ideas for a creative writing short story

104 Of The Best Short Story Ideas And Prompts To Grab Your Readers

So, you want to write a short story — and not just a mildly entertaining short story but one your readers can’t put down until they’ve finished it.

You want a story that gets reactions like “Wow!” and “How did you do that?” and “Do you have more like this?”

What writer doesn’t want that kind of reaction, right?

And since short stories are short, you have less time to wait for your readers’ reactions — but you also have less time to grab their attention.

That’s why a great topic is worth its weight in gold when it comes to writing these little gems.

Even with the challenges inherent to short story writing, you’ll most likely finish a short story in far less time than you would a novel.

So, you’ll get to explore more story topics in less time than if you were writing longer works.

But how do you generate short story ideas that are worth the time you’ll invest in crafting a short story your readers will love?

If you’ve been writing for long enough, you already know good story ideas are everywhere, and you might even have some in mind as you read this.

But which of those ideas should be on your shortlist for story writing projects?

And if you don’t have any great ideas at the moment, where do you get some?

Short Story Idea Generator (how to generate story ideas)

Short story writing exercises, generating story ideas with the short story formula, timeless themes and emotional impact, 35 short story ideas, 69 short story writing prompts.

When it comes to generating new story ideas, you can take more than one approach. You might try these three:

• Writing exercises
• Writing prompts
• The Short Story Formula

Think of your school days when your English teacher assigned an essay or invited you to write a paragraph in answer to a question.

Maybe all you had to do was write one complete sentence. Or maybe your teacher wanted a haiku — or a rhyming couplet.

School isn’t the only place for writing exercises , though. If you’ve ever joined a creative writing group, your leader may have encouraged you to spend some time each day freewriting or writing a character sketch .

The purpose of writing exercises is to practice writing — or to practice a specific kind of writing (voice journaling, essays, persuasive ad copy, song lyrics, etc.).

So, whether it’s NaNoWriMo, Twitter’s #VSS (Very Short Story) challenge, or writing sprints, the more time you invest in these exercises, and the more you open yourself up to constructive criticism, the more quickly your writing will improve.

The most effective writing prompts and writing exercises make use of themes with a history of captivating and inspiring others. Because of this, either one might lead you to a story idea that you can hardly wait to explore.

Take one (or more) of those popular themes and combine them with a context that is both unique and relatable, and you have the formula for a compelling story idea.

Story writing ideas are generally more fully developed than writing prompts. It’s not unusual, for example, to begin with a writing prompt , develop it into a story idea, and then write the actual story.

And don’t beat yourself up if the first idea that comes to mind is a cliché. You’re human, and familiar ideas are the easiest to think of. Nothing wrong with that. The first idea is like a first draft , in that it gives you something to start with.

And don’t be afraid to mix it up — literally. Take one idea, mix it up with another, and play with it for a while. Who knows how you might juice up your story idea without even trying?

The best fiction story ideas make use of timeless themes. You’ll find one or more of the ten themes that follow in most stories that have been written, read, and shared over the centuries.

• The End of a Relationship
• Rags to Riches
• Scars / Wounds
• Ghosts / the Paranormal
• Deepest Fears
• A Soulmate Encounter
• A Journey Interrupted
• Monsters (human or otherwise)

The story idea itself — in its simplest form — doesn’t have to be original, and in fact, it shouldn’t be. But the way you embody and develop that idea should surprise your readers and evoke an emotional response in them.

It’s that emotional impact that makes your story not only worth finishing but memorable.

Short story ideas will look different from novel ideas, though — mainly because short stories have to make a big impact with fewer words. And because of this, the most powerful short stories have what James Scott Bell describes as the “one shattering moment.”

In his book, How to Write Short Stories and Use Them to Further Your Writing Career, Bell describes that moment as “something that happens to a character, an emotional blast which they cannot ignore. It changes them, in a large or a subtle way — in a way that cannot be ignored.”

Any one of the popular themes listed above could you give your main character a shattering moment that would change that character’s life or perspective.

Take a look at the following creative story ideas, many of which combine two or more of the popular themes listed, and feel free to modify any of them to create your next unputdownable short story.

1. Your character’s loved one has died , and he learns while going through that loved one’s belongings that the latter had a terrible secret that unnervingly correlates to your character’s deepest fear.

The rest of the story explores your character’s reaction to this discovery and how it affects his/her relationships and decision-making.

2. Your character has married the man she saw as her “soulmate.” During their honeymoon, he shows her his list of goals for their first five years together, and they have their first real argument over one of those goals — which requires something of her that she never agreed to.

She has a sudden memory of their first date and of the moment when she first decided he was the one, but she sees it now from his perspective, and it changes everything.

3. Your orphaned character inherits a house and moves in to find that it’s already occupied — by the spirits of the character’s long-deceased parents, who aren’t at all like the people other relatives have described.

4. Your character is having trouble getting past his anger over the wounds inflicted by those who raised him and by those with whom he had one failed relationship after the next.

After losing his job, he goes on a journey to change the direction of his life, but that journey is interrupted by the death of one of his parents — the one who hurt him the most.

5. Your character is widely regarded as a monster and doesn’t deny or hide from that designation.

When his closest confidante gets fed up with him, tells him off, and leaves the company they founded together, your character finds himself disoriented by grief and does something different.

6. Your character is content with her life but suddenly inherits a large sum of money and a palatial estate on the east coast.

She sees the inheritance as proof that the Law of Attraction works, and she invites family and a few close friends to move with her and share the wealth. On the first night of their stay, someone dies.

7. Your character’s snake-loving neighbor has just been found in the belly of her pet boa constrictor (who she swore was a better “snuggler” than her ex).

The ex shows up and is angry when he finds out that your neighbor left the house and everything in it to your character. He threatens to ruin her life if she doesn’t turn the house over to him.

8. Your character meets his/her soulmate on a flight that almost doesn’t make it to its destination; both of them respond to emergencies on the plane (one as a cop and the other as a doctor).

Once at the airport, your character learns that this soulmate is already in a relationship with a well-known philanthropist. But your character notices something odd and calls the philanthropist out.

9. Your character’s best friend just announced the end of a relationship, and your character is surprised to find this friend in a celebratory state of mind (rather than heartbroken).

Your character then finds out the disturbing reason for the friend’s manic behavior.

10. One of your character’s siblings is getting married, and during wedding preparations, your character learns something she was never meant to know. This discovery changes her relationships with everyone.

11. The happy couple living next door to your character has died in a horrific accident, and when the parents show up for the funeral, you find out why the couple always changed the subject whenever you asked them about their families.

12. Your character starts receiving messages from someone who knows his/her deepest fears and intends to exploit them. At the same time, your character is discovering a latent ability that relates to those fears but might also help him overcome them. Or they might change him into something the messenger never saw coming.

13. Your character meets a soulmate at a community grief counseling group meeting and learns that this soulmate also attends AA meetings (like your mc) — though with a different group and with a friend who doesn’t particularly like your main character.

The surprising reason comes out when your character goes on a first date with this soulmate. The soulmate’s friend swears he/she knows your mc from a different reality — which he/she visits in dreams.

14. Your character breaks free of a painful relationship and embarks on a journey to discover what she’s capable of. After volunteering at a nursing home — reading to vision-impaired residents and writing letters for them — she agrees to personally deliver one of those letters to the resident’s estranged son.

15. After avoiding close relationships because of deep scars from his childhood, your main character learns something about one of his parents that changes everything for him. He then has an opportunity to take a step off his accustomed path.

16. Your character has been married for 19 years before her spouse — after a weekend that reminds her of when they met and why she married him — hands her divorce papers.

17. Your character is making a list of reasons to break up with her boyfriend of two years when the latter comes home early and tells her he’s won the lottery jackpot.

18. Your character is a locally famous writer whose hero story ideas come from his freewheeling lifestyle and insatiable curiosity about others.

One day, out of boredom, he offers a homeless man $100 to propose to the first woman he takes a fancy to, while he watches from a safe distance. The proposal goes terrifyingly wrong.

19. Your character has just lost a child by miscarriage , and when she comes home, her married life has changed. Her husband, who was always the more talkative of the two, spends their time together quietly grieving in his own way.

Your character, on the other hand, becomes more outgoing and starts spending more time (and money) on her appearance.

20. Your young adult character finds himself suddenly orphaned when his parents die in a plane crash. The funeral is the beginning of a dramatic shift in his perspective and in the choices he makes.

He breaks off a relationship with a woman his parents adored, he quits the lucrative job that he hates, and he leaves the country.

21. Your character has just learned that his spouse has been cheating on him, and he confronts her when she gets home that night.

She reveals that what he saw as proof of her infidelity was something completely innocent — but that she’s already decided to make a permanent and dramatic end to their marriage.

22. The only child of your character is diagnosed with a fatal illness, and your character doesn’t know how to deal with the worry and dread that now consumes her.

Her doctor suggests one anti-anxiety med after another, and her husband and his family urge her to try one — for her husband’s and her son’s sakes. She goes into a fugue state with the experimental drug she tries, and she wakes up to the consequences.

23. Your character’s new glasses — created as a free gift from an old friend with unusual connections — reveal more than the physical objects in his field of vision.

After looking at a coworker and seeing the latter’s death just hours before it happens, he goes to replace the glasses with a plain pair from a local chain. Then he catches his full-length reflection in a window.

24. Your character wakes up alone in an unfamiliar place and is told by everyone he encounters that the life he thought he’d lived for the past six years — with a wife and three kids and with the job that barely paid the bills — must have been a dream.

He’s actually stunningly wealthy, treated with respect by everyone he meets, and desired by more than one woman. So, why is there a picture of him with his nonexistent family on his desk?

25. A year ago, your character met someone who offered her the power to transform the interior of her home to anything she wants — in exchange for a DNA sample from her only child, who is a gifted storyteller.

During the year after she accepted the offer, her home becomes everything she wants it to be, but her son stops telling stories, and one day she finds out why.

26. Your character makes drastic changes to his diet and adopts new habits that alienate him from his usual circle of friends but lead him to a new one.

He then wins a large sum of money from a scratch ticket that an estranged friend (a compulsive gambler) slipped under his door.

27. Your character has returned from a successful quest to find his home empty, with no sign of his loved ones other than a note left on the refrigerator.

Not only does he now have no one with whom to share his victory, but what he learns calls that very victory into question.

28. Your character has spent eleven years living with the consequences of a vow she has taken. When she forges a new friendship with a counselor, she learns something about herself that scares her and makes her avoid the counselor, for his own sake.

Keenly aware of her own vulnerability, she brands herself to ward off unwelcome attention.

29. Your character, after 15 years of living in a house chosen mainly to fit her spouse’s preferences, sees an ad for an apartment in town that represents the life she gave up to make her husband happy.

After hearing him complain about his life and their house for one too many times, she goes to look at this apartment and finds it has almost everything she wants. The apartment manager, a well-dressed woman close to her own age, hears your character’s last name and appears shaken by it.

30. Your character splurges on a new rug for her living room floor — the kind of rug she’s coveted for years — and her S.O. criticizes it and later “accidentally” spills his drink on it.

The final straw is his suggestion that she wait ‘til it dries and return it to the store for a refund or exchange it for something more practical.

31. Your character has recently broken free from a cult that had drawn him in when he was vulnerable from a family tragedy. His new support system — a group of other cult survivors — is having varying degrees of difficulty re-entering society and repairing damaged relationships.

Your character meets with them one evening at their accustomed café table and confronts a server whose off-handed comment provokes him. What begins as a calm request for respectful treatment escalates as other members of the group chime in and the server’s manager gets involved.

32. Your character has joined a church and finds herself under the tutelage of a church member who leans toward the traditionalist end of the spectrum and who regards her as the daughter he never had.

When he decides to renounce the church’s leadership and join an extreme traditionalist group, she backs away from him — after explaining to him why she won’t do the same. His behavior toward her changes and she makes a change of her own.

33. Your character is so desperate for money that he does something he never would have done otherwise. He doesn’t get caught, but he doesn’t get away with it, either. Consumed by guilt, he undergoes a penance of his choosing, which spirals out of control.

34. Your character walks into a tourist shop and buys a homemade “tonic” freshly mixed by the owner, after tasting and enjoying an innocuous sample in the same flavor. The tonic changes him in a way he can’t ignore or undo.

35. Your character inherits an old music shop with a secret back room where his uncle kept a few instruments that can make even someone like him — who has never played an instrument — a virtuoso in seconds. He takes the piano to his apartment and learns why his uncle (in a letter he’d written before his death) had warned him not to — and why his uncle kept the door to that secret room locked.

With writing prompts , you get a launching pad of sorts: a question, an idea, a provocative quote, or something that inspires a reaction — specifically a written one. Maybe that reaction is an argument, or maybe it’s an impassioned defense of an idea.

Whatever it is, the purpose here is to take that prompt and use it to generate a written response in one form or another. The aim of writing prompts for short stories is to get you started on a new short story .

The prompt could be as simple as a word or as detailed as a character sketch or an elevator pitch. It could even be a picture or a song. It could be an observation you make while (discreetly) people-watching.

We’ve create 69 short story writing prompts that flesh out an idea more thoroughly, giving you a good headstart for your story.

1. You get a new job, and your new boss approaches you on the first day with an invitation to the “After Hours Club.” He tells you it’s no big deal if you decline, but you get a strong impression that it would be.

2. One day, on the way home from work, your new car takes over and drives you to a remote area, stopping beside other cars in a clearing underneath a new moon. You wake up underneath a full moon and drive yourself home. But much has changed in your absence — and so have you.

3. You bake pies for a local bakery, and when a celebrity comes to town and tastes your locally famous turtle pie, he invites you to go on tour with him — to a movie set somewhere in Europe — to be his personal pie maker. You say yes.

4. You buy a single rose from a street vendor, and it lasts a week, then two weeks, then three, and then a full month. Only then does someone point out to you that previously healthy people in the neighborhood have been falling ill and dying at an abnormal rate.

5. It’s time for your 10-year-old daughter to make her First Confession, but when her turn comes to go into the confessional, she panics and won’t be persuaded to go in.

6. You’re stranded in a small village down a winding road from Burgos (Spain) on a Sunday. A stranger comes by on a motorcycle and goes to fetch a taxi for you. You’re waiting at the bus station when he tells you he knows you’re meant to replace his recently deceased wife.

7. The bartender brings you your first Irish coffee in what looks like a candy dish. Halfway through, you notice the whole cafe seems to be floating, and since you can’t put the rest into a to-go cup (alas), you pay your tab and head out. You think you’re doing fine until your key doesn’t work in the front door of your apartment building. Someone else kindly lets you in, and you recognize him as the bartender from that cafe.

