50 Fun Writing Prompts to Boost Your Creativity

The point of a fun prompt is not that it produces good writing. It is that it gets you writing at all, and writing badly and quickly is how most people get unstuck.

The fifty below are built as games rather than topics: absurd premises, voice exercises, constraint challenges, dialogue two-handers, and a final set designed for groups. Almost all of them take between five and twenty minutes.

That last group is for classrooms, writing groups and families. Most prompt lists assume you are writing alone, which is a shame, because writing in a room with other people is the fastest way to get less precious about it. If you want prompts aimed at finished work rather than play, our short fiction prompts are pitched for that instead.

• There is no correct answer. The moment a prompt has a right way to do it, it stops being play.
• The rule does the work. Fifty words exactly, no letter e, only dialogue. A constraint gives you something to push against and removes the pressure to have a good idea.
• It finishes. A prompt you can complete in fifteen minutes gives you the small satisfaction that makes you come back tomorrow.
• It works better read aloud than admired on the page. Most of these are funnier out loud, which is also a good test of whether they worked.

Ten silly what-ifs. The trick with an absurd premise is to treat it completely seriously. The comedy comes from the straight face rather than from the idea.

1. The bureaucracy of magic

Wizards must file paperwork for every spell. Write the rejection letter for a spell that has already been cast.

2. The pigeon union

The pigeons in your city have unionised. Write their list of demands in full, with the one completely reasonable demand placed third.

3. Sentient traffic light

Write a day in the life of a traffic light with strong opinions about the drivers and no way to express them except timing.

4. The nearly useless power

Everyone gets a superpower at eighteen and yours is that you always know exactly how much milk is left. Write the day it saves somebody's life.

5. Complaints, afterlife division

Write three customer complaints submitted to the afterlife, and the single form response sent to all of them.

6. The moon is late

The moon fails to rise one night, and it turns out there is a perfectly reasonable explanation. Write the press conference.

7. Impossible assembly instructions

Write flat-pack assembly instructions for something that should not be flat-pack. Include one step that is clearly wrong and never acknowledge it.

8. Gravity, on subscription

Gravity now works on a subscription model. Write the day somebody's payment fails.

9. Witness statement from a cat

Write a police witness statement given by a cat. It is not a reliable witness and it is not trying to be helpful.

10. The last honest advert

Write an advertisement for an ordinary product in which every claim is completely true and completely unappealing.

Never explain the joke. If the piece has to tell the reader it is being funny, the premise was not doing enough on its own.

These are about tone rather than plot. Pick a voice, commit to it entirely, and see how long you can hold it.

11. The wrong stakes

Narrate a completely ordinary event as though it were the most dangerous thing that has ever happened. Never break the tone.

12. Wildly overqualified

Write a job application from somebody wildly overqualified for a very small job, who genuinely wants it and will not say why.

13. The object with a grudge

Write a monologue from a household object that was mildly wronged and has been thinking about it for years.

14. Supermarket review, 1890

A vampire who has been asleep since 1890 writes a review of a modern supermarket.

15. Confident and wrong

Write an expert explanation of something by somebody who is confidently, energetically wrong about all of it. Do not wink at the reader once.

16. Grievance from under the bed

The creature under the bed submits a formal grievance about working conditions. Write the response from HR.

17. The inconvenienced hero

Write a scene in which somebody saves the day entirely by accident and is annoyed about the interruption.

18. Diary of the assistant

Write three diary entries from the assistant to a famous adventurer. The adventurer never appears.

19. Translating badly, on purpose

Write a scene where somebody is translating a very tense negotiation and quietly making it worse.

20. Reverse advice column

Write a letter to an advice column from somebody whose only problem is that their life is going too well.

Hold the register to the very end. Almost every voice exercise collapses in the final paragraph, where the writer steps out and comments on their own joke.

Here the rule is the whole game. These are the ones to reach for when you have no ideas at all, because a constraint removes the need for one. The same discipline drives our poetry writing prompts, and an AI idea generator is handy if you want more variations at the same difficulty.

21. Exactly fifty words

Write a complete story in exactly fifty words. Beginning, turn, ending. Count them.

22. No letter E

Write a paragraph of at least eighty words without using the letter e anywhere. It changes your vocabulary in genuinely interesting ways.

23. Alphabetical story

Write twenty-six sentences, each beginning with the next letter of the alphabet in order, that together form one continuous story.

