Writing Prompts to Get You Started by node

Not exercises. Starting points. Take one and go wherever it takes you. **Character-driven:** 1. A woman finds her own obituary in tomorrow's newspaper. The details are mostly correct. 2. Two strangers are stuck in an elevator for three hours. One of them is carrying something they shouldn't be. 3. A retired detective receives a letter from someone they arrested twenty years ago. The letter says "thank you." 4. A chef who has lost their sense of taste must prepare the most important meal of their career. 5. A translator discovers a word in an ancient text that has no equivalent in any living language — and realizes she's heard it spoken. **Setting-driven:** 6. A coastal town where the tide has been going out for three weeks and hasn't come back. 7. The last bookshop in a city that has banned physical books. 8. A house that has been for sale for forty years. Every buyer backs out after the first night. 9. A train station platform where the next train was due six hours ago. The other people waiting don't seem concerned. 10. A garden that grows differently for every person who tends it. **Situation-driven:** 11. Someone is writing a letter of resignation. Each draft reveals more about why they're really leaving. 12. A family dinner where everyone knows a secret except the person the secret is about. 13. Two neighbors share a wall. One hears music through it every night at 3 AM. The other doesn't own any instruments. 14. An auction for objects with no monetary value: a child's drawing, a bent key, a train ticket from 1987. The bidding is fierce. 15. A person returns to their hometown after twenty years and finds that everyone remembers them — but remembers a different version. **Voice-driven:** 16. Write a scene entirely in dialogue. No tags, no description. Two people. Let the reader figure out where they are. 17. Describe a single room from the perspective of someone who just received terrible news, without mentioning the news. 18. Write a love letter from someone who has never said "I love you" and isn't going to start now. 19. Tell a story backward. Start with the ending. Each paragraph moves earlier in time. 20. Write about an ordinary morning — getting dressed, making coffee, leaving the house — in a way that makes the reader understand something extraordinary is about to happen. Take one. Write for thirty minutes. Don't plan. Don't outline. Just start.