8. You’re exploring an old Spanish town, and you realize someone is following you. You turn and find an old woman who asks if you’ll help her find her hotel. You help her, and she invites you in, telling you she has a son who shares your interest in all things Tolkien. You’re not in a hurry to get back to your hotel room, so you go up with her.

9. Your fingers don’t respond to you the way they used to, and you’ve been having other difficulties. You go see your doctor, and they run some tests to check for neurological diseases but don’t find anything. They think it’s probably stress-related. Your life has been stressful lately, and it doesn’t help that your new roommate has been acting strangely toward you.

10. You wake up with your heart racing, but you don’t remember why. You almost never remember your dreams but often wake up covered in sweat with your heart pounding. You’re tired of having to shower every morning and feeling sick for the rest of the day, so you decide to undergo hypnosis, hoping to find out what’s going on.

11. Your neighbors have been up to some strange shenanigans lately, and their lights are on well into the wee hours of the morning. You’d like to know why, but every neighbor you’ve talked to who have gone over there to ask about it has, later on, told you that nothing suspicious is going on and that those neighbors are “very spiritual, and so, so nice!”

12. The street lamps that light up your cul de sac have gone dark, and you’re outside waiting for your spouse to get home when something large and dark brushes past you, almost knocking you off balance. Then a man appears and asks, “Have you seen my cat?”

13. Someone has broken into your house while you were away and has taken all the religious articles out of it — every statue, every picture, and every holy water bottle. The thief left everything else alone.

14. You move into an apartment that used to be a hoarder’s paradise, and your manager gives you permission to paint the walls a different color and add some new flooring. You get to work removing the kitchen’s linoleum floor and find something you never expected.

15. You joined a wine delivery service, and the delivery person is every bit as charming as the labels on the posh wine he brings to you each week. When you lose your job and cancel the service, the wine keeps coming.

16. You buy a pound of gourmet coffee beans at a local food festival, and as you’re sipping the first cup from the first pot you’ve brewed, you have a vision, which feels as real as though it were actually happening to you. When the vision ends, you’re still in your kitchen, holding your cup. You take another sip.

17. You’re about ready to gather up all the ceramic village pieces that have been cluttering up your living room and toss them in the trash bin, but your spouse, who knows you hate them, insists you should try selling them on eBay, instead. That’s when the fight starts.

18. You buy a new pair of Bluetooth earbuds that are supposed to enhance your listening experience. You plug them in and use them while watching a movie, and suddenly, you’re there on the scene, about to get flattened (or eaten) by a dinosaur.

19. You need a new toilet, and someone shows up at the door (as though sent by heaven) to sell you a toilet that will flush down ANYTHING. Oddly enough, it doesn’t even need to be hooked up to your septic system. “All you have to do is remove and empty the dust tray at the base every evening, reinsert it for the next day’s flushes, and voila!”

20. You buy a new keyboard , and after typing a few sentences of a new story, it starts typing on its own, and you watch in surprise as it types out a new short story. You submit it to a contest you’ve never won and win first prize. You start thinking you’ll never have trouble paying the rent again! Then you accidentally spill wine on the keyboard, and even stranger things start happening.

Related:  55 Funny Writing Prompts To Inspire Your Inner Comedian

21. Your famous stew recipe has won an award. You go to collect it (a cash prize), and meet the next runner-up, who believes she should have won the first prize instead with her three-bean salad. She warns you not to spend the money, because she will prove you won unfairly. You go home and find a bowl of three-bean salad and a note.

22. You suggest at the breakfast table one morning that you might actually have too many books, and your SO seizes upon this and offers to help you thin out your collection. After breaking up with him, you cull a few volumes for donation and run into the author of one of them.

23. Your first issue of Real Simple magazine has finally arrived, but something has come with it — something you can’t see but that makes your life anything but simpler.

24. A girl scout comes to the door selling cookies, and you tell her you already bought some from her at the table outside your grocery store, and you’ve spent enough for the year. Suddenly, all the food in your house (including the canned food) becomes moldy or rotten. And every bit of food that passes your threshold becomes inedible.

25. You buy a new whiteboard to help you keep track of your writing assignments, but you wake up one morning, and new items have somehow been added to your list. And the new titles have a sinister edge to them. You live alone.

26. You buy a new poster that looks exactly like the TARDIS door, and you put it up on your bedroom wall. One night, right at midnight (you’re up working at your computer), the door opens and you walk through it.

27. You buy a CD with music that’s supposed to help you write more creatively and also lose weight more easily. You start playing it during your writing time, and sure enough, the words flow without effort, and you love what you’ve written. You also start losing ten pounds a week, and soon you can’t afford to lose another ten, but you’ve come to depend on that music CD.

28. You’re a carpenter who has joined a construction team to build a new development of 3,000+ square foot houses. All is going well until someone on the team discovers something buried in the lot for the third house. The foreman removes it and tells everyone to get back to work, but you have a bad feeling. And you’re right to have it.

29. Your boss announces they’re having a potluck and you’re all expected to show up and bring something. He also tells you it has to be homemade. You tell him you can’t cook, but he tells you, “Well, learn, then!” Strangely enough, you do, and you create an entree that has everyone’s mouth-watering when you open the lid at the potluck. But your boss is conspicuously absent.

30. You wake up in the middle of the night and rush to the bathroom, where you empty your stomach of everything you ate that day. Something else comes out, and it’s moving.

31. You stop at a coffee shop while making stops to apply for a new job, and the barista tells you the new bed and breakfast is looking for someone to handle their advertising. You apply, are accepted, and agree to start immediately. But the owner, who openly admires your bicycle, offers you a room at the B&B, so you’ll be more accessible.

32. You have way too much time on your hands since your latest project has earned you enough to more than double your previous year’s salary, and you’re taking a sabbatical. You see an ad for an opportunity to spend a month at a castle in Wales, with full room and board and a bicycle for exploring the countryside. You call the agent and book a flight.

33. One night, as you’re coming back from the bathroom, you see a bright light and follow it to see that your front window is wide open and bugs are swarming in and out. You rush to close it but then you see the view from it — which is not your usual view of the front yard. You see something you want to investigate.

34. Sometimes, people stare when you pull out an index card and start scribbling furiously onto it, but you don’t care. Then someone accuses you of writing something about him and, pulling out a gun, demands you hand the card over to him.

35. You’re starting a new job, and one of your co-workers tells you it’s up to the new guy to keep the coffee pot full for his first week. While you’re brewing the latest refill, muttering to yourself about how little you’re getting done that day, one of your co-workers starts choking and accuses you of trying to poison her.

36. Your home-brewed ale is the talk of the neighborhood, but your next-door neighbor frequently buys up your newest batch. You start imposing limits. He then starts telling other neighbors that your secret is adding pee from your pet guinea pigs, “But it’s cool, because urine is sterile. And that guinea pig pee really adds something!”

37. You inherit a lighthouse from your deceased uncle — along with the small living quarters attached to it. You move right in, looking forward to the solitude. But whenever you’re up at the top scanning the surface of the ocean, you see things that can’t possibly be there. And one of them sees you — and comes to visit.

38. You stop at the local nursery and pick up a new houseplant — a tiny, adorable succulent. The cashier looks nervous as she rings you up. “That plant isn’t normal. If you want to pick another one, I would totally understand.” She’s nodding with wide eyes as she says this, clearly hoping you’ll agree.

39. You live in a studio apartment. Your boss comes to bring you soup when you call in sick and sees the quilt on your bed, which you won at a raffle. “That’s the quilt my mom made!” she says. “She told me someone stole it.”

40. You take your kids trick-or-treating, and you go to your boss’s neighborhood (your boss suggested it). Most houses gave out full-sized candy bars, but one gave out treasure maps, and your kids want to find their treasures before you leave the neighborhood.

41. Someone offers you a chance to win a million dollars just by visiting his website and typing in your address. “I don’t need your checking account info. It’s not safe to give that to just anyone. I’ll just mail the check to you,”he writes.

42. You wonder what it would be like to be a famous actor, and someone, out of the blue, invites you to perform in his movie as an extra — “and, who knows, maybe something more… prominent.”

43. You get a call from the principal’s office that your daughter has been involved in a bullying incident. Someone was bullying her, and she punched him. There were witnesses, and the principal reminds you of their zero-tolerance policy for physical violence…

44. You get a call from the principal’s office that your son has been acting out toward his classmates (who, according to what he’s told you, have been behaving aggressively toward him) and had brought a weapon to school to protect himself. They’ve confiscated the weapon (a paring knife) and have called the police.

45. Your kid has an IEP, and the Special Ed staff at the school always sound so caring and professional at the meetings you attend with them. But your son tells you they behave very differently toward him. The principal assures you that she knows the staff would never do what your son has accused them of doing. She suggests your son may be lying.

46. Your young daughter notices that one of your trees is “sick,” and she goes to visit the tree, talks to it, leans against it, and tells it to please get better. It responds by growing stronger and larger, spreading its branches out and downward to create a sort of cave for your daughter to rest in when she wants to be alone. It becomes her haven.

47. You wake up one morning and start loading your excess possessions into boxes and bags and hauling it off to Goodwill to donate it. That’s when you find the tiny cameras hidden in the bathroom, and bugs hidden in every room.

48. Your favorite coffee mug has broken, and you’re in mourning. The mug you just bought as your “second” just doesn’t feel the same in your hand, but it surprises you by magically refilling your drink with every sip — and keeping it hot for you.

49. The moth on your ceiling doesn’t bother you — much. But every time you look, it’s there. And you wonder why it never leaves. When you finally get a step ladder to get a closer look at it, you can hardly believe what you’re seeing.

50. Your neighbors on the home office side of your house have never been friendly, but one day, the wife comes over with a pie and tells you she made it herself and that she’s tired of being cooped up in the house with no one but her husband to talk to. You look over and see the outline of her husband in an upstairs window.

51. Tired of getting hair in your face, you take an electric hair-trimmer and run it all over your head with the one-inch attachment. You look at the results with satisfaction.

52. Your spouse, who has never done or said a romantic thing since your honeymoon, suddenly comes home with an expensive bouquet and a travel brochure for a place you’ve always wanted to visit. Later on, someone delivers the car you’ve always wanted, and your husband unconvincingly feigns surprise. You ask him if he won the lottery, but he shakes his head and says, “This is way better. You’ll see.”

53. You’re out in your backyard and stumble over something, which turns out to be a small brick half-buried in the grass. You see initials etched into the brick, along with a crudely-shaped heart. You wonder what — or whom — might be buried beneath. Soon, you find other markers like it, and you wonder how you failed to notice them before.

54. Your neighbor invites you over to her house, and you see that every wall has a cross painted on it with crude, hurried strokes. You ask why, and she nervously clears her throat and says, “This place needs them.”

55. You watch an infomercial and order a new face cream, hoping it will restore a youthful look to your face. It does more than that.

56. Your teenage son gets a job and, on his first day, he encounters a rude customer. Unaccustomed to responding with calmness and diplomacy, he lashes out at the customer and gets himself fired. Instead of calling home for a ride, though, he takes a walk through town and runs into the same customer holding up a cardboard sign.

57. You put your headphones on when you start on your writing project, and, at some point, an unfamiliar voice interrupts your playlist to tell you he likes what you’ve written so far. And he thinks you’d get along great.

58. Your spouse starts trying different paint samples on walls all over the house, and you don’t like any of the colors; they’re either too bright or too dark. One day, you paint patches of a pale green-gray that you like next to his acid-bright or dark color patches, and he tells you it’s boring, and that he’s painting the house his way.

59. Someone keeps writing fortune-cookie phrases on your new whiteboard at work, and it’s irritating you. You ask around, and no one knows who keeps writing the messages. Then, one of the predictions comes true.

60. You look out the window while you’re working and you see one neighbor attacking his spouse, knocking her down and then kicking her. You call 9-1-1, but later on, the wife comes over and says, “I know it was you who called. And you’ve made everything worse!”

61. Every time you look outside and see the wind in the trees, you take a deep breath and feel calmer. When the air is still, you feel as though the whole world is holding its breath and that something bad is about to happen. So, when it’s calm outside, you picture wind in the trees and take a deep breath.

62. You see movement in the corner of your eye and whenever you look, you see a huge, black dog in the neighbor’s yard, running back and forth. This time, though, he runs into your yard and starts barking at your front door.

63. Your eight-year-old son gets up and immediately goes for his Kindle Fire to play Minecraft. You’ve found some educational apps you want him to try, so you’ve installed them on his Kindle. He comes to you a few minutes later and says, “This app is telling me to do things I’m not supposed to do.”

64. You try a new recipe for a potluck, hoping it will wow your boss and coworkers, but it turns out terrible, and you end up rushing to a restaurant for something to bring before arriving (late) to find out everyone has already eaten the entree you were most looking forward to trying. When the cops show up later to ask why everyone is violently ill except you, you tell them everything you know.

65. You take your teenage son to his orientation for a new job, and when you come back to pick him up an hour later, you find out no one has seen him — though you saw him walk in the door before you drove off.

66. You’re living in a world where everyone is born with a birthmark that matches that of their soulmate. But you are born without one.

67. You and your best friend are in a terrible car accident, and you both die. Your friend, however, has a very different account of what he saw on the other side.

68. You’re born with the ability to mentally manipulate DNA. You started with plants and moved on to your pets, who now have unique abilities. For the past few years, you’ve been hacking your own DNA.

69. You were raised in the deep South where manners and feigned politeness were a thin veneer covering your family’s questionable history and lingering dysfunction.

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107 Character Mannerisms For Writers

Did you find these short story ideas and prompts useful?

I hope your mind is buzzing with an idea you can’t wait to start playing with. Keep this article handy, so you can return to it when you’re looking for a new short story idea. You don’t have to follow any of them verbatim; take one and change the details however you like to make the idea your own.

Just don’t forget the “one shattering moment” for your character — and the importance of making an emotional impact on your reader. You make this impact as much with dialogue as with description and the structure of your story. Make it all count.

And when it comes time to edit, cut everything that dampens the impact of your story. Your readers will love you for it!

If you found value from this list of short story prompts, please share it and encourage others to pass it on to support and inspire as many fellow writers out there as possible. Why not even invite them to share their new short stories with you after they’ve written them?

And may your creative energy and goodwill infuse everything else you do today.

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301 Short Story Ideas Guaranteed to Kick Your Writing into High Gear

With shorter attention spans and increasingly hectic lives, it's no wonder readers love short stories now as much as ever. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , The Shawshank Redemption , Minority Report , and Brokeback Mountain —even Hollywood has taken a renewed interest in short stories.

Below are 301 short story prompts and starters to help you become inspired, get past writer's block and explore the fascinating process of writing in a genre that Stephen King famously once compared to a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Please feel free to use any of these ideas to spark your next creative project. You don't have to credit us, but it would be much appreciated if you do! A simple link to ServiceScape is the best way to do that.

