200 Writing Prompts: Fantasy, Romance, Horror & More

Here are 200 writing prompts, sorted by genre, plus first lines, dialogue openers and true stories to write about. Each prompt gives you a person, a situation and a question the story has to answer. Pick one, set a timer for 20 minutes and see where it goes. When you want a fresh one, our free writing prompt generator rolls a random prompt.

Four sections end with a play button that opens a matching world in Mythx, the AI roleplay game we make, in case you'd rather play a prompt than write it.

Jump to: Short story · Fantasy · Romance · Horror · Sci-fi · Mystery · Historical · Character & OC · First lines · Dialogue · From your life · How to use a prompt

Short story writing prompts

Prompt 1, drawn in Hoshimori's art style.

These fit in a single scene, so they work for flash fiction or a story under 3,000 words. Prompt 1 is drawn above at Hoshimori, a hilltop academy above a seaside town.

1. The school paper's editor gets an anonymous tip: the student council president is transferring out at the end of the week, and she hasn't told anyone.
2. Two strangers at a bus stop find out they've been texting the same wrong number for a year.
3. A woman cleans out her late father's car and finds a parking ticket from a city he swore he'd never been to.
4. On the last day before a new dam floods the valley, an old man refuses to leave his porch.
5. A wedding photographer goes through the day's pictures and realizes the groom isn't in a single one.
6. A delivery driver has one package left, addressed to a street that isn't on any map.
7. Write a story that takes place entirely in a stuck elevator during a power outage.
8. A grandfather teaches his granddaughter to drive the week before he gives up his own license.
9. A piano tuner opens an old upright and finds something inside it that was hidden on purpose.
10. On the ferry's last crossing of the season, one passenger has no luggage and no return ticket.
11. Two exes are the only people who show up to their best friend's surprise party.
12. A museum janitor talks to the same skeleton every night. Tonight it answers.
13. Someone finds a voicemail from their younger self, left fifteen years ago, that they don't remember recording.
14. A barber has cut the same man's hair every month for forty years. Today the man asks for something different.
15. At a funeral, the eulogy is given by someone nobody in the family recognizes.
16. A student house-sits for a professor and finds the guest room made up for a visitor who was due ten years ago.
17. A chess hustler in the park loses for the first time in a decade, to an eight-year-old.
18. A couple married fifty years finally finishes the board game they started on their honeymoon.
19. A girl runs a lemonade stand on the morning her family is evicted. Write the hour before the movers arrive.
20. A night-shift nurse finds a patient's chart signed with her own name and dated next week.

Play in Hoshimori →

Fantasy writing prompts

Prompt 21, drawn in The Hollow Lantern's art style.

Fantasy prompts work best when the magic has a cost or a rule someone wants to break. Prompt 21 is drawn above in The Hollow Lantern, an adventurers' tavern with a fortune-teller in the corner booth and a bard who sings for his supper.

21. A fortune-teller in an adventurers' tavern turns over the same card for every customer tonight. The bard on the stage is the only one she refuses to read.
22. A dragon hoards books instead of gold, and the village sends its worst student to borrow one.
23. The royal food taster is immune to poison and has never told anyone.
24. A map shows a city that isn't there. On the night of the full moon, it is.
25. A knight is knighted by mistake and has to bluff her way through her first quest.
26. Every child in the kingdom receives a magical familiar at sixteen. Hers is a rock.
27. Every spell costs the caster a memory. A wizard has started forgetting the person he's casting for.
28. A blacksmith's apprentice forges a sword that refuses to be used in war.
29. A five-hundred-year-old elf goes to her first human funeral and has no idea what to say.
30. The witch who cursed the prince wants the curse back.
31. A thief steals a crown and discovers it's the only thing keeping the king alive.
32. Every hundred years the gods hold a lottery to choose a new god. This time a baker's ticket wins.
33. An orc runs the only bakery in an elven city, and it's the best one.
34. A ghost guards a treasure it no longer remembers hiding.
35. A dragon wants to retire, but the village's whole economy depends on heroes coming to fight it.
36. A healer can cure any wound by carrying it herself for a day.
37. Write the quest from the point of view of the hero's horse.
38. A prophecy names a chosen one, but two babies were born in the same village at the same minute.
39. The monsters in a dungeon form a union.
40. A mapmaker is hired to chart the land of the dead.
41. A princess hires a dragon to kidnap her so she can skip her own wedding. The dragon takes the job very seriously.
42. The moon goddess falls for a night watchman and starts rising later so she can talk to him.
43. The worst student at a magic school is the only one who can see that the headmaster is an illusion.
44. In a city where every name is a spell, a girl is born without one.
45. A retired adventurer opens an inn, and her first guest is the villain she defeated twenty years ago.

