhere. A prompt is a door, not a plan. If the twenty minutes end mid-sentence and you want to know what happens next, you have the start of a story.

Literary and general fiction

Ordinary rooms, ordinary people, and the moment something shifts.

  1. A woman returns the key to a house she has not lived in for twenty years, and the new owner asks her to show him where the leak is. Write this
  2. Two brothers divide their mother’s kitchen between them, object by object, without once mentioning her. Write this
  3. The last bus of the night is empty except for a man asleep with a wedding cake on his lap. The driver has to decide where to wake him. Write this
  4. On the morning of the move, a child hides one thing inside the walls of the old house. Write the day, forty years on, when someone finds it. Write this
  5. A retired translator receives a letter in a language she no longer speaks aloud. Write her first attempt to answer it. Write this
  6. Every evening a neighbour waters a garden that is plainly dead. Tonight the narrator goes over to ask why. Write this
  7. A couple agree to tell each other one true thing a day for a month. Write day nineteen. Write this
  8. A hospital cleaner is the only person who talks to the patient on the top floor. Write the shift when the patient talks back. Write this

Mystery and crime

A wrong detail, a question nobody wants asked, and someone who cannot let it go.

  1. A detective investigates a burglary in which nothing was taken and one thing was added. Write this
  2. The village baker has sold the same number of loaves every day for eleven years. The day the count is one short, she calls the police. Write this
  3. A woman finds her own handwriting in a stranger’s diary, dated next week. Write this
  4. A locksmith is called to open the same safe for the third time in a month, each time by a different person who says it is theirs. Write this
  5. Someone has been returning library books that were never borrowed, each with one sentence underlined. Write this
  6. The alibi is perfect: six people saw him in the pub all evening. The trouble is that the pub closed in 1996. Write this
  7. A forensic accountant notices that a charity’s books balance to the penny every month, which never happens. Write this
  8. The only witness to the crime is a parrot, and it has started repeating a name. Write this

Fantasy

Rules of magic to break, and the people who have to live under them.

  1. In a city where every citizen owns exactly one spell, a girl is born with none and learns to trade. Write this
  2. The dragon has not been seen in a hundred years, but the village still pays a boy to watch for it. Write his last day in the job. Write this
  3. A cartographer is hired to map a forest that rearranges itself each night. She begins to see a pattern. Write this
  4. The king’s food taster has survived every poison for thirty years. This morning, something tastes of nothing at all. Write this
  5. Magic in this world costs memories. A widow decides exactly which ones she can spare. Write this
  6. Each god of the city has one worshipper left. They meet on Thursdays. Write this
  7. A bridge troll retires and must find somewhere to live in the town whose people she has frightened for centuries. Write this
  8. The prophecy named a hero, but the name is a common one. Four of them turn up. Write this

Science fiction

One change to the world, followed honestly.

  1. The colony ship arrives to find the planet already settled by the descendants of a faster ship launched later. Write this
  2. A technician maintains the last analogue clock in a city that runs on synchronised time, and notices the two have begun to disagree. Write this
  3. Everyone carries a device that tells them the kindest thing to say. One morning hers starts telling the truth instead. Write this
  4. The first message from another civilisation is a recipe. Write this
  5. A grandmother’s memories have been uploaded for the family. The grandchildren discover she has been editing them. Write this
  6. On a generation ship, the gardener is told that the next harvest is the last anyone will need to grow. He plants anyway. Write this
  7. The weather is scheduled a year in advance. A clerk finds a Tuesday with nothing filled in. Write this
  8. The translator for the alien delegation realises their language has no word for later, and has to tell her government. Write this

Romance

Two people, a reason they cannot be together, and the scene where that stops being true.

