Creative writing prompts
Published
Writing exercises for adults, each built on a short passage from a public-domain book. Read the passage, set a timer, write.
Under each title is its ten-minute version, ready to use now: to choose today's, read them and take the first one you want to answer. Its page has the full prompt, the passage and, for most, a way to run it with a writing group.
The prompts are grouped by what they ask of you. Use one as a warm-up, or let it open a short story.
Start here: one prompt in full
A truth everyone agrees on
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813). Project Gutenberg #1342
Open with a sweeping claim that everyone around you is expected to accept, stated as calmly as a law of nature. In a second sentence of the same long, balanced shape, show how one household quietly turns that claim to its own advantage. Choose a subject far from marriage: a parking space, a retirement, a new neighbour's dog.
Set a timer for 20 minutes.
This prompt, with its ten-minute version and a way to run it with a group, has its own page: A truth everyone agrees on.
Write it their way
Take a passage you admire and write something else in its exact shape: same syntax, same rhythm, same movement, another subject.
- A truth everyone agrees on
In ten minutes, write only the first sentence: one sweeping claim about your street, built with the same balance of clauses, and stop when it rings true.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Project Gutenberg #1342 · For a group: Blind vote
- A time of opposites
In ten minutes, write eight paired opposites about this week, each in the same clause shape, in one unbroken sentence.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Project Gutenberg #98 · For a group: The group's text
- A name, then a departure
In ten minutes, write the three-word introduction and the one long sentence of departure, nothing more.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Project Gutenberg #2701 · For a group: Blind vote
Answer it
Write the text's reply, the letter back, the missing retort, the other side of the contest, in the form of the original.
- The reply that cuts deeper
In ten minutes, write only the loving person's reply, six lines of speech at most, ending on a question.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Project Gutenberg #28054 · For a group: Two sides and a judge
- What he says next
In ten minutes, write his answer in three short speeches and one gesture.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog (1899), Project Gutenberg #13415 · For a group: The writer listens
- The household answers back
In ten minutes, write the note slipped under the door, six sentences in his own mocking register.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864), Project Gutenberg #600 · For a group: Only what works
Same scene, other way
Keep the matter and change the manner: the same moment told through other eyes, in another mood, another register.
- Two looks at a train door
In ten minutes, write the guard's version of the two looks, one paragraph, bored.
Full prompt: 25 minutes · Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1878), Project Gutenberg #1399 · For a group: Two sides and a judge
- The graves, seen otherwise
In ten minutes, write the sister's version of the visit to the graves in one paragraph.
Full prompt: 25 minutes · Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861), Project Gutenberg #1400 · For a group: Blind vote
One rule first
Set a formal rule before the first sentence and hold to it to the end.
- One day, three chimes
In ten minutes, write the stretch between two strikes of the clock, rule written at the top first.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Project Gutenberg #71865 · For a group: Only what works
- No place named
In ten minutes, write the walk from the door to the bridge under the no-names rule.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866), Project Gutenberg #2554 · For a group: Blind vote
Finish what's given
One piece is imposed, often the ending or a single line, and you write what leads to it.
- The hardest part begins
In ten minutes, write the last page only, ending on the given thought.
Full prompt: 25 minutes · Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the Dog (1899), Project Gutenberg #13415 · For a group: The writer listens
- Years later, the calm
In ten minutes, write one paragraph after the fixed first line, each sentence implying a storm now over.
Full prompt: 25 minutes · Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), Project Gutenberg #2600 · For a group: Only what works
- Everyone settled, one unimproved
In ten minutes, write the three closing sentences that settle three characters, one of them unimproved.
Full prompt: 25 minutes · Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), Project Gutenberg #1342 · For a group: Blind vote
Be someone else
Write from a voice, a time or a situation not your own.
- The storyteller who won't say where
In ten minutes, write the opening in which the storyteller refuses, three times over, to name the place.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Nikolai Gogol, The Mantle and Other Stories (1842), Project Gutenberg #36238 · For a group: Call and answer
- A child corrects the book
In ten minutes, write the child's first paragraph correcting the book, in their own grammar.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Project Gutenberg #76 · For a group: Call and answer
- To a parent, from elsewhere
In ten minutes, write the address to the parent: two worn things, and what they gave for the road.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World (1916), Project Gutenberg #7166 · For a group: Only what works
Make it seen
Describe with a few chosen details, heard or seen, so that the reader has the scene before them without a word of comment.
- Heard before seen
In ten minutes, write the arrival: the voice through the wall, the hush, the entrance, three details.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Cao Xueqin, Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber (1791), Project Gutenberg #9603 · For a group: Blind vote
- An afternoon kept indoors
In ten minutes, write the shut-in afternoon in four sentences with a touchable detail in each.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), Project Gutenberg #1260 · For a group: Only what works
The list
Line up brief items under one formula (memories, names, questions) and let the list run long.
- Classifying a chaos
In ten minutes, classify one chaos in ten entries, same shape each: name, size, one habit.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), Project Gutenberg #2701 · For a group: The group's text
- Questions before the story
In ten minutes, write twelve questions about a story you have not told, same form each, no answers.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Cao Xueqin, Hung Lou Meng, or, the Dream of the Red Chamber (1791), Project Gutenberg #9603 · For a group: The group's text
Don't stop
Write for a set time without rereading or correcting, the hand always moving.
- The air of one morning
Ten minutes, timer on, from the air of one morning you remember, no going back, no fixing.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Project Gutenberg #71865 · For a group: Only what works
- Between the page and sleep
Ten minutes from the dark after the light goes out, following each confusion as if it were true, no rereading.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913), Project Gutenberg #7178
- One small decision this morning
Ten minutes from one small decision of the morning, errands and weather interrupting each other, no crossing out.
Full prompt: 15 minutes · Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Project Gutenberg #71865 · For a group: Call and answer
Pass it on
Write in company, each extending the previous writer's piece, linking to it and moving it on.
- Stories to pass the heat
Alone, in ten minutes: take the last sentence of the passage as your first, tell the short tale it makes possible, and end on a sentence that proposes the next one.
Full prompt: 30 minutes · Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron (1353), Project Gutenberg #23700
- Each witness, no further
Alone, in ten minutes: write three witnesses of one small event, each starting where the last one went blind and allowed to contradict them.
Full prompt: 30 minutes · Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone (1868), Project Gutenberg #155
Two words that don't belong
Let chance impose an unlikely pairing, two words or a hypothesis, and write until both belong in the same piece.
- A portrait by detour
In ten minutes, draw two unlikely subjects and sketch a relative's character only through detours into them.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), Project Gutenberg #1079 · For a group: Only what works
- Dust and a dream
In ten minutes, draw one coarse word and one abstraction and build the single image that makes them belong to one person.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925), Project Gutenberg #64317 · For a group: Blind vote
Grow a sentence
Start from a sentence, a maxim, a question, a fact, and develop it step by step: cause, contrary, example, scene.
- What caused it, really
In ten minutes, write the question, the received causes, and the one contrary that undoes them.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869), Project Gutenberg #2600 · For a group: Two sides and a judge
- A polite phrase, unfolded
In ten minutes, take one polite phrase and give its meaning, its hidden opposite, and one example in the person's own mouth.
Full prompt: 20 minutes · Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Project Gutenberg #6593 · For a group: The weekly table
Where the page goes next
Scrin is a home where pages grow into books: you keep writing, from an untitled line to a chapter, and Scrin keeps the rest.