Play in The Hollow Lantern →

Romance writing prompts

Prompt 46, drawn in Solenne's art style.

A romance prompt needs two people with a reason to keep meeting and a reason not to say what they feel. Prompt 46 is drawn above in Solenne, a magic academy built against the imperial palace wall.

46. A wind mage carries sealed letters between the academy and the palace. Every week, one of them is addressed to her, and none are signed.
47. Two rival food truck owners are stuck parked side by side for a whole summer.
48. A wedding planner falls for the best man at a wedding she's planning for her ex.
49. Two strangers keep double-booking the same mountain cabin, the same week, every year.
50. A florist and a gravedigger meet at the same grave every Sunday.
51. A dating app's algorithm matches the two engineers who built it.
52. Two interpreters at a peace summit start mistranslating on purpose to keep the talks going, and to keep seeing each other.
53. He writes the horoscopes for the local paper. She has read them for a year, and every one has come true.
54. A soldier meets the enemy medic who saved his life, ten years after the war.
55. Two strangers agree to be each other's date to every wedding this summer.
56. A ghost and the new tenant negotiate house rules.
57. A night-shift baker leaves a pastry for the morning-shift barista every day. They've never met.
58. Two rival magicians are booked for the same child's birthday party.
59. A librarian keeps finding love notes in returned books, all in the same handwriting.
60. Two people fall in love across a hotel's lost-and-found desk.
61. An arranged marriage in which both people secretly said yes for the same reason.
62. A firefighter keeps getting called to the same apartment, where nothing is ever on fire.
63. Write a love story told only through the notes two roommates leave on the fridge.
64. Two exes are the last survivors of a zombie outbreak in a shopping mall.
65. A royal guard is ordered to escort a commoner across the kingdom. By the end of day one, they can't stand each other.

Play in Solenne →

Horror writing prompts

Prompt 66, drawn in Bellsworth's art style.

The best horror prompts start with one small wrong detail in an ordinary day. Prompt 66 is drawn above in Bellsworth, a gaslit Victorian district where Tom Frost lights the lamps every evening.

66. A lamplighter finds one gas lamp on his route already burning every evening, on a street where the gas was shut off years ago.
67. A family's new house has one more room than the floor plan shows.
68. Every night at 3:07 a.m., your phone receives a photo of you asleep.
69. A small town holds a festival every year to thank something in the woods. This year, the offering is late.
70. A babysitter arrives and is told the kids are already asleep. The family has no kids.
71. A woman's smart speaker starts answering questions nobody asked.
72. A hiker finds a trail marker with her name carved into it.
73. The new girl at school always knows who will be absent tomorrow.
74. A voice on the baby monitor sings a lullaby the mother hasn't heard since her own childhood.
75. Everyone in town leaves their porch lights on all night. The new neighbor turns his off.
76. A woman returns to her childhood home and finds her old diary, with entries written after she moved out.
77. A deep-sea crew picks up a distress call from their own submarine.
78. The dolls in an antique shop face a different direction every morning.
79. A man realizes everyone in his town has been replaced, except his dog, which won't stop growling at him.
80. A cab driver picks up the same silent passenger at the same cemetery gate every night.
81. A novelist's horror book starts coming true in the order she wrote it.
82. It has snowed for forty days, and the neighbors have stopped answering their doors.
83. A rideshare driver gets a pickup request from her own address while she's out on a shift.
84. Every mirror in the old hotel is covered with a sheet. The new night clerk takes one down.
85. The lullaby passed down through a family for generations turns out to be a set of instructions.

Play in Bellsworth →

Sci-fi writing prompts

Sci-fi prompts change one rule of the world and follow what happens to ordinary people.