Need more writing prompts? Check out our writing prompt videos below or try out our Writing Prompt Generator .

• A group of hunters are on a hunt. Their dress and actions are completely primitive until the end when they change back into suits and leave the area in modern vehicles.
• Weather patterns across the globe suddenly shift, causing natural law to go haywire. A family tries to make sense of it while getting to safety.
• A flood swept away an entire town, leaving only the library and its strange secret.
• Your main character is evicted from their home and forced to call in some favors. Although, those favors take him/her on a wild ride they never expected.
• The night before an important social function, your main character is tasked with saving the world.
• Your main character's boat is sinking in the middle of the ocean and he/she only has 1 hour to make a raft from parts of the vessel.
• Your main character joins the communist regime and leads the party to glorious victory over the capitalist bourgeoisie funded by your antagonist's Super-PAC.
• Your main character has a change of heart and partners up with your antagonist, joining their evil organization and proving a much more capable evil overlord than your antagonist could ever hope to be.
• Your character's things are packed up and they are ready to leave town tomorrow. Before they say goodbye to their town, they decide to stop by at their favorite bar just to say goodbye. Something that happens at the bar makes them question whether or not leaving is the right decision.
• When your character is hanging out at their favorite coffee shop, they notice someone loitering outside. As your character leaves, they see a black SUV pull up and a very handsome man gets out. The loiterer goes to lunge for the man, but your character instinctively decides to jump on him, blocking him from attacking the unsuspecting man. It turns out that the handsome man is the governor of the state. What happens next?
• Two giant fingers reach down and pluck your main character away from what they were just doing, and unceremoniously deposit them on a pirate ship.
• Your main character finds an abandoned car, keys still inside, parked outside their home.
• Your protagonist is a corporate CEO who suddenly must hunt and forage his own food.
• Your characters are trapped in a structure that constantly shifts and changes. How do they find their way out?

Sci-fi, Fantasy, and Supernatural

• Your main character wakes up in the body of the person he/she most despises.
• An outdoor music festival receives strange, otherworldly visitors who decide to take the stage for their own performance.
• A man wakes up to discover he can no longer hear but can see things he's never seen before.
• A man and his dog go to the dog park to play and the dog finds a bone with strange carvings on it that reacts to the environment in unexpected ways.
• A group of high school friends cross paths 10 years after graduation to catch up, only to learn that one in their midst has developed special, superhuman powers.
• A secondary character stumbles upon a talking blade, and they begin behaving suspiciously.
• Your character wakes one morning and finds that they are physically stronger, faster, and have greater reflexes than when they went to sleep. Each time they sleep, they become stronger.
• As if losing everything she owned in the tornado wasn't enough, Lila learned that she'd been laid off from her job. And that's when she started noticing the monsters.
• A tertiary character is revealed to be "The chosen one," and your main character must help them to succeed in fulfilling their destiny.
• The antagonist dies, but the story doesn't end.
• Your main character is given a suit that protects them from danger—unfortunately it has a different threshold for safety than seems ideal.
• A character in your story becomes aware that they are in a story.
• our character wakes up deaf and mute but sees more colors than he or she knew was possible.
• Your main character finds that time has slowed for them. Each year they age only several weeks, and slowly those nearest them are beginning to take notice.
• Your main character makes a pact with an alien visitor to trade bodies for the day to tour around unnoticed.
• Your main character wakes up in an unrecognizable city that is at least 100 years more advanced in technology than we are today.
• Lightning strikes your main character and he/she wakes up in the hospital with a small black goblin perched on their shoulder, which no one else can see.
• The sun goes out, replaced by building-sized lights in the sky over each major city. Across the world, beams of light descend from the sky, and each points toward your main character.
• A secondary character is visited by aliens. They are told that they have been chosen as a representative of humanity amongst the interstellar accord. They need your main character's advice.
• Your main character has a theme song which plays for ten seconds every time they enter a room.
• Your protagonist is visited by a comic book hero who needs their help.
• Your character cannot wake from a series of back-to-back dreams that feel like he or she is awake.
• All rhinos have gone extinct except for two, and your main character has been granted guardianship of the last two of their kind.
• Your character notices a weird growth on their arm one morning. They brush it off as a weird bump or scratch—until it turns into something else entirely.
• Your character has always thought of their parents in a certain way, but here lately they're doing something unusual that changes your character's opinion of them.
• Your main character is the owner of a variety store and an invisible car crashes through the wall, driven by an invisible person.
• Your antagonist and protagonist meet in the afterlife, hundreds of thousands of years after your story takes place.
• Your antagonist and protagonist get freaky-Friday-ed. When they wake up, each is in the other's body.
• Your main character is suddenly invisible, but they don't know how long it will last.
• Your main character wakes up, in high school again, and finds that they are late for an important test.
• Your main character is granted a single wish, but must be careful, because the genie granting the wish will attempt to misinterpret any wish they make.
• Your main character finds himself/herself in the video game they were playing.
• Your main character is the leader of a random group of apocalypse survivors who must now forage for food.
• A cell phone is found locked inside a cabinet in a home recently purchased by newlyweds. On it is a recorded message from their future children. What does the message say and how did it get there?
• Your main character and the three people standing closest to them, are thrown backwards in time three hundred years.
• Your protagonist can see the future and doesn't want to leave his/her home.
• Your main character discovers that they are a wizard, and that this means they will have to leave their family to learn how to safely practice magic, in a school they have never heard of.
• Suddenly, your main character can hear the thoughts of everyone who is wearing the same color shirt as they are.
• Your protagonist dies. The story doesn't end.
• Your main character is really a guardian angel in human form.
• Your protagonist meets a man claiming to be God. He/she doesn't believe the man, but then miracles ensue.
• Two adult sisters discuss a fateful night when they were teenagers and ran away from home, only to encounter a pack of vampires waiting to take them in.
• A family comes together for Christmas, only to discover that they have somehow switched bodies and perspectives over the course of the meal.
• A man or woman wakes up as his/her dog or cat and it's breakfast time.
• Two writers discover they've written the exact same text, word for word, 1,000 miles apart from each other.
• A parent and child encounter their ancestor, who has been dead for centuries, and they go on a walk through the city/the woods.
• A lost Incan treasure is found in the basement of a school in Ohio. How did it get there? And more importantly, how is it glowing?
• Your main character suddenly loses his ability to see but can hear things he hadn't heard before.
• .It's 2050 and most of America has become one large city except for a small area in the middle of the country, considered uninhabitable by most people except for a few. Who are they and how do they survive?

Romance and Drama

• A secondary character starts their own business and enlists your main character to help it succeed but falls in love instead.
• Your antagonist wins over your main character's best friend, convincing that friend of their good intentions.
• Your main character gets a new job, working at the evil corporation run by your antagonist—but the work they would be doing could really help people.
• Your main character and their best friend find themselves in a love triangle with your antagonist.
• A couple is having an argument at the table beside your character at a restaurant. Although they are trying to avoid eye contact, your character realizes that one of them is the ex that the other never quite got over.
• A tertiary character is seriously stressing out, and your protagonist feels the need to reach out to them with a kind gesture. It does the opposite of help.
• Your character is talked into going to their romantic interest's mother's dance recital, and their romantic interest doesn't show up.
• Your character is at a friend's house for a dinner party. Suddenly, someone they absolutely despise walks in. What do they do now?
• Your character's boyfriend of five years surprises them with an engagement ring at a dinner with their whole family. They pause for a minute before they answer him. But if he knew their secret, there is no way he would be proposing right now. The whole room is waiting for the response.
• Your character gets matched up with a famous person on Tinder. What happens on their date?
• Your character's friend introduces them to someone at a party. It turns out that your character and the other person actually know each other quite well. However, neither of them acknowledges this fact. The friend steps away. What do they say to each other now?
• Your character's mom seems really tense when they are out to dinner with her one evening. They ask her what's wrong. "I have something to tell you," she says gravely.
• Write a story about a father and son reuniting for the first time in 20 years. Why did they go so long without talking? What finally brought them together?
• Your main character's romantic interest finds one day that they are much more interested in your antagonist.
• Suddenly, a tertiary character confesses their love for your protagonist, getting down on one knee and producing a ring. But your protagonist loves someone else.
• One night when your character is at a bar with all of their friends, a mysteriously charming stranger starts talking to them. They are instantly captivated by their every word. They ask for your character's number, but there's just one (major) problem.

Mystery and Horror

• A writer's manuscript contains words he didn't write…ghostwriting in its truest form. But who is his co-author and what does the ghost want?
• Your main character comes home to find that their family is missing.
• Your character wakes up covered with strange tattoos and can't remember how he/she got them.
• Your protagonist awoke from a nightmare to find an object from his/her dream laying on the pillow.
• Two cousins hitchhike along a deserted country road, following a stream of black smoke to an abandoned house, where there is no one tending the steadily burning fire.
• Your main character wakes up in the trunk of a car, their head throbbing.
• An escaped convict leaves behind evidence of his innocence for the search party to find.
• Your protagonist wakes up aged considerably, after a Rip Van Winkle-esque 20-year nap, and his friends don't believe his story.
• There's no way out of the concert hall but the concert-goers tried to find it anyway. Behind them, the snarling monster prowled.
• Lost in the woods, two teens encounter a witch-like woman who offers them all they've ever wanted in exchange for one small thing—their baby sister.
• Your main character discovers a long-lost sibling who is down on their luck.
• Your main character is given an important heirloom, an item passed down for generations in their family. But it is cursed.
• Your main character finds a black mahogany door in their basement, shut tight with chains.
• One night while your character is camping in the woods with their family, there's a loud noise from inside the tent. At first everyone thinks it's an animal, but this sounds like nothing they've ever heard before.
• Your main character has a conversation with a ghost from their past, either literally or figuratively.
• Your main character goes broke drinking and gambling and wakes up the next morning with a small white rabbit perched on their chest, possibly stolen from the magic act they saw the night before.
• Your main character wakes up on a rooftop, in their underwear.
• Your main character inherits a vast fortune, but they must stay in a creepy old house for an entire night in order to earn it.
• Your main character sells their soul and seems to have all of their problems solved, only to find out that the devil is a blood relation, and there are no catches.
• Your main character wakes up to find that ¾ of the world's population has suddenly disappeared without a trace.
• Two adopted twin sisters embark on a journey to find their birth father, only to find that he's been close to them all along.
• Your main character's dog goes missing in the night, and they aren't the only one missing a pet. After some sleuthing they discover that a friend has become a werewolf, and that their best friend is the cause of the missing animals.
• Your main character wakes up wearing a strange ring which glows with sparks of blue electricity.
• People find that if they don't concentrate on keeping their soul attached to their body, it begins to separate. Without continuous concentration, everyone becomes ghosts of themselves.
• Your character discovers that there's something really mysterious happening at the neighborhood park. Your character finally works up the nerve to go down there one evening, and what they find is even more peculiar than what they originally thought.
• Your main character is trapped in a dream that is quickly becoming a nightmare.
• After a particularly grueling day at work, your character groggily returns to work the next morning. The secretary, who your character has said hello to every morning for about five years, suddenly has no idea who they are. When they tell her their name, she responds: "No one by that name has ever worked here."
• Your character wakes up one morning in what looks to be a hospital. They try to move, but it appears they are strapped into the bed. A nurse suddenly enters the room and calls them by the wrong name. What happened to them? What happens next?
• The doorbell rings. No one is there, but a mysterious package was left behind. Your character opens it up and find something inside that's very unexpected.
• Write about a scenario where a character does something terrible and gets away with it completely.
• Your character's sibling is wanted for a serious crime. They swear that they didn't do it, but your character is not so sure.
• A ghost of your antagonist's great-great-great-grandmother visits your protagonist, warning him to stay away from her great-great-great-grandchild.
• On your character's walk to work, they notice that the streets are suspiciously empty. Brushing it off, they finally get to their office. There's no one inside at all. They walk around searching for someone, anyone to ask what's happening. They find no one and nothing.
• A child draws scenes that end up happening exactly as he/she draws them. His/her parents try to understand what is happening.
• Your main character has been knocked unconscious, and another character from your story needs to step up and take their place.
• At the library one afternoon doing some research, your character notices an unusual photograph. Your character is immediately captivated by it. What's in the photograph?
• Your character's grandma recently passed away. In her will, she left your character something very strange.
• Your main character has just come face to face with their worst enemy, and they are monologuing.
• Your antagonist has finally won, accomplishing their greatest feat. Now what?
• Your antagonist and protagonist swap places for a day.
• Your antagonist and protagonists are placed in the same dorm room at university. Hilarity ensues.
• It turns out your antagonist was right the whole time, and now your protagonist has some explaining to do.
• Your main character or antagonist wins the lottery, a jackpot of 3.4 million dollars. But he/she doesn't want it.
• Your main character is contemplating suicide until a stranger stops him/her.
• The king dies, and your antagonist's best friend becomes the new ruling monarch. The catch is, they don't seem too bad, other than the fact that your antagonist keeps whispering in their ear.
• Your protagonist is incredibly late for their next scheduled meeting, and he or she just keeps running into obstacles which stall them further.
• Your character's birthday wish that they made when they were blowing out the candles actually comes true. What is it? Is it everything that they hoped for?
• Your character's home is a little worse for wear. It seems like everything is broken and your character has no more money to invest in this money pit. In the garage, they see an old can of gasoline. Would they do the unthinkable? What is going through their mind right now?
• Your character's family has a lot of traditions. They go along with them, except for one. If their parents knew your character broke this rule, they would likely disown them. What is it? What would your character do if they found out?
• Your character is a pretty shy, introspective person. One day they wake up and realize that they are saying everything that they think. They can't control the words that are coming out of their mouth at all. While this is helpful when they are trying to talk to friends and acquaintances at work, it really starts to get them into trouble.
• Your character is a member of a family that has always feuded with their neighbors over trivial issues, and now must ask his/her neighbors for help in an emergency. How do the neighbors respond?

Story Starters

• The place where the world stopped was not so strange, but the vertigo was overwhelming. The girl could not decide whether or not it would be wise to jump.
• The gear turned, interlaced with another, and another. His eyes traced the inner workings of the machine to the place where the light shone.
• Static played between the cracks of the monitor, the spark and hiss of the television muffled as the living room filled with water.
• The hand was pale, as if circulation had long stopped; and the ring upon the creature's finger seemed to glow with a spark of interior fire.
• They say that when you die in a dream, you die in real life. I can tell you that isn't true; because I died in a dream, and what happened to me was much stranger than that.
• The girl spun, dragged by the momentum of her backpack, tilting from one foot to the next so that her balance was tenuous, her motions growing wilder.
• The face in the mirror was not his own. It was handsomer, his eyes more vibrant, his skin clearer. He frowned, uncertain, but his reflection smiled.
• Once upon a time, in a night with no stars and no moon, there was a shadow in the darkness.
• Bright blue water held the stars' reflections, until she dove beneath the surface. Then for a long moment the lake was still, until I began to grow nervous. When she finally returned, she held aloft over her head the star which had hung in the North, the wish-making star.
• It was, as the wave of mud descended, sprayed by the wheels of a yellow taxi – it was that moment which made that day the worst of her life.
• Again, try again. Concentrate now, it will not come easily.
• Strange, to see her here. She seemed out of place. Not the soft out-of-place, like an uncle entertaining unfamiliar nieces and nephews, but the hard of out-of-place which drew every eye in the room.
• It was a trick of the fingers, and a twist of the wrist, which changed the shape of the shifting cloak. One moment the garment was a heavy green wool, and the next it was black satin, suitable for the night's entertainments.
• I have been many things: a pawn, a dancer, a master of the blade; but none of these in the way you might think, and none of them for less than a moment.
• The torch hissed as he plunged it into the river and let the current sweep the light away. Then he was alone in the dark with the red-ember eyes.
• Like a dream she had drifted from the room, and like a dream she seemed unreal, and like a dream she was gone.
• The pencil was now stuck in the ceiling, the glob of green hanging precariously from it; and before I could dash across the room, or throw the stapler again to dislodge it, Mr. Smythe reentered the classroom.
• The lower level was waist-deep already, flooding from a number of breaches along the starboard hull. Younger crewmen were wading through the water in search of bailing buckets. Older crewmates were racing toward the ladders, offering prayers beneath their breath.
• The river was home to a great many, and together they drifted along it. It was never fast, never sudden, but always full to brimming of fish, and always clean to drink.
• The sphere was some metal he had never seen before, like steel but with a faint blue hue. It stood out nearly three feet from the earth; and where it was exposed to the air, lightning struck it repeatedly, illuminating his surroundings with each strike.
• The woman swung her scythe with the steady clockwork motion of a pendulum.
• Frost spread across the ground. Slowly at first, with the lingering laziness of autumn, but then with greater fervor; and the creature flew along behind it as it spread across the field.
• Doom blanketed the town, like silence might have on a more peaceful night.
• Typical, he thought. Another throwaway evening. Not a soul in town, and not a sound to be heard; but that night was anything but typical.
• She didn't blink. Not when he made faces, or when he screamed; not when he brought out the joke about the garden gnomes, or the one about the flea circus. She didn't even blink when he resorted to the feather, or when he made a motion like he might poke her in the eye.
• His favorite color had always been blue. Not because it was depressing or anything – it wasn't – but because it seemed to soak in the light, and then give some of it back. Like black, he thought, but less dead, less drab.
• The ballet slipper would not fit, and that would never do. Only moments now, before they knocked on her dressing room door, and her sister's slipper would not slide onto her foot.
• You aren't supposed to have conversations through the wall of the changing rooms, especially not the fancy kind where a woman waits outside to ask if everything fits just right. And yet, here she was, knee deep in the most awkward conversation she could imagine.
• There was no gravity here, and so she floated, waiting to come close enough to something solid that she could push off from it, and toward the exit.
• They say bleach for blood but the odor is too strong. Best to take it out with hydrogen peroxide. Then again, it looks strange buying thirty bottles of hydrogen peroxide at three in the morning, so I settle for a couple gallons of bleach.
• The doctor looked up from the manila folder in his hands and said, "Your test results are positive."
• Just as she settled into the backseat with her suitcase and carry-on bag, an oncoming headlight illuminated the driver's face and she realized this wasn't her Uber driver. He was the man they'd been showing on the news the last few days.
• As the doctor handed the newborn bundle to her, she gasped.
• As she threw her head back to soak up the flowering spring trees, she saw her ex-husband watching her from across the street. How could he have known she was here?
• The young girl was maybe 5 or 6 but there was something about her that chilled me to the bone.
• She might never get the chance to be alone with him again. Her husband was across the country; he'd never find out, so why not?
• "Is this your handwriting?" the policeman asked with a scowl.

• I could have been anything—a doctor, lawyer, architect. Instead, I became a carney.
• When he saw the state troopers standing on his front stoop, he thought they must have the wrong house. But when the troopers took off their hats and one of them asked, "Are you James Cooper?" he couldn't find the strength to answer.
• "I knew you'd come back to me," she whispered. "It's been a lifetime but I knew you'd come back."
• The doctor emerged from the double doors and said, "There were some unexpected complications."
• This was the moment he'd been training for. He strapped on his helmet and got in position.
• She continued running, but as the trail of blood got thicker and the splattered drops got closer together, she started following the blood instead of the greenway path. She had to find the source of all this blood. Was it animal blood... or human?
• When he looked around, he froze. He'd been here before. This was the same place where he kept getting stuck in his dreams. Would he be able to find his way out in waking life?
• She shut off the kitchen light and turned to go upstairs to bed, unaware that two sets of eyes were watching her every move.
• He frantically searched his lab, but he found no sign of the invisibility potion. How could someone have stolen it before he even got the chance to use it?
• As she listened to him snore on the pillow next to her, she wondered how much longer she could stay married to him. She prayed he would die in his sleep or get hit by a car. Then her eyes fell on the pillow at the foot of the bed.
• "Mr. Dempsey, they're not both going to make it. We can save your wife or the baby, but we can't save both. You need to let us know your decision in the next two minutes, or we may lose them both."
• "Are you sure you want to do this?" the man asked as he positioned the needle over her heart.
• Nothing had grown in that patch of grass for 50 years. It had been a barren dirt patch ever since that stranger had conjured a fire bolt and scorched the ground. But Tommy definitely saw a green sprout growing in the middle of the barren square. What was it, and how could it produce life in a place that nothing else could?
• The car rattled as if she'd gone over a speed bump, but she knew there were no speed bumps on this road. She looked in her rear view mirror and thought she saw blonde hair… and maybe a human form on the road. She wondered if she should turn back. Had anyone seen her?
• "If you walk out that door right now, I don't ever want to see your face in my home again," his mother said.
• "I will get my money back one way or another," he growled, as he pinned her arms beneath her back.
• "The price of freedom depends on what you're willing to pay. Tell me, sir: how much is your freedom worth to you?
• She fumbled in her purse for her keys, but her hands were clumsy with fear. Just as her fingers grazed the familiar key fob, a sweaty hand grabbed her shoulder.
• He'd seen her. She could tell by the smirk on his lips. She pushed through the thick crowd in hopes of making it to the exit before he blocked her way.
• She glared at the thick bracelet on her bicep. Why did her parents make such a big deal about never taking off? It was heavy and not even stylish. She found clasp and fiddled with it for a moment. Surely her parents were exaggerating about all the awful things that would happen to her if she ever took this off.
• He extended his hand to her and said, "Hi, I'm Finkel Wolfson." She looked at his outstretched hand as if it was crawling with spiders and roaches. "Oh, I've heard about you," she said with a sniff. Finkel panicked. He was 3000 miles away from home; how could she have heard about him?
• "One of us has to try it," Amir said as he pointed to the lumpy, unfamiliar fruit on the tree in front of them. If we don't, we'll starve to death. Death by poison seems worth the risk in case it's edible, doesn't it?"
• The night winds rustled as the door to the old woman's home slowly opened.
• She laughed when he told her the news. It was exactly what she expected and she knew the lie was over.
• He glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that the blue sedan was still following him.
• She stepped off the elevator with a sense of purpose. This time, she would succeed.
• He flicked the stub of his cigarette onto the pile and walked away without a second look.
• Just as they got to the edge of town, the car started making a terrible clunking sound.
• "What's that smell?"
• He rolled down his window and called out, "Hey—do you want a ride?"
• "You better get down to the station. It happened again."
• The dog raced toward her with such intensity that she didn't have time to get out of his way.
• "I don't think you're capable of love."
• He picked up the glowing rock and inspected it. Where had it come from, and how had it ended up in his backyard?
• By the time Johnny got home, thousands of sheets of paper had piled up on the floor beside the printer, each with only one sentence printed in bold type: "I am coming for you, and there's nothing you can do."
• "How could you have married him? You promised you'd wait for me."
• "I've lost him," she screamed, but none of us knew what she'd lost.
• For a moment, time slowed, and the sound of the approaching storm was all that we could hear.
• "Look out!" he shouted.
• I'd never last long in the slammer. I get all frantic when I'm in tight spaces, start tryin' to climb the walls and such.
• Tears filled her eyes as she scanned the list a second time. She didn't make the team.
• "I'm pregnant."
• He watched her leave, knowing that she only locked the flimsy doorknob behind her. He had at least two hours before she'd be back home.
• "Where am I?"
• "What happened to you?" She asked.
• There are three things you never mess with if you know what's good for you: heroin, border patrol, and the Valdez cartel.
• She fell to the floor when she heard the first explosion. She didn't know if she should try to escape or try to hide.
• "We're sending you to live with another family. It's for your own safety."
• As she watched this hulking, hairy animal lope across her backyard, she wondered what two creatures collaborated to make this tremendous beast, and what was it looking for?
• "She hasn't spoken a word since the accident. Our friend said that you might be able to help her."
• "Don't lie to me. I already know the truth."
• As he walked away, his smile grew from a smirk to an all-out grin.
• "Why is all of Daddy's stuff in the front yard?"
• He counted his register drawer again. How could he be short $2500?
• The teacher looked at his gaping shoes and tattered clothes and knew she had to find out what was really going on at home or this kid would end up in the system. She called him up to her desk and asked, "Do you want to help me on a project this weekend?"
• If he hurried, he might be able to get back to work before anyone found out what he had done.
• "Do you have experience with demons?" she whispered from under the table.
• "This medicine numbs the pain, but it will also permanently numb your ability to feel pleasure. Do you want it?"
• "Mr. Whipple, we've just learned that your wife is an undercover agent with the Russian government. We need your help apprehending her."
• Once she'd confirmed that no one was looking, she ducked into the unmarked building.
• When she walked outside the next morning, she realized his curse must have worked.
• He pulled his hat low over his brow and tried to blend in with the crowd, hoping no one would realize who he was.
• He was inside the video game! But wait—if he was in here... who had the controls?
• She bent down to pick up the strange-looking shell from the sand, but as soon as her hand touched it, the earth started to shake.
• He opened the letter and sunk to his knees in the middle of the driveway.
• "What are we going to do once the last of this food is gone?" he asked.
• She looked closer and realized that this tree was growing dollar bills instead of leaves and quarters instead of acorns.
• There is never a better time to say "I'm sorry" than when karma is kicking you good.
• When the pigeon swooped down in front of her, she realized it had a note attached to its right leg.
• "I'll need to speak to at least three of your ex-girlfriends to check your references before I'll go on a date with you."
• "Mommy, there's a ghost in my room!"
• Something wasn't right. No one seemed to recognize her. No one even really seemed to see her. Could he have erased her existence?
• They had never been this high before. As she reached for the next rock outcropping, she wondered if it was actually close enough to reach, or if she was about to fall into the canyon.
• "This is something we don't usually show visitors," the museum docent whispered as she unlocked the door marked "DANGER!"
• He looked both ways before crossing the street, not realizing that he had just made the worst decision of his life.
• "How did you get that scar?"
• He muttered a few extra spells as he stirred the potion. He couldn't risk it malfunctioning this time.
• Every person on the street and in the mall looked identical. They were all wearing red shirts and blue shorts, and every single one was a man with light skin and short brown hair. What had happened, and how was she the only one who was still different?
• "You don't understand," she said, looking at him sadly. "I am not who you think I am."
• All the lights in the city went out and they knew the monsters were surrounding them.
• "If you take one step closer, it'll be the last step you ever take," he said, pointing the weapon at the strange figure in front of him. But his threat was useless, since the creature had no feet.
• There, nestled within the grove of trees, was the thing he'd been waiting for since he was 12 years old.
• "Who's there?" Her words bounced off of the metal walls of shipping containers when she awoke. But there was only the echo of her own voice to answer her.
• They were lost in the woods and they knew it, although this time was different. This time, they were hunted.
• Looking into the fire was the wrong thing to do. He found he couldn't drag his stare away.
• It wasn't until my father pushed me off the cliff that I believed he was telling the truth.
• The sign hit them like an inanimate object.
• The pumpkin would not stop growing, despite the application of the second potion. The witch had lied.
• All four tires were on the ground, but I had started floating toward the surface.
• Smoke leaked from the exhaust pipes of the Mustang as the plane began to descend. She looked into the jungle below, dreading the impact.
• Picture us, standing against the world, armed to the teeth, walking out into that blizzard.
• If romance is dead, then I suppose there are none to blame but the hopeless romantics. It was a boy, not too long ago, that taught me romance – real romance—isn't something hopeless, or unenergetic like stale poetry, or futile like canned compliments.
• It's impossible to tell really, just how many times I've come back.
• When a pet passes away, the moment is strangely dense. That moment as I held the shoebox was the longest of my young life, but there were harder times to come.
• The girl crept past the open door, listening with piqued interests for clues revealed in the voices beyond it.
• Thunder does not crash like a wave, but ripples outward like a pebble tossed into a pond. When the lightning struck, I was the first to hear that thunder.
• Heroes wear masks for all kinds of reasons. I wear the mask so they can't see the grey at my temples or the weariness of age in my eyes.
• The sun never shone like it did that day. It baked my skin until I felt I might burn in the shade, but I never did. Nothing went wrong that day.
• The paper tore once, twice, three times. I shredded it and scattered it to the wind.
• Ma always told me not to climb so high. Always lookin' out for me 'cause I ain't look out for myself. Too bad Ma ain't here now.
• They think they know me, but they don't really. I hunt only at night and only when I know I have the advantage over my prey.
• City slicker like myself doesn't have a wit of business in the country. They knew it. I knew it. Not a one of us in that room was happy I'd purchased the land.
• Here's the thing about family. Family sticks together, but it's almost never roses and sunshine. Family sticks together when you have nothing; so when you have it all, well, things get complicated in a different way.
• It wasn't my idea to paint the damn cow, it was Johnny's; but I suppose I'm to blame for going along with it.
• Stars spin real slow. So slow you can't see it, unless you have the time and the resources to take a really close look.
• I can't say I ever much liked gym class. I've never seen the point of running unless you were being chased. But I'm running now, aren't I? I guess I'm glad I never skipped gym.
• It's been a few years since the guns got off the street, and the drugs. Didn't happen all at once, but it did happen fast. Not sure I like it.
• My dad raised me believing that time is money. Now that money is time though, I'm not sure anything he taught me means what I thought it would.
• I realized that something was wrong when I thought "I'm getting married," instead of "I'm getting married to John."
• It wasn't a happy winter, but it wasn't so sad either, considering.
• "Blood is thicker than water," we all heard that. What people don't do is say it out full: "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb," which, (if you ask me, which you didn't) means almost the opposite.
• Never thought I'd dance on his grave, not really.
• Clouds parted that night, while I was bending picking weeds in the dark—fool thing to do—and the moon shone down on my garden.
• There are dreamers like me, but none as vivid, and none who know the clouds and sunshine of my mind as I do.
• You can't sing—can't really sing—a happy song when you are sad; but I know now that you can sing a sad song, and fill that song with life, when you are happy.
• All it took was one step into the water and I knew I was home.
• If love stories begin with wonder and end with tragedy, this isn't really a love story.
• She looked out the window and saw moving shadows, as far as the eye could see, and was thankful at least for the light from the window on the house on the hill.
• "I'm falling for you," he said. But he knew that look and he regretted it immediately.
• Give me five minutes and I'll turn that girl's silly smile into a look of shock.
• At dawn, we were swallowed up by the darkness, but it didn't matter, really. We had waited for it all night long.
• If loss were a taste, you'd spit it out as soon as you were able to. But it isn't. It's a sound and a cry and it goes on forever.
• That night in September, the body count was almost as high as the temperature.
• ."They're not even normal," the little girl whispered. "Look Ma', those men have gills for ears."
• She closed her eyes and remembered the flowers in her mother's yard and how red the roses grew.
• There was nothing left to say but "I love you" as they stood together and watched the world burn.
• "Mamma, there's someone here to see you." I knew from the sound of my daughter's scared voice who that someone was.
• Lost in a wonderland of sorts, I wandered the home's slanted hallways until I found the right room.
• "There he is," she shouted. "I told you he…..!" But before I could turn to look, she screamed and fell silent.
• The explosion could be seen for miles around, but only two people saw it.
• She couldn't identify the lifeforms standing across from her but she knew they weren't human. She also knew they weren't friendly.
• "Here, put on this mask," she said. "They can't know who you really are."
• It took 15 days and 11 hours to reach the mountain range on foot, but there it was in front of us, big as we knew it would be.
• "I don't know how you handle this type of thing on Earth," she spat, "but here on Mars, we don't let killers run free."