  1. Two rival bakers are the last tenants on a street scheduled for demolition. They have one month and one oven that still works. Write this
  2. She writes the obituaries for the local paper; he keeps turning up alive after she has filed his. Write this
  3. A wedding planner is hired for the wedding of the man who left her, and finds the bride is the only person who can see she is miserable. Write this
  4. He has sent letters to a wrong address for a year. The person who lives there has been answering. Write this
  5. Two strangers are seated together on a delayed overnight train with a single working lamp. Write the hours before dawn. Write this
  6. A lighthouse keeper’s replacement arrives a week early, and a handover meant to take a day will take seven. Write this
  7. The understudy and the leading man have one performance to get through. She knows every one of his lines; he has never learned her name. Write this
  8. A woman who repairs old clocks is brought one that was stopped on purpose, by the man who brings it in. Write this

Horror and the uncanny

Something is wrong in the house, and the character notices one beat too late.

  1. A new father realises the baby monitor is picking up a second room that the house does not have. Write this
  2. The village has a rule: never answer a knock after the church bell. Tonight the knock sounds exactly like the narrator’s mother. Write this
  3. A removal firm is asked to move a house’s contents into the identical house across the street, and to finish before dark. Write this
  4. A woman finds a photograph of her own kitchen on a stranger’s phone, with one chair pulled out. Write this
  5. The lift has a button for a floor that is not on the plans. The night cleaner has started hearing it arrive. Write this
  6. Every mirror in the house shows the rooms one second behind, and the delay is growing. Write this
  7. A lighthouse log records the same keeper’s handwriting for one hundred and forty years. Write this
  8. A boy’s imaginary friend has left a note saying she will be away for a while, and to lock the back door. Write this

Historical

A real time, a made-up person, and the detail that makes it theirs.

  1. 1912: a telegraph operator at a quiet coastal station takes down a message he is not supposed to understand. Write this
  2. A seamstress in a plague town is paid to sew shrouds, and begins to embroider them. Write this
  3. 1849: a woman keeps the account book for a wagon train, and the numbers tell a story the leader will not. Write this
  4. The last day of a scriptorium before the printing press arrives in town, told by the boy who grinds the ink. Write this
  5. In 1969 a mother in a town with one television invites every neighbour to watch the moon landing. Her husband wants no one to come. Write this
  6. A Roman surveyor marks the line of a new road straight through a village that has stood for a thousand years. Write this
  7. The night before a dust storm in 1935, a schoolteacher decides which books to bury. Write this
  8. A lady’s maid in 1815 must get her mistress to a ball on time while the house is being sold around them. Write this

Memoir and personal essay

Your own life, one scene at a time. Write what you remember and mark what you are not sure of.

  1. The first meal you cooked for someone else, and what you were trying to say with it. Write this
  2. A room you can still walk through in your mind, object by object. Write it in the present tense. Write this
  3. The day you learned a word you then heard everywhere. Write this
  4. A photograph of yourself that you cannot remember being taken. Describe it, then describe the day around it. Write this
  5. A promise made to you that was not kept, and what keeping it would have cost the person who broke it. Write this
  6. The last time you were truly lost, before phones, and what you noticed while finding your way. Write this
  7. An argument you lost and were later glad to have lost. Write this
  8. The object you have moved house with the most times, and why it still goes in the first box. Write this

First lines

A first sentence to continue. Keep it or cut it once the scene has found its feet.

  1. “The second time the house flooded, we knew which things to carry upstairs.” Write this
  2. “Nobody told the new girl that the eighth floor did not exist.” Write this
  3. “My father kept bees, and then he kept secrets, and only one of those came looking for us after he died.” Write this
  4. “The invitation said no gifts, so of course we each brought one.” Write this
  5. “It was the kind of town where the only traffic light had a name.” Write this
  6. “She had been dead for three years when I finally learned her first name.” Write this
  7. “The map was wrong in exactly one place, and we were standing on it.” Write this
  8. “He kept the receipt for the ring in his wallet for eleven years, folded small.” Write this

In Author Sweets

Write this opens the Try page: the real manuscript editor, with the prompt on its first line and your words kept in this browser. Keep this and start free carries the scene into a free account as the first scene of your first book, so nothing is lost at the form.

In the app, a sprint from the manuscript header runs the timer and counts the words you add, the daily goal keeps your streak, and a book target says how many words a day finish the book; the word goal calculator does that sum on the website. For a habit that outlasts the prompt, read the guide to daily word goals.

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