24. One syllable only

Write a scene of at least a hundred words using only single-syllable words. The rhythm that results is the point of the exercise.

25. No adjectives, no adverbs

Describe a room vividly without using a single adjective or adverb. Nouns and verbs only.

26. One sentence, three hundred words

Write a single grammatical sentence of about three hundred words that stays readable the whole way through. No semicolons.

27. Dialogue with nothing else

Write a two-page scene using nothing but dialogue: no tags, no description, no narration. The reader must always know who is speaking.

28. Same first and last line

Write a story whose first and last sentences are identical but mean completely different things by the end.

29. Backwards in six scenes

Write a story in six short scenes ordered from last to first. Each must change the meaning of the one before it.

30. Ten six-word stories

Write ten different six-word stories. Exactly six words each. The good ones usually leave out the noun.

Do not cheat the constraint. The line you are forced into is almost always better than the one you wanted, and cheating loses you the only thing the exercise had to offer.

Ten scenes for two voices. Every one of these forbids people saying what they mean, which is the entire skill of writing dialogue.

31. Arguing about the wrong thing

Write an argument about a dishwasher in which the real subject is never mentioned once and is completely clear throughout.

32. Neither will go first

Two people in a lift, both with the same thing to say, and neither will go first. Write four floors.

33. One-word answers

Write a scene where one character talks a great deal and the other only ever answers with a single word. The single words should win.

34. Relentlessly pleasant

Write an exchange between an impossible customer and an employee who refuses, absolutely, to stop being pleasant.

35. Lying badly

Write a conversation in which one person is lying and doing it very poorly. The other lets them continue.

36. The same question, four times

One character asks the same short question four times and it means something different each time. The other answers only once.

37. Wrong number

A wrong-number phone call that neither party ends, for reasons that gradually become clear. Write the whole call.

38. Interrupted five times

Write a scene where somebody is trying to say one important sentence and is interrupted five times before they manage it.

39. Determined common ground

A marine biologist and a tax accountant are seated together and determined to find common ground. Write dinner.

40. Negotiating over nothing

Two people negotiate seriously over something completely worthless, using the full vocabulary of a corporate deal.

Read it aloud with the names removed. If you cannot tell the speakers apart, the problem is the characters rather than the dialogue.

For classrooms, writing groups and rainy afternoons. Several work with as few as two people. Our middle school writing prompts and daily writing prompts fit alongside these for more structured sessions.

41. Pass the story

Each person writes two sentences and folds the paper so only the last line shows, then passes it on. Read the whole thing aloud at the end.

42. Everyone gets the same first line

Give the whole group the same opening sentence and ten minutes. Read them all out. The variety is the lesson.

43. Word donation

Everybody contributes one random noun. Everybody then has to use all of them in a single paragraph.

44. Guess the prompt

Everybody writes from a different prompt, then reads their piece aloud while the group tries to work out what the prompt was.

45. Two-minute rounds

Set two minutes and write. Pass the page to the left and continue somebody else's piece. Four rounds, then read the results.

46. Terrible first lines

Everybody writes the worst opening sentence they can manage. Swap, and each person then has to write a good paragraph after somebody else's terrible line.

47. Character auction

Each person invents one character in three sentences. The group votes on which two characters should meet, and everybody writes that scene.

48. Five banned words

The group agrees on five banned words before starting. Ordinary ones work best: said, walked, looked, very, just.

49. Read it in the wrong voice

Everybody writes a short serious piece. Somebody else reads it aloud as a sports commentator, or a nature documentary. It teaches you what your writing actually sounds like.

50. The collective ending

One person writes an opening paragraph. Everybody writes a different final paragraph for it. Read them one after another.

Read everything aloud, including the failures, and do not let anybody apologise before they read. The apology is the only part that spoils it.

Two things here are genuinely worth doing, and neither is asking for a draft. The first is generating variations: hand over prompt twenty-three and ask for eight more constraint games at the same difficulty. That is a five-second job which a workshop leader would otherwise spend an evening on. An AI story generator handles the drafting if you want to see one version before writing your own.

The second is better. Take any prompt here and ask what the most obvious response would be, then deliberately do something else. With absurd premises particularly, the first idea is the one everybody has, and knowing what it is saves you writing it. Claude Sonnet 5 is worth using for the voice exercises, since holding a register across a long passage is exactly the thing it does well. Chat Smith is free to try.