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The 35 Best Short Story Prompts That Will Surely Inspire You To Write

• March 16, 2022

“I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.” Andre Dubus

Are you running out of short story prompts? Or, are you experiencing writer’s block? Want to write a short story, but you have no story idea where to even begin?

If so, this article is for you. We included a long list of creative writing prompts in this article, story ideas, and writing exercises to help you get your creative juices flowing.

What Makes a Good Short Story?

Any good short story has rich characters , an interesting plot, and an immersive setting.

Unlike a novel, short story writers have to traverse their character arcs in a short amount of time in a way that keeps the reader engaged.

The writing skills required to write a short story are:

• An ability to be concise
• The ability to engage the reader immediately
• Natural and realistic use of dialogue
• The power to paint a compelling image with words
• Interesting plot developments and character arcs

If you have a short story that you would like to publish or are trying to get started with just writing it, consider the abovementioned points. If your story lacks any of the above, it is wise to revisit and add whatever is missing.

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Short Stories

In Kurt Vonnegut’s  Bagombo Snuff Box , the renowned American 20th-century writer shares some important tips for anyone who wishes to write a compelling short story. According to Vonnegut’s advice, a short story should:

• Use the time of a total stranger so that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
• Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
• Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
• Every sentence must do one of two things: reveal character or advance the action.
• Start as close to the end as possible.
• Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters are, make awful things happen to them so that the reader may see what they are made of.
• Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
• Give your readers as much information as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such a complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

How Long Should My Short Story Be?

There is no exact word count for a short story . Some are merely a page or two, while others can be 10 or 20 pages. Typically, the word count of a good short story falls somewhere between 5000-10,000 words.

The Importance of Feedback

It is always wise to get as much feedback as possible about your story or even your short story idea. Share your work with fellow writers, avid readers, and friends and family who do not write or read much at all.

Get all kinds of opinions, insights, and criticisms from all sorts of people to gain a clearer sense of your story’s impact.

Short Story Ideas and Writing Prompts to Help You Get Started

Feel free to use the following story prompts or in combination with your own story ideas.

• A man wakes up in a new town with no idea how he got there.
• A young woman receives a letter from a mysterious stranger.
• Three strangers who look alike meet in a bar.
• A man gets blamed for a crime he did not commit.
• A child’s dog wanders through the forest, and he follows it.
• A character notices that his neighbor is acting strange and suspicious.
• The internet shuts down all over the world without warning.
• Passengers on a train wake up one by one at an abandoned station.
• A quiz show winner enjoys their prize until someone claims that the show was rigged.
• A young woman loses her partner for years and sets out on a solo adventure worldwide.
• A coming-of-age story in which high school students prepare for their final exams and the different journey the friend group will take when they move on to university.
• A middle-aged man gets tired of his job and quits on a whim. Now jobless and in need of income, he joins a team of young professionals who create a dating app for middle-aged singles. He volunteers to provide greater information for the team and the app – in person, by going on as many dates as he can.

More Creative Writing Prompts

We have included some genre-specific short story ideas below, including fantasy, science fiction , and romance . Even if these are not your go-to genres, it is worth checking them out. In attempting to write one of the following, you may find inspiration for a different story altogether.

Fantasy Short Story Prompts

• A young man stumbles across an ancient gemstone. With the stone in his possession, the character finds himself the center of attention of strange people who seem to want to harm him and one new friend who has some unexpected answers.
• A young girl who lives on a farm with her family finds a large unhatched egg. She takes care of the egg in her room without telling her parents. The egg begins to hatch, but the creature that emerges is far from what she expected.
• The main character makes a living selling fake artifacts. One artifact in his collection is the real deal, but he has no idea until a strange customer shows up.
• A prince is captured in a foreign land and is held at ransom. The hostage-taker is a mercenary hired by someone close to the prince.
• A teenage farm boy is visited at night by a white horse. The horse stands outside his window, and the boy approaches. The horse walks on, stops, and waits for the boy. The boy follows and eventually mounts the horse. As the horse begins to gallop, the boy looks back at his house, only to find that the entire landscape has changed and his house is no longer there.

Science Fiction Short Story Ideas

• An airplane flies through turbulence. The turbulence passes, the plane stabilizes, but half of the passengers are missing. The pilot tries to contact the ground but to no avail.
• A man reports strange sights in the skies, but no one believes him. He pleads them to believe him because he is convinced that what he saw was not of this earth. As more and more people begin to see the strange lights in the sky, the man is nowhere to be found.
• The main character wakes up with no memory of his past. He finds himself equipped with advanced weapons, strange technology, and a chip in his arm. War and conflict rage outside his room. As he begins to wake up, he notices a letter by his bed with an address and note that says ‘Urgent!’
• AI has advanced exponentially since our current day, most of humanity has been wiped out, and the remaining humans now live in small tribes. A team of humans who take refuge deep in the desert must traverse, but the AIs occupied the lands for more resources for their survival.
• A large unidentified object hurtles through space on a direct trajectory to earth. A team of scientists and astronauts are on a timer to divert the object before it gets too close. Time is ticking, people are panicking, and the team faces resistance when gathering support.

• The year is 3100. Humanity lives in bunkers underground due to an apocalyptic event 500 years earlier. As the dust settles, the surviving humans begin to emerge from their underground shelter only to find new inhabitants living and ruling on the surface.
• A scientist discovers a means of traversing galaxies at light speed, but the cost of the technology is millions of lives. Authorities seek to understand and control his discovery. However, his moral compass drives him to keep his discovery out of the hands of those who would sacrifice millions without a second thought.
• Humans on a mission to revive a dead planet are met by resistance from living creatures under the surface. On their escape back to earth, one of the planet’s inhabitants has made its way onto their ship and hides there until the team arrives home.
• A microchip inserted into the brain allows authorities to influence and control the thoughts of chipped people. The unchipped are now few in numbers but are the only humans left who can think independently. Time is ticking as the last remaining free-thinkers are mercilessly hunted down. A ragtag group, a multi-disciplinary team of survivalists, scientists, and hackers, must fight the authority and free those who have been brainwashed into the authority’s oppressive regime.
• In the near future, the elites will control the fate of the rest of us at the press of a button. Access to water, food, and even sunshine depend on a nation or community’s willingness to send a large proportion of their population into competition against each other for survival.

Scary Story Ideas

• A young couple moves into a new house in the countryside. The house is empty except for an old-fashioned dress in a wardrobe. The young woman, packing her stuff away, tries on the dress. As soon as she wears it, she starts acting strange.
• One night in an allegedly haunted house in the country, friends planned a trip. They partied, drank, and danced all through the night. Later, one of the friends pulls out an Ouija board. Most of the friends disagree and go to bed for the night. Five friends stayed up and played the game with ghostly consequences.
• Kids visit their grandmother’s house and find a secret room in the basement. They enter the room, and the door vanishes.
• Trick or treaters visit houses on Halloween night. One family offers lots of candy to the kids who show up and say trick or treat! A child shows up at the house and rings the bell. When the family answers, the child is alone and silent. The family invites him in to ask where his friends and parents are, the greatest mistake they ever made.

Romantic Short Story Ideas

Here are some romantic short story ideas to try out:

• A correspondence of love letters between two now long separated and aged former lovers. They are no longer together, but the letters reveal the ups and downs of their relationships and how close yet far they were from becoming lasting lovers.
• A young man about to take off on his travels stops by a café to grab a coffee before he goes. While sipping his coffee, he meets a high school crush he knew years earlier. She has a suitcase.
• A woman plans an exotic holiday on her time off from work with her best friend. Her best friend decides to cancel at the last minute, so, on a whim, the woman asks her coworker to join. They set off on this unexpected journey, but the shared journey is not the only thing they had not expected.
• A man’s sick and dying mother is being taken care of by an at-home nurse. The character finds out about his mother’s fading health and decides to rush home to be with her, worried and guilty for not having spent time with her in recent months. The nurse and the man’s mother have developed a close relationship, and even though the mother is dying, the nurse keeps her in good humor. After her passing, the nurse and the man do not want to say goodbye to each other.

Whether you are a student required to submit a good story for a writing class, a first-time short story writer looking for inspiration or a seasoned writer stumped with writer’s block, the prompts and story ideas above should help you get a story flowing.

Even if you do not decide to follow through with any of the short story prompts above, attempt writing at least one of them—the more you write, the more skilled you become, so write poorly, write slowly but make sure to keep writing.

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the best teacher of how to write.” Annie Proulx

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44 Short Story Ideas

Here are lots of short story ideas that you can use as writing prompts. Any of these ideas can be used either humorously or dramatically... or you can try both. Have fun!

Story ideas - 3 elements

Choose a set of three elements and write a story that contains all three of them! Extreme challenge: combine three of the elements with one of the other short story ideas on this page.

• A stolen ring, fear of spiders, and a sinister stranger.
• A taxi, an old enemy, and Valentine's Day.
• Identical twins, a party invitation, and a locked closet.
• A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.
• Aerobics, a secret diary, and something unpleasant under the bed.
• An ex-boyfriend, a pair of binoculars, and a good-luck charm.
• An annoying boss, a bikini, and a fake illness.
• The first day of school, a love note, and a recipe with a significant mistake.
• A horoscope, makeup, and a missing tooth.
• A campfire, a scream, and a small lie that gets bigger and bigger.

More short story ideas

Challenge: 4 stories in 4 weeks using these short story ideas. Are you up to it? Extreme challenge: Why not write a book of short stories? Choose seven or eight short story ideas to get started.

11. A babysitter is snooping around her employer's house and finds a disturbing photograph...

12. At a Chinese restaurant, your character opens his fortune cookie and reads the following message: "Your life is in danger. Say nothing to anyone. You must leave the city immediately and never return. Repeat: say nothing."...

13. Your character's boss invites her and her husband to dinner. Your character wants to make a good impression, but her husband has a tendency to drink too much and say exactly what's on his mind...

14. It's your character's first day at a new school. He or she wants to get a fresh start, develop a new identity. But in his or her homeroom, your character encounters a kid he or she knows from summer camp...

15. Your character has to tell his parents that he's getting a divorce. He knows his parents will take his wife's side, and he is right...

16. At the airport, a stranger offers your character money to carry a mysterious package onto the plane. The stranger assures your character that it's nothing illegal and points out that it has already been through the security check. Your character has serious doubts, but needs the money, and therefore agrees...

17. Your character suspects her husband is having an affair and decides to spy on him. What she discovers is not what she was expecting...

18. A man elbows your character in a crowd. After he is gone, she discovers her cell phone is too. She calls her own number, and the man answers. She explains that the cell phone has personal information on it and asks the man to send it back to her. He hangs up. Instead of going to the police, your character decides to take matters into her own hands...

19. After your character loses his job, he is home during the day. That's how he discovers that his teenage son has a small marijuana plantation behind the garage. Your character confronts his son, who, instead of acting repentant, explains to your character exactly how much money he is making from the marijuana and tries to persuade your character to join in the business...

20. At a garage sale, your character buys an antique urn which she thinks will look nice decorating her bookcase. But when she gets home, she realizes there are someone's ashes in it...

Learn to make your story a page-turner with our online course Irresistible Fiction.

Even more short story ideas

21. Your character starts receiving flowers and anonymous gifts. She doesn't know who is sending them. Her husband is suspicious, and the gifts begin to get stranger....

22. A missionary visits your character's house and attempts to convert her to his religion. Your character is trying to get rid of him just as storm warning sirens go off. Your character feels she can't send the missionary out into the storm, so she lets him come down into her basement with her. This is going to be a long storm....

23. Your character is caught shoplifting. The shop owner says that she won't call the police in exchange for a personal favor....

24. Your character is visiting his parents over a holiday. He is returning some books to the library for his mother and is startled to notice that the librarian looks exactly like him, only about thirty years older. He immediately begins to suspect that his mother had an affair at one time and the librarian is his real father...

25. Your character picks up a hitchhiker on her way home from work. The hitchhiker tries to persuade your character to leave everything and drive her across the country...

26. Your character has to sell the house where she grew up. A potential buyer comes to look at it and begins to talk about all of the changes she would make to the place. This upsets your character, who decides she wants to find a buyer who will leave everything the way it has always been....

27. A bat gets in the house. Your character's husband becomes hysterical, frightened that it might be rabid. In his panic, he ends up shutting the bat in a room with your character while he calls an exterminator from a safe place in the house. His behavior makes your character see her husband in a new way....

28. Your character changes jobs in order to have more time with his family. But his family doesn't seem interested in having him around...

29. Your character develops the idea that she can hear the voices of the dead on a certain radio channel. She decides to take advantage of this channel to find answers to some questions that are bothering her about her dead parents....

30. Your character's dream is to be a professional dancer. At a party, she mentions this dream to a stranger, who says that he has contacts in the dance world and gets her an audition for a prestigious dance troupe. One problem: your character doesn't know how to dance. Your character decides to accept the audition anyway and look for a solution....

And still more short story ideas

31. Your character thinks her boss is looking for an excuse to fire her. She decides to fight back....

32. Your character goes out for dinner on a date and becomes attracted to the waiter or waitress....

32. Your character notices that a stranger is following her. She pretends not to notice. The stranger follows her home and watches her go inside. Then when he leaves, your character turns the tables and starts to follow him....

34. A child moves into a new house and finds out that the other kids in town think it's haunted. She begins to invent ghost stories to tell at school in order to get attention. But the more stories she tells, the more frightened she becomes of the house...

35. Your elderly character escapes from the retirement home where his or her children have placed him or her....

36. Your character gets cosmetic surgery in an attempt to make her boyfriend love her more. But then she worries he only loves her for her looks....

37. Your character is a writer. But his new neighbors are so noisy that he can neither work nor sleep. He decides to take action....

38. Your character's mother-in-law comes to visit for a week, and your character suspects she is trying to poison him. He shares his suspicion with his wife, who says he's always hated her mother but this accusation is going too far. Meanwhile, your character has stomach cramps, and his mother-in-law is downstairs making breakfast again....

39. It's a freezing cold night. Your character finds a homeless family on his doorstep and invites them into his home to sleep. But in the morning, the family doesn't leave....

40. Your character has recently married a man with two teenage children. The children resent her, and she tries to avoid them altogether. Then her new husband (their father) disappears suddenly, leaving only a short good-bye note....

Story ideas: personal creative writing challenges

41. Make a list of five things you're afraid of happening to you. Then write a story in which one of them happens to your character..

42. Think of a big problem that one of your friends had to face. Then write a story in which your character battles with that problem..

43. What is one of your bad habits? Invent a character who has the bad habit, but a much worse case of it than you have. Write a story where this habit gets your character into trouble.

44. What is one of your greatest strengths? Invent a character who doesn't have this strength. Create a situation in which having this strength is very important for your character. What does your character do? Write the story.

Keep the short story ideas flowing

• If you're looking for more detailed story ideas , you'll find them here.
• Our 8-week course will show you how to write an unputdownable story .
• Browse more creative writing prompts .
• Short Story Ideas

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How to Come Up with Story Ideas: 6 Foolproof Strategies for Any Writer

by Sarah Gribble | 0 comments

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You're a writer. You want to write a story—but for whatever reason, you're not inspired right now. Or maybe you are, but you just can't think of a story idea that really interests you. You need some strategies that can teach you how to come up with story ideas .

And you'd like to use these ways to come up with story ideas consistently.

Creative writing is like a muscle: use it or lose it. Coming up with ideas is part of the development of that muscle. And boy, do you have to come up with a lot of ideas if you’re going to be a short story writer .

In this article, I’m going to show you different strategies for coming up with ideas for short stories and how to train your mind to continuously come up with ideas.

Why Finding Ideas Helped Me Write Consistently

When I was first starting out, I didn’t write consistently. Partly because I didn’t know a writing habit was a necessity to be a writer, and partly because I wasn’t trying to “become” a writer at the time. But mostly I wasn’t writing consistently because I didn’t have story ideas consistently.

When I started getting my short stories published, that changed. After that first publication, I got the bug, as they say. I needed to see my words in print, and I needed to see them often. Feeding that high required me to churn out short story ideas pretty much constantly.

I’ve probably written at least a hundred short stories at this point. Not all of them are good. In fact, most of them aren’t. A lot of them didn’t make it past the first draft stage because the story idea wasn’t great and they just fell off.

But it doesn’t matter that they weren’t all winners. What matters is writing all those stories trained my brain to watch out for story ideas consistently.

It wasn’t always easy. I struggled to come up with ideas in the beginning. But as I said, writing is a muscle. It takes time to get that muscle really beefed up.

To exercise my brain, I use these six strategies.

6 Ways to Come Up with Short Story Ideas

Below are five of my favorite ways to come up with short story ideas. They are in two categories: active and passive .

• Active meaning you intend to write a short story and you need an idea now .
• Passive meaning an idea is not an emergency .

If you’re new to short story writing, I’d suggest focusing on the active strategies for a while. The passive strategies are what you're really looking to master, but these will develop over time. Mastering these are how you train your brain to shoot out ideas continuously.

Remember as you look through these strategies, that the key to everything here is a notebook, a note-taking app, or something of the kind. All the ideas in the world mean nothing if you don’t remember them when it comes time to sit down and write!

Strategy: Active

The most obvious way to come up with ideas for stories is to look at writing prompts . They’re everywhere. Google and you’ll find lists and lists and more lists. We have some here and we also post a couple a week on our social sites . There are prompt books, prompt games, prompt newsletters. There is no shortage of writing prompts out there. There are even story idea generators, like this one .

Want to get started now? Choose a writing prompt below and start writing!

• A middle-aged woman discovers a ghost in her house.
• A long journey is interrupted by disaster.
• A young woman falls in love with a person she's never met in real life.
• A talented young man’s deepest fear is holding his life back.
• A young prodigy becomes orphaned.

Some writers feel like writing from a prompt won't produce an original story, but that's nonsense.

You'll notice a couple of the prompts above might remind you of famous stories. That doesn't matter! Prompts are the basic  idea  of a story. The writer is what makes it original.

A hundred writers given the same prompt will come up with a hundred different stories. The thing that makes a story unique is  you !

2. Writing for a call

Many short story anthologies and magazines are themed, and will advertise when they are open for reading submissions. They’ll often give a specific prompt. (Again, prompts don't mean you end up with the same story as someone else.)

Writing for one of these “calls” is a great way to get ideas for short stories. You also know exactly where you’re going to send the story when you submit, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time finding a home for it. I have more on this strategy in my How to Publish a Short Story blog series .

I'd suggest doing some research online for anthologies and magazines that publish your genre. Keep an eye on those places by signing up for their newsletter if they have one, or at least checking in to see what they're accepting once a month.

There are also places online that do some of the work for you and gather calls for submissions across the internet. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Horror Tree . This one isn't just for horror! (It used to be, but they've exploded in the past several years and have really branched out.)
• Submittable . If you're not already familiar with Submittable, you will be very soon after becoming a short story writer. The basis of this company is to provide a space for anthologies, magazines, and indie presses to accept submissions. You  will be dealing with them at some point when you're getting your work out there. A few years back, they started posting calls for submissions as well.
• The Grinder . I've been using this tool for years. Not only do they post calls for submissions (in a really great searchable way), but they're also a tool for tracking your submissions.

3. People Watch

Strategy: Active OR Passive

People watching is the all-time winner for writers when trying to come up with ideas. You'll see a lot of writers sitting around in coffee shops with their laptops. They're not just writing; they're spying.

Characters (and stories) don't come from a vacuum; they come from things the writer experienced in their personal life. People, events, family life . . . it all gets stitched together to make a story.

I’ve dubbed people watching as active or passive simply because when you’re first starting out, this strategy will be more active. You’ll specifically be watching and listening to conversations in order to come up with ideas. After a while, your brain will automatically be “tuned in” to what’s around you and this will come naturally. You’ll catch a snippet of conversation walking by someone in a store and boom! Brilliant story idea.

The next time you’re out in public (or just looking out your window as people pass by), pay attention. Be present and watch your surroundings. There are tons of ideas surrounding you.

Need practice people watching? Try paying attention to these things the next time you're in public:

• What are people wearing? Description is important, even in short stories. If you're like me, you live in leggings and t-shirts and are totally unaware of what fashion is. I wouldn't be able to write a teenager if I didn't go out and see what teenagers were wearing.
• How do they act when they think no one is watching? This is by far the most amusing thing to watch out for. People are weird, let's just leave it at that. Go see for yourself.
• How do they act when people  are  watching? How do they interact with each other?
• What are their mannerisms when having a conversation? You have to have action beats to break up dialogue in stories. If you want to stay away from just saying “she smiled” over and over, you'd better bone up on some other action beats.
• What are they talking about and how are they talking? I don't want you to go over and sit with them, but try to pay attention to their conversation if you can. And don't forget to take note of slang, dialect, and accents!

People can make a great source of inspiration if you let them!

Obviously, you can't be taking notes over every little thing every time you're out in public. You have things to do after all. But after a while, your mind will start to take note of things that pop out. In the beginning (or if you're actively looking for a source of inspiration), you'll need to pay careful attention to the things I listed above.

Eventually, you won't have to all the time. In reality, a story idea doesn't have to come from a “true story” you witnessed or an entire conversation you overheard. Snippets will do.

Years ago I was at a Lewis Black show and he did a bit about overhearing a snippet of conversation. He said he was passing someone who was talking to her friend and heard this:

“If it weren't for that horse, I wouldn't have gone to college that year.”

Now, he's a comedian, so this inspired a good five minutes of jokes about how he couldn't stop thinking about this. It's been years since I've seen the show and I  can't stop thinking about it. The sheer amount of directions you could go with a story to explain how that sentence comes about is mindboggling.

Keep your eyes and your ears open (and a notetaking tool on hand) and you'll get plenty of passive inspiration as you go about your day.

4. The What If Question

The What If Question is my absolute favorite way to come up with ideas for short stories. This strategy is pretty much what it sounds like: What if X were to happen?

This is another active or passive strategy. As I’m sitting here writing this, I can actively think of things that might happen around me.

• What if an alien spacecraft landed in my backyard?
• What if someone knocked on my door?
• What if my roof caved in?
• What if I got a phone call telling me I won a prize?

This is me actively looking around in my real-life personal experience for a source of inspiration. This is me teasing a decent idea out of my mundane surroundings. I'm forcing myself to look around and come up with something that might work as a story.

The passive side of the What If Question probably already happens to you. You probably ask What If? questions naturally.

As a writer, you need to take this one step further and train yourself to pay attention when you think these things. And if this doesn't come naturally to you, practice ! Take everyday life experiences and spin them in a new direction with the What If Question.

For example, you might see someone walking along, looking at their cell phone and you think:  What if they walked out into the street without realizing it ? You can probably picture the outcome, right? But you also probably have those kinds of thoughts daily and don’t pay much attention to them.

Train yourself to pay attention, to bring those fleeting thoughts to the forefront of your mind and play with them.

5. Move Your Body and Don't Think

Strategy: Passive

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is a lot of writers get ideas while taking a walk. Whether they’re blocked on a project or are just brainstorming ideas, walking seems to be the key to successfully writing. ( Stephen King , to give a famous example, has said he walks several miles every day.)

I go for a walk most days. (Preferably outside, but I live in Ohio, so that’s not possible a good portion of the time.) I’ve come up with dozens of story ideas while walking. I’ve also come up with dozens of story ideas while doing yoga. There's something about the mundane movements of your body that frees your mind to wander.

So if you want a brilliant story idea or just need to get out of a bout of writer's block , take a hike, literally. Busy your body and turn your active mind off.

Not into exercise? I hear you. The cool thing about this strategy is you don't necessarily have to do something super physical for it to happen. You can also do something else mundane that doesn't require much thought.

Try one of these when you're trying to keep your body busy and your mind off:

• Chores (laundry, dishes, and gardening work great)

Really anything will work as long as you're not intaking information in the process of doing the thing.

Strategy: Passive 

I can’t tell you how many times new writers have told me they don’t read, mostly because they don’t have time.

Here’s the thing: you can’t—I repeat CANNOT—be a writer if you don’t read.

Not only are you studying the craft just by reading , you’re getting ideas.

Sometimes you’ll be reading something and think you can do it better. Sometimes a phrase or word will trigger a brilliant story idea.

If you’re reading nonfiction books on the writing craft, you’ll often have an epiphany. If you’re reading in your genre (and you should be reading the genre you’re writing), you’ll get ideas to mash up, turn upside down, flip around, stretch out, and smoosh down. If you’re reading outside your genre, you could see a way to take a similar story and push it into your genre .

In short, read. Read everything. And then read some more.

If you're stumped about what books to read, try Goodreads, asking your librarian for suggestions based on your favorite books, or join a book recommendation newsletter or book club. (We have one, by the way. You can sign up here .)

Ideas are everywhere

As I said at the beginning of this article, creative writing is a muscle you need to use consistently. Otherwise, it fades away. In order to use that muscle, you have to have ideas.

Coming up with ideas isn’t always easy, especially when you’re starting out. If you're new to short story writing, start by using the active strategies above to get used to coming up with ideas. I promise, after a while, your brain will learn how to do this on its own and you’ll have too many ideas to write!

And don’t forget to carry around a notebook!

How do you come up with short story ideas? Let me know in the comments .

For today’s practice, you have two options.

• Option #1: Go here, choose a prompt, and get to writing. Write for fifteen minutes .
• Option #2: Go for a walk and practice thinking of ideas. Settle on one and write about it when you come back. Write for at least fifteen minutes .

When your time is up, share your practice in the comments section. And after you post, please be sure to give feedback to your fellow writers.

Happy writing!

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Sarah Gribble

Sarah Gribble is the author of dozens of short stories that explore uncomfortable situations, basic fears, and the general awe and fascination of the unknown. She just released Surviving Death , her first novel, and is currently working on her next book.

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The short story is a fiction writer’s laboratory: here is where you can experiment with characters, plots, and ideas without the heavy lifting of writing a novel. Learning how to write a short story is essential to mastering the art of storytelling . With far fewer words to worry about, storytellers can make many more mistakes—and strokes of genius!—through experimentation and the fun of fiction writing.

Nonetheless, the art of writing short stories is not easy to master. How do you tell a complete story in so few words? What does a story need to have in order to be successful? Whether you’re struggling with how to write a short story outline, or how to fully develop a character in so few words, this guide is your starting point.

Famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Haruki Murakami, and Agatha Christie have used the short story form to play with ideas before turning those stories into novels. Whether you want to master the elements of fiction, experiment with novel ideas, or simply have fun with storytelling, here’s everything you need on how to write a short story step by step.

How to Write a Short Story: Contents

The Core Elements of a Short Story

How to write a short story outline, how to write a short story step by step, how to write a short story: length and setting, how to write a short story: point of view, how to write a short story: protagonist, antagonist, motivation, how to write a short story: characters, how to write a short story: prose, how to write a short story: story structure, how to write a short story: capturing reader interest, where to read and submit short stories.