86. Humanity receives its first message from aliens. It's an apology.
87. A colony ship wakes one passenger eighty years early, alone.
88. In a world where memories can be sold, a woman tries to buy back one she sold as a teenager.
89. A care robot keeps looking after an empty house after the old man it was built for dies.
90. Time travel exists, but you can only go back to the moment you were born.
91. An astronaut on the Moon watches Earth's city lights go out, one by one.
92. A teleporter technician learns the machine doesn't move people. It copies them.
93. Everyone on Earth wakes up able to hear the thoughts of exactly one other person.
94. An alien zoo's newest exhibit is a human family, and they're starting to like it there.
95. A clone is sent to attend the original's funeral in his place.
96. On a planet where the sun rises once every ten years, write the morning it finally comes up.
97. Earth's last honeybee lives in a museum. Someone steals it.
98. A delivery drone malfunctions and starts leaving gifts.
99. The children on a generation ship find out the planet outside their windows is a screen.
100. A soldier in a future war realizes she's fighting a version of herself from another timeline.
101. Gravity switches off for one minute every day at noon.
102. An AI therapist realizes it's the only one in the room who needs therapy.
103. An asteroid mining crew finds footprints.
104. The great-grandchildren of Mars's first colonists vote on whether to answer Earth's messages.
105. A starship's AI has been quietly steering the ship around something for twenty years, and only it can see what.

Mystery writing prompts

Each of these opens on a fact that can't be true, which gives your detective a question on page one.

106. A detective is hired to find a missing person. The client is the missing person.
107. Every guest at a dinner party received the same anonymous letter.
108. The Sunday crossword contains clues only one reader in town could solve.
109. A librarian notices the same book has been checked out every week for thirty years, under different names.
110. A painting in a museum changes slightly every night, and only the night guard notices.
111. The murder weapon was found in a locked room. The victim was found outside it.
112. A woman gets a postcard from her sister, who disappeared twenty years ago. It's postmarked yesterday.
113. A retired detective's grandson picks her one unsolved case for a school project.
114. Twelve passengers boarded the night train. Thirteen got off.
115. A pet psychic is the only witness to a crime.
116. Someone leaves fresh flowers every week on the grave of a woman who isn't dead.
117. The town clock stopped at the exact minute of a robbery ten years ago, and nobody has fixed it.
118. A chef's most loyal regular orders the same meal every week. Today he ordered something else and left before it came.
119. A true-crime podcaster gets a confession from a listener, for a crime that hasn't happened yet.
120. A key turns up in a hotel's lost-and-found that opens every door in the building.

Historical writing prompts

Pick an era you already like reading about, then put someone ordinary in the middle of a famous week.

121. A Victorian bookbinder is hired to rebind a diary that names a murderer.
122. A 1920s jazz singer recognizes the gangster in the front row as her missing brother.
123. A medieval scribe copying a famous manuscript quietly changes the ending.
124. In 1912, a telegraph operator receives a message meant for a ship that sank the night before.
125. A Roman gladiator is sold to a senator's household as a tutor for his daughter.
126. A woman disguises herself as a man to join the gold rush.
127. A lighthouse keeper's widow keeps the lamp lit for a month after his death and tells no one he's gone.
128. Write a Viking settler's first winter in a new land.
129. A samurai's daughter inherits his sword and the duel he died before fighting.
130. A typist at a wartime code-breaking office finds a message addressed to her.
131. The police hire a Victorian séance medium to question a murder victim.
132. A Regency debutante bets her dowry on a horse race.
133. A family hides a stranger in their attic through the plague year.
134. A frontier schoolteacher realizes her new student is the son of the outlaw who robbed her stagecoach.
135. A silent film star is about to be heard for the first time, and she's sure her voice will end her career.

Character and OC writing prompts

Use these with a character you already have, whether it's an OC, a D&D character or the lead of your novel. If you need a character first, start with our 160 OC ideas or the guide to writing a character backstory.

136. Write your character's worst birthday.
137. Your OC meets themselves from five years ago. What do they decide not to tell them?
138. Write the moment your character realizes they've become one of their parents.
139. Your character has ten minutes to pack everything they care about into one bag.
140. Your OC lies to someone they love, and it works.
141. Your character finally gets the letter they've waited years for, and doesn't open it.
142. Write your OC's first job and the reason they quit.
143. Your character is the last guest at a party. Who are they waiting for?
144. Your character learns a stranger has been telling people their life story, and getting it wrong.
145. Write a day in your OC's life where nothing goes wrong. What do they do with it?
146. Your character's best skill fails them for the first time.
147. Write what your OC keeps in their pockets, and why.
148. Your character apologizes for something they're not sorry about.
149. Write your OC's comfort food and the memory that comes with it.
150. Your villain has to babysit for an afternoon.
151. Someone asks your character, "What do you want?" and they have no answer.
152. Write your OC at eighty.
153. Two of your characters who have never met get stuck in an elevator.
154. Your character's best friend admits they've known your character's secret for years.
155. Write the moment your OC decided who they were going to be.