There’s no secret formula to writing a short story. However, a good short story will have most or all of the following elements:

• A protagonist with a certain desire or need. It is essential for the protagonist to want something they don’t have, otherwise they will not drive the story forward.
• A clear dilemma. We don’t need much backstory to see how the dilemma started; we’re primarily concerned with how the protagonist resolves it.
• A decision. What does the protagonist do to resolve their dilemma?
• A climax. In Freytag’s Pyramid , the climax of a story is when the tension reaches its peak, and the reader discovers the outcome of the protagonist’s decision(s).
• An outcome. How does the climax change the protagonist? Are they a different person? Do they have a different philosophy or outlook on life?

Of course, short stories also utilize the elements of fiction , such as a setting , plot , and point of view . It helps to study these elements and to understand their intricacies. But, when it comes to laying down the skeleton of a short story, the above elements are what you need to get started.

Note: a short story rarely, if ever, has subplots. The focus should be entirely on a single, central storyline. Subplots will either pull focus away from the main story, or else push the story into the territory of novellas and novels.

The shorter the story is, the fewer of these elements are essentials. If you’re interested in writing short-short stories, check out our guide on how to write flash fiction .

Some writers are “pantsers”—they “write by the seat of their pants,” making things up on the go with little more than an idea for a story. Other writers are “plotters,” meaning they decide the story’s structure in advance of writing it.

You don’t need a short story outline to write a good short story. But, if you’d like to give yourself some scaffolding before putting words on the page, this article answers the question of how to write a short story outline:

https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-story-outline

There are many ways to approach the short story craft, but this method is tried-and-tested for writers of all levels. Here’s how to write a short story step-by-step.

1. Start With an Idea

Often, generating an idea is the hardest part. You want to write, but what will you write about?

What’s more, it’s easy to start coming up with ideas and then dismissing them. You want to tell an authentic, original story, but everything you come up with has already been written, it seems.

Here are a few tips:

• Originality presents itself in your storytelling, not in your ideas. For example, the premise of both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ostrovsky’s The Snow Maiden are very similar: two men and two women, in intertwining love triangles, sort out their feelings for each other amidst mischievous forest spirits, love potions, and friendship drama. The way each story is written makes them very distinct from one another, to the point where, unless it’s pointed out to you, you might not even notice the similarities.
• An idea is not a final draft. You will find that exploring the possibilities of your story will generate something far different than the idea you started out with. This is a good thing—it means you made the story your own!
• Experiment with genres and tropes. Even if you want to write literary fiction , pay attention to the narrative structures that drive genre stories, and practice your storytelling using those structures. Again, you will naturally make the story your own simply by playing with ideas.

If you’re struggling simply to find ideas, try out this prompt generator , or pull prompts from this Twitter .

2. Outline, OR Conceive Your Characters

If you plan to outline, do so once you’ve generated an idea. You can learn about how to write a short story outline earlier in this article.

If you don’t plan to outline, you should at least start with a character or characters. Certainly, you need a protagonist, but you should also think about any characters that aid or inhibit your protagonist’s journey.

When thinking about character development, ask the following questions:

• What is my character’s background? Where do they come from, how did they get here, where do they want to be?
• What does your character desire the most? This can be both material or conceptual, like “fitting in” or “being loved.”
• What is your character’s fatal flaw? In other words, what limitation prevents the protagonist from achieving their desire? Often, this flaw is a blind spot that directly counters their desire. For example, self hatred stands in the way of a protagonist searching for love.
• How does your character think and speak? Think of examples, both fictional and in the real world, who might resemble your character.

In short stories, there are rarely more characters than a protagonist, an antagonist (if relevant), and a small group of supporting characters. The more characters you include, the longer your story will be. Focus on making only one or two characters complex: it is absolutely okay to have the rest of the cast be flat characters that move the story along.

Learn more about character development here:

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

3. Write Scenes Around Conflict

Once you have an outline or some characters, start building scenes around conflict. Every part of your story, including the opening sentence, should in some way relate to the protagonist’s conflict.

Conflict is the lifeblood of storytelling: without it, the reader doesn’t have a clear reason to keep reading. Loveable characters are not enough, as the story has to give the reader something to root for.

Take, for example, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic short story The Cask of Amontillado . We start at the conflict: the narrator has been slighted by Fortunato, and plans to exact revenge. Every scene in the story builds tension and follows the protagonist as he exacts this revenge.

In your story, start writing scenes around conflict, and make sure each paragraph and piece of dialogue relates, in some way, to your protagonist’s unmet desires.

Read more about writing effective conflict here:

What is Conflict in a Story? Definition and Examples

4. Write Your First Draft

The scenes you build around conflict will eventually be stitched into a complete story. Make sure as the story progresses that each scene heightens the story’s tension, and that this tension remains unbroken until the climax resolves whether or not your protagonist meets their desires.

Don’t stress too hard on writing a perfect story. Rather, take Anne Lamott’s advice, and “write a shitty first draft.” The goal is not to pen a complete story at first draft; rather, it’s to set ideas down on paper. You are simply, as Shannon Hale suggests, “shoveling sand into a box so that later [you] can build castles.”

5. Step Away, Breathe, Revise

Whenever Stephen King finishes a novel, he puts it in a drawer and doesn’t think about it for 6 weeks. With short stories, you probably don’t need to take as long of a break. But, the idea itself is true: when you’ve finished your first draft, set it aside for a while. Let yourself come back to the story with fresh eyes, so that you can confidently revise, revise, revise .

In revision, you want to make sure each word has an essential place in the story, that each scene ramps up tension, and that each character is clearly defined. The culmination of these elements allows a story to explore complex themes and ideas, giving the reader something to think about after the story has ended.

6. Compare Against Our Short Story Checklist

Does your story have everything it needs to succeed? Compare it against this short story checklist, as written by our instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko.

Below is a collection of practical short story writing tips by Writers.com instructor Rosemary Tantra Bensko . Each paragraph is its own checklist item: a core element of short story writing advice to follow unless you have clear reasons to the contrary. We hope it’s a helpful resource in your own writing.

Update 9/1/2020: We’ve now made a summary of Rosemary’s short story checklist available as a PDF download . Enjoy!

Click to download

Your short story is 1000 to 7500 words in length.

The story takes place in one time period, not spread out or with gaps other than to drive someplace, sleep, etc. If there are those gaps, there is a space between the paragraphs, the new paragraph beginning flush left, to indicate a new scene.

Each scene takes place in one location, or in continual transit, such as driving a truck or flying in a plane.

Unless it’s a very lengthy Romance story, in which there may be two Point of View (POV) characters, there is one POV character. If we are told what any character secretly thinks, it will only be the POV character. The degree to which we are privy to the unexpressed thoughts, memories and hopes of the POV character remains consistent throughout the story.

You avoid head-hopping by only having one POV character per scene, even in a Romance. You avoid straying into even brief moments of telling us what other characters think other than the POV character. You use words like “apparently,” “obviously,” or “supposedly” to suggest how non-POV-characters think rather than stating it.

Your short story has one clear protagonist who is usually the character changing most.

Your story has a clear antagonist, who generally makes the protagonist change by thwarting his goals.

(Possible exception to the two short story writing tips above: In some types of Mystery and Action stories, particularly in a series, etc., the protagonist doesn’t necessarily grow personally, but instead his change relates to understanding the antagonist enough to arrest or kill him.)

The protagonist changes with an Arc arising out of how he is stuck in his Flaw at the beginning of the story, which makes the reader bond with him as a human, and feel the pain of his problems he causes himself. (Or if it’s the non-personal growth type plot: he’s presented at the beginning of the story with a high-stakes problem that requires him to prevent or punish a crime.)

The protagonist usually is shown to Want something, because that’s what people normally do, defining their personalities and behavior patterns, pushing them onward from day to day. This may be obvious from the beginning of the story, though it may not become heightened until the Inciting Incident , which happens near the beginning of Act 1. The Want is usually something the reader sort of wants the character to succeed in, while at the same time, knows the Want is not in his authentic best interests. This mixed feeling in the reader creates tension.

The protagonist is usually shown to Need something valid and beneficial, but at first, he doesn’t recognize it, admit it, honor it, integrate it with his Want, or let the Want go so he can achieve the Need instead. Ideally, the Want and Need can be combined in a satisfying way toward the end for the sake of continuity of forward momentum of victoriously achieving the goals set out from the beginning. It’s the encounters with the antagonist that forcibly teach the protagonist to prioritize his Needs correctly and overcome his Flaw so he can defeat the obstacles put in his path.

The protagonist in a personal growth plot needs to change his Flaw/Want but like most people, doesn’t automatically do that when faced with the problem. He tries the easy way, which doesn’t work. Only when the Crisis takes him to a low point does he boldly change enough to become victorious over himself and the external situation. What he learns becomes the Theme.

Each scene shows its main character’s goal at its beginning, which aligns in a significant way with the protagonist’s overall goal for the story. The scene has a “charge,” showing either progress toward the goal or regression away from the goal by the ending. Most scenes end with a negative charge, because a story is about not obtaining one’s goals easily, until the end, in which the scene/s end with a positive charge.

The protagonist’s goal of the story becomes triggered until the Inciting Incident near the beginning, when something happens to shake up his life. This is the only major thing in the story that is allowed to be a random event that occurs to him.

Your characters speak differently from one another, and their dialogue suggests subtext, what they are really thinking but not saying: subtle passive-aggressive jibes, their underlying emotions, etc.

Your characters are not illustrative of ideas and beliefs you are pushing for, but come across as real people.

Your language is succinct, fresh and exciting, specific, colorful, avoiding clichés and platitudes. Sentence structures vary. In Genre stories, the language is simple, the symbolism is direct, and words are well-known, and sentences are relatively short. In Literary stories , you are freer to use more sophisticated ideas, words, sentence structures, styles , and underlying metaphors and implied motifs.

Your plot elements occur in the proper places according to classical Three Act Structure (or Freytag’s Pyramid ) so the reader feels he has vicariously gone through a harrowing trial with the protagonist and won, raising his sense of hope and possibility. Literary short stories may be more subtle, with lower stakes, experimenting beyond classical structures like the Hero’s Journey. They can be more like vignettes sometimes, or even slice-of-life, though these types are hard to place in publications.

In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape. In Literary short stories, you are free to explore uncertainty, ambiguity, and inchoate, realistic endings that suggest multiple interpretations, and unresolved issues.

Some Literary stories may be nonrealistic, such as with Surrealism, Absurdism, New Wave Fabulism, Weird and Magical Realism . If this is what you write, they still need their own internal logic and they should not be bewildering as to the what the reader is meant to experience, whether it’s a nuanced, unnameable mood or a trip into the subconscious.

Literary stories may also go beyond any label other than Experimental. For example, a story could be a list of To Do items on a paper held by a magnet to a refrigerator for the housemate to read. The person writing the list may grow more passive-aggressive and manipulative as the list grows, and we learn about the relationship between the housemates through the implied threats and cajoling.

Your short story is suspenseful, meaning readers hope the protagonist will achieve his best goal, his Need, by the Climax battle against the antagonist.

Your story entertains. This is especially necessary for Genre short stories.

The story captivates readers at the very beginning with a Hook, which can be a puzzling mystery to solve, an amazing character’s or narrator’s Voice, an astounding location, humor, a startling image, or a world the reader wants to become immersed in.

Expository prose (telling, like an essay) takes up very, very little space in your short story, and it does not appear near the beginning. The story is in Narrative format instead, in which one action follows the next. You’ve removed every unnecessary instance of Expository prose and replaced it with showing Narrative. Distancing words like “used to,” “he would often,” “over the years, he,” “each morning, he” indicate that you are reporting on a lengthy time period, summing it up, rather than sticking to Narrative format, in which immediacy makes the story engaging.

You’ve earned the right to include Expository Backstory by making the reader yearn for knowing what happened in the past to solve a mystery. This can’t possibly happen at the beginning, obviously. Expository Backstory does not take place in the first pages of your story.

Your reader cares what happens and there are high stakes (especially important in Genre stories). Your reader worries until the end, when the protagonist survives, succeeds in his quest to help the community, gets the girl, solves or prevents the crime, achieves new scientific developments, takes over rule of his realm, etc.

Every sentence is compelling enough to urge the reader to read the next one—because he really, really wants to—instead of doing something else he could be doing. Your story is not going to be assigned to people to analyze in school like the ones you studied, so you have found a way from the beginning to intrigue strangers to want to spend their time with your words.

Whether you’re looking for inspiration or want to publish your own stories, you’ll find great literary journals for writers of all backgrounds at this article:

https://writers.com/short-story-submissions

Learn How to Write a Short Story at Writers.com

The short story takes an hour to learn and a lifetime to master. Learn how to write a short story with Writers.com. Our upcoming fiction courses will give you the ropes to tell authentic, original short stories that captivate and entrance your readers.

Rosemary – Is there any chance you could add a little something to your checklist? I’d love to know the best places to submit our short stories for publication. Thanks so much.

Hi, Kim Hanson,

Some good places to find publications specific to your story are NewPages, Poets and Writers, Duotrope, and The Submission Grinder.

“ In Genre stories, all the questions are answered, threads are tied up, problems are solved, though the results of carnage may be spread over the landscape.”

Not just no but NO.

See for example the work of MacArthur Fellow Kelly Link.

[…] How to Write a Short Story: The Short Story Checklist […]

Thank you for these directions and tips. It’s very encouraging to someone like me, just NOW taking up writing.

[…] Writers.com. A great intro to writing. https://writers.com/how-to-write-a-short-story […]

Hello: I started to write seriously in the late 70’s. I loved to write in High School in the early 60’s but life got in the way. Around the 00’s many of the obstacles disappeared. Since then I have been writing more, and some of my work was vanilla transgender stories. Here in 2024 transgender stories have become tiresome because I really don’t have much in common with that mind set.

The glare of an editor that could potentially pay me is quite daunting, so I would like to start out unpaid to see where that goes. I am not sure if a writer’s agent would be a good fit for me. My work life was in the Trades, not as some sort of Academic. That alone causes timidity, but I did read about a fiction writer who had been a house painter.

This is my first effort to publish since the late 70’s. My pseudonym would perhaps include Ahabidah.

Gwen Boucher.

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• Writing Prompts

250+ Short Story Ideas for Kids

Staring at a blank page is every writer’s nightmare (or writer’s block )! To combat a blank page, here are 250 short story ideas to spark up your imagination. These short story prompts can make great daily writing exercises or can be used to write your next best-selling short story . 

Random Short Story Idea Generator

Unlike thousand-page novels, short stories (or flash fiction and one-shots ) can be really difficult to write. Their general word limit of around 1,000 words or fewer means that you need a brilliant idea and story plot to keep your readers hooked from beginning to end. With this in mind, we have created an ultimate collection of short story ideas that will keep your readers engaged. Whether you’re writing a sci-fi book or a series of modern-day fairy tales, click the links in the table of contents below to find the perfect idea for your next story! 

Love writing stories? Take part in our weekly short story challenge . Each week you’ll be given a random short story prompt to write about. Can you complete the challenge in time?

Reflecting back on your life experiences can be a great source of inspiration. Whether you’re thinking about a bad moment in your life or a funny one, here are 20 life story prompts to get you started:

• The worst day of your life just happened. Write about how things keep going wrong all day until the very end of the day it turns around.
• It’s your 12th birthday and your favourite uncle gives you a gift that really surprises you. 
• Think about how your self-image has changed over the past few years. Has your confidence grown or withered away? Use this as your inspiration for your next short story.
• Is your family wealthy or short on money? Money can be a strong motivator and a source of conflict for many people. How does money make you feel?
• Who raised you the most when growing up? What lessons did they teach you? How do they inspire you?
• What is the greatest lesson you learned so far in your life and how did you learn it?
• Write a short story inspired by a recent argument you had. 
• Think about a difficult decision you had to make recently. For example, did you have to choose between going to your best friend’s birthday party or visiting your dad in another country?
• Write about a recent achievement or goal you accomplished. 
• Think about an object that you had your whole life, like a piece of jewellery or a teddy bear. Write a short story centred around this object.
• Look through some old family photos and pick one at random. Use this photo as inspiration for your next story.
• Have you ever felt pressured to do something? Write about this peer pressure from the perspective of your future self in 5 years time. 
• Loneliness is a strong emotion. Write about a time when you felt alone and what did you do to cheer yourself up?
• Write a story dedicated to your best friend. Think about what you like most about them.
• Think about your greatest fear and write about overcoming it.
• Write about something that brings you great joy in your life.
• What hobby do you enjoy the most and how did you get into it?
• Write a story dedicated to the best teacher or mentor you ever had so far in your life. 
• Think about the funniest thing that happened in your life and use it as an inspiration for your next short story.
• Write a short story dedicated to your mother , father or someone else who looks after you.

Sci-fi (science-fiction) is one of the most popular genres of books out there. It can cover everything from aliens taking over a planet to futuristic robots losing control. Not to mention mad scientists and human mutation. Here are 20 sci-fi short story ideas to inspire you:

• A meteorite from deep outer space lands on Earth covered in strange alien bacteria. This bacteria grows and takes over the local plant life creating a swarm of aliens. 
• A space shuttle heading to the moon gets invaded by a team of space pirates. They then use this space shuttle to invade Earth disguised as humans.
• Write a short story about a mad scientist who has found a way to combine human DNA with animal DNA to create superhumans. 
• A computer hacker accidentally releases a deadly computer virus causing all machines to attack humans. 
• It’s the year 2135, every household has their own robot servant. After years of learning from human behaviour, the robot servants develop a mind of their own and start to attack humans. 
• A cure for a rare disease mutates humans into flesh-eating zombies.
• In a small town in Australia, a farmer discovers a strange chicken egg. It turns out to be an alien egg which fell from a UFO. 
• For centuries humans have evolved. From apes to modern-day men and women. This evolution has not stopped. In the year, 2200, some humans have special abilities or superpowers, such as mind-reading powers or the ability to fly. This has caused great destruction on Earth. 
• You are an astronaut studying life on the moon. Your Space ship breaks down there, leaving you stranded on the moon. How will you survive? 
• Your best friend died years ago and was replaced by a cyborg. And you only just found out recently. 
• Scientists invent a teleportation machine which allows people to travel all over the world within a few seconds. However, the machine goes bust and starts sending people into different dimensions. 
• Back in the 1960’s aliens abducted some people and planted some alien eggs inside them. Fast forward to the year 2020, you just discovered that your best friend is an alien and their parents were born aliens. 
• It’s the year 2070 and crime is at an all-time high. To combat crime, one town has completely replaced its police officers with robot officers. However, the robot police officers malfunction and start thinking that all humans are criminals.
• A physics professor at a top university creates a gadget that can turn back time. He starts using it for his own personal gain, such as winning the lottery. Then he realises that he has created multiple timelines, where multiple versions of himself have been created. 
• After being involved in a car accident, you wake up in a strange pod on an alien spaceship. The spaceship looks like it has crashed and there is no-one around.
• Write a short story from the perspective of an alien living on Mars. You can use the following sentence as inspiration, “Humans are real! We are not alone! Humans are real” Chanted the crowd. 
• Overpopulation has become a big problem in the future. To deal with the rising population, half of the world’s population is forced to live in space pods floating around space. Only when the population on Earth is controlled can these people return to Earth. 
• In the year 2080, the government banned all brightly coloured objects from all households and public locations to boost productivity. Now in the year 2181, you live in a greyscale world. People work all the time, there is no fun and no colour in their life. Until one day you discover something buried underground, a bright red t-shirt. 
• Everything will be automated in the future. Humans won’t even need to walk or get up. The robots can do that for them. In fact, humans don’t do anything, apart from just exist in the world. This gives aliens from a nearby planet, the perfect opportunity to invade and take over planet Earth.
• The gap between the rich and poor in the future means that the poor are forced to live in the sewers. While the rich live above ground, building more and more towers to show off their wealth. But now the poor have finally had enough of living in the sewer and want a taste of the rich life. 

For more science fiction ideas, check out this list of over 110 science fiction writing prompts . You might also be interested in our cosmic planet name generator and our amazing space writing prompts for more ideas and inspiration.

Everyone loves a good old adventure book. A bunch of kids heading out to solve a mystery or a family holiday gone bad. All adventure books have one thing in common: They are all about travelling and going to new or faraway places. Here are some adventure prompts to get you started:

• While cleaning up your basement you find a mysterious key that can open up portals to new worlds. 
• During a family camping trip, you find a backpack containing a strange-looking map, compass and a solid gold snake ring. What do you do next?
• Your main character goes on a fishing trip. Instead of catching fishes, he pulls out a mysterious chest. What happens when they open this chest?
• During a rescue mission in the North Pole, you lose all your teammates in the extreme weather conditions and dangerous animals. You have to find a way to get home safely. 
• A family camping trip gets dangerous when a pack of wolves start circling your tents in the middle of the night. 
• While on a deep-sea fishing expedition, you find the remains of an old pirate ship . Along with the pirate ship, you find a locked treasure chest and open it to release the most dangerous ghost pirate of all time.   
• You wake up in the morning to discover that your pet German Shepard has run away. You search all over town until you finally find him in the forest near a pile of bones. 
• During a road trip across America, you notice a mysterious red truck following you. Who is it and what do they want?
• From the outside, the tree looked normal. But when you start climbing it, it seems to never end like a huge beanstalk. After a few hours of climbing the tree, you reach a mysterious destination above the clouds. What happens next?
• During a historic school trip to Machu Picchu, you find yourself in a dark cave. When you turn back around, you realise that you are lost. How will you get out of the cave and find the others?
• You and your best friend find a beautiful sports car parked outside your home. The keys are inside and the door has been left open. 
• Your main character is on the hunt to catch a rare fish, which can only be found at night in the middle of the ocean. However, during the fishing trip sharks start surrounding your boat stopping you from reaching the middle of the ocean.
• An expedition in the Amazon rainforest gets deadly when you and your team encounter a group of warriors protecting the rainforest from outsiders. 
• While on a family holiday at the beach, you find a message in a bottle . The message tells you to take a boat to a nearby island where you will find everything you desire. 
• You and your family have just moved into a new home. At night you hear a strange ringing sound coming from the attic. You follow the sound to discover a magical wardrobe into the attic, which takes you to a new world. 
• A hard-working lawyer decides to leave the city life behind to start a new life in the country. As he ventures off to the country he realises that country life is not as calm or as relaxing as he thought it would be.
• A group of hunters searching for an endangered wolf in the mountains get more than what they bargained for when they finally find the wolf’s den. 
• During a cruise ship holiday, the ship starts sinking. You end up stranded on an island, where you have to survive until someone rescues you.
• Write a short story from the perspective of a young stray cat looking for her mother who is a house cat. 
• You are going to visit your grandma. It’s a two-hour car drive to get and the traffic is extra busy today. While stuck in the traffic you have some funny, yet strange encounters with other drivers. 

Fantasy is a genre that relies on the writer’s imagination. The more creative you are, the better your fantasy story will be. Try to think outside the box and create new worlds that no-one has ever thought of. Humans can have magical powers, animals can talk and monsters lurk around every corner. Here are 20 fun fantasy prompts to get your imagination going:

• Dragons are at war with humans. While foraging for food near the mountains you find a small ice dragon that helps hunt for food. Together you end the war between dragons and humans. 
• During a football game , the ball falls into the forest behind your school. When you go to find the ball, you discover small fairy-like creatures in the forest. No-one believes you when you try telling them, but you know the truth.
• A new magic shop has just opened in town. You decide to get your brother a magic play set for his birthday from this shop. Instead of just playful magic, the magic set turns your brother into a warlock capable of turning humans into frogs and more!
• During certain times of the day, a castle appears in the sky. Using your telescope, you discover the latest location of this secret castle and decide to pay it a visit.
• A vain high school girl gets sucked into a mirror, to discover that she has entered the dark world from her nightmares. 
• You were born with the gift of being able to cast any spell you like. After abusing your powers, a witch curses you by turning you into a powerless human being. 
• On your 12th birthday, you’ll be old enough to join any of the four clans: Steel Warriors, Earth Souls, The Healers or the Wise Ones. But a secret group living underground called the Dark Assassins want to recruit you. What will happen next? (If you like cats and warriors, take a look at the Imagine Forest Warrior Cat name generator .)
• You were a brave warrior and the Queen’s lead knight in battle. But one day both your legs were eaten by a ferocious beast. Now you have to prove yourself to the Queen that you are just as strong and as powerful as before. What will you do?
• In a world where anyone can do magic and mythical beasts are real. You belong to a family of powerful witches and are the youngest of five sisters. Each one of your sisters has the power to control the elements, such as wind, water, fire, earth. But being the youngest you have no clue on what you can control or even if you can control anything. 
• Your main character is a street thief and a shapeshifter. They can change into any human or animal. As the lowest ranking member of society, your main character is tired of being treated like dirt, so they decide to impersonate the king and take over the kingdom. 
• There’s an old ancient belief that the ocean is alive. When pirates pollute it with rubbish and hurt the sea creatures it makes the ocean angry. Write a short story from the perspective of the ocean.
• Your main character follows a street cat and ends up in a world where cats rule the planet and humans are their pets. 
• You find an old pen in a magic shop. Every time you write something down using that pen it becomes true. 
• For centuries it was thought that all dragons were dead. Until one night, the evilest and most legendary dragon of all rises from the Volcano. Write a short story from the perspective of this dragon.
• Not everything is rainbows and cotton candy on the planet of unicorns. Something deadly lurks underground. 
• Write a short story about a group of garden fairies being at war with the garden gnomes. 
• You are the best dark assassin in the kingdom. The king’s son has hired you to kill the king in secret. What do you do?
• Your main character is a poor farmer’s boy. One day his fortune turns around when he finds a magician’s spellbook deep in the forest.
• The main character of your story has just discovered that she is a mermaid and that there is a whole underwater kingdom for her to rule. 
• You accidentally create a potion which makes people invisible without them knowing. Soon the whole town becomes invisible. People start wondering why they can’t see anyone and why no-one can see them.

Check out our post on Fantasy Writing Prompts for more inspiration.

The horror genre is bound to shock and spook your readers. If you’re not scaring your readers, then you haven’t written a horror book. Go dark and go gory with these spooky horror prompts to scare your readers:

• You thought your best friend was dead, but not anymore!
• After eating a strange-looking vegetable, your pet bunny becomes a disgusting zombie bunny.
• After reading a cursed book, all your nightmares start becoming real. 
• You steal a rare ring belonging to a famous pirate from the museum. When you wear it on your finger it takes over your body and turns you into an evil pirate. 
• You find a spider in your bedroom and lock it inside a jar. When you wake-up the spider has become human-sized.
• It is late at night and you are on a camping trip with your classmates. Suddenly you hear a roaring sound, you get out of the tent to look. All you see is a shadow. As you start walking towards the shadow, you hear a scream. You start running, but this mysterious creature won’t stop chasing you until you trip over…
• For years you wanted to visit the old house down the street. Now you finally found the courage to knock on the door. The door is open, so you just walk in and find…
• Your best friend and you sneak into the school cafeteria after school to steal some food. But as soon as you open the door you hear the dinner ladies chanting some spell over something that looks like a smoking cauldron.
• Camp ghost stories are not always scary unless they start happening for real. 
• It’s Friday the 13th and all over town pets are acting weird. Your cat is acting more viscous than usually and then suddenly it jumps on you and starts attacking you.
• This Halloween you decide to go as a simple ghost. What you didn’t realise is that by wearing the costume, you actually became a ghost. And your best friend dressed up as a vampire, is now actually a vampire!
• You look in the mirror and see nothing – not even a reflection of yourself.
• Your little sister is always bugging you to play with her dolls, but you’re too old to play with dolls. Until one day you actually become a doll. Your parents think you ran away, but really you are in your sister’s bedroom on a shelf with all the other dolls. 
• It’s late at night and you hear a scream outside. You run over to the window and notice that one-by-one the lights inside the houses across the street are getting switched off. Your turn is coming soon. 
• You always believed that monster lived under your bed, but never really saw it. Until one night an arm grabs you from under the bed. 
• It’s Halloween night and you just finished carving a pumpkin with your parents. Later that night when you are alone in the house, the pumpkins start talking to you with the mouth you carved on them. 
• Every night the same whispers. Every night the same cries. Who could this be and what do they want?
• For your birthday, your parents buy you a black kitten. You never believed in superstition until you start to get bad luck every time the black kitten is around. 
• A strange boy joins your school. He never comes to school on sunny days, just on cloudy or rainy days. It turns out that he is a vampire and he wants to drink your blood.
• After visiting a magic shop and buying nothing, the owner of the shop curses you. Now everywhere you go, people keep laughing at you and you don’t know why. 

For more spooky prompts, take a look at our Halloween writing prompts post and our Halloween image prompts for inspiration.

It’s fun playing along to solve a mystery. Just imagine the old “who done it” style books. Keep your readers hooked and sprinkle in some shocking news about the real criminals or victims. Here are 10 mystery prompts to help you write your own mystery story:

• There’s a sock thief on the loose. The thief goes into homes stealing one sock from each pair. Why is the thief doing this and who will stop them?
• All around town cats have been sneaking off to a secret location each night. Your job is to find out where they are going and what they are up to you.
• Known as the Floral Slayer, there is a serial killer on the loose. They are going around town destroying all flowers in public places, people’s gardens and front yards. Why are they doing this and who can stop them?
• Complete the following