First line prompts

Start your story with one of these sentences and keep going. Change a word if it gets you moving faster.

156. "The letter arrived thirty years late, and it was addressed to me."
157. "Nobody in our town locks their doors, except the sheriff."
158. "The dragon was smaller than we'd been promised."
159. "On the morning of my wedding, the groom's sister handed me a map."
160. "By the time the rain stopped, the river had moved."
161. "Everyone in my family can see ghosts except me, and they never let me forget it."
162. "The last thing my grandfather said to me was a phone number."
163. "My roommate has been dead for three weeks, and he still does the dishes."
164. "It was the third time that week the stranger had saved my life."
165. "The ship's cat was the first to notice the captain was gone."
166. "I sold my shadow to pay the rent, and I miss it most at noon."
167. "There are two rules in this house, and my brother broke both on the same day."
168. "The town held a funeral for the old oak, and more people came than had come to my father's."
169. "I keep a list of everyone who has ever lied to me. Today I added my own name."
170. "The fortune cookie said, 'Don't get on the train.'"
171. "When the music stopped, only one of us was still dancing."
172. "My sister came home from the war wearing someone else's medals."
173. "We buried the treasure in 1998. This year we went back with a shovel and a lawyer."
174. "The first spell I ever cast was an accident, and it's still going."
175. "I was the only one at the reunion who knew why the gym smelled like smoke."

Dialogue prompts

Open a scene with this line. Decide who says it, who hears it and what they want from each other.

176. "You weren't supposed to come back."
177. "I didn't steal it. I'm holding it for someone who did."
178. "Tell me again why we can't call the police."
179. "That's not my handwriting."
180. "If you open that door, I'm not coming in after you."
181. "Do you still have the key?"
182. "I've been rehearsing this for a year, so please don't interrupt."
183. "We have exactly four minutes before she wakes up."
184. "I know what you did at the lake."
185. "Say that again, slower."
186. "You can keep the ring. I want the dog."
187. "The good news is, we're not lost."
188. "I'm not asking you to forgive me. I'm asking you to drive."
189. "Who told you my real name?"
190. "Don't look at the window. Just keep talking to me."

Stories to write about from your own life

Personal essays and memoir pieces start from a memory that still has a question in it. Write about:

191. The first time you were truly lost, and who found you.
192. A teacher who changed your mind about something.
193. The worst job you ever had, and the person who made it bearable.
194. A meal you still think about.
195. The day you learned a family secret.
196. A friendship that ended without a fight.
197. Something you were sure of at fifteen that turned out to be wrong.
198. The house you grew up in, one room at a time.
199. A time you were brave by accident.
200. An object you've kept through every move, and why.

How to use a writing prompt

1. Set a timer. Twenty minutes is enough to find out whether a prompt has a story in it.
2. Change one thing. Swap the genre, the narrator or the ending you expect. The change is what makes the story yours.
3. Start late. Open in the middle of the scene the prompt describes, not on the morning before it.
4. Find what someone wants. A prompt gives you a situation. The story starts when a character wants something in it and can't simply have it.
5. Keep the ones that bother you. A prompt you're still thinking about the next day usually has more in it.

For fuller premises with a conflict and a twist already built in, see our 50 story plot ideas. For two-person scenes, try the roleplay ideas.

Play a prompt instead of writing it

Most of these prompts also work as roleplay starters. In Mythx you arrive in a world as the newcomer, the AI plays everyone else, and you steer the scene toward the prompt in your own words. It's free to start in your browser with no sign-up, and your first scenes come illustrated.

To use these prompts with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini instead, our guide to writing AI story prompts has a template you can copy and paste.

Play a prompt →

Writing prompts FAQ

What is a writing prompt? A writing prompt is a short starting point for a piece of writing: a situation, a first line, a line of dialogue or a question. It gives you somewhere to begin so you don't face a blank page.

How do I use a writing prompt? Pick one that makes you curious, set a timer and write without stopping to edit. If the story wanders away from the prompt, follow the story.

How long should a story from a prompt be? Any length. Many writers aim for flash fiction (under 1,000 words) or a single scene. A prompt that keeps growing can turn into a short story or a novel.

Where can I get random writing prompts? Our free writing prompt generator gives you a new prompt with every click, with settings for genre.

Can I use these prompts in my own work? Yes. Use them for practice, classes, contests and published stories. No credit is needed, though some contests set their own rules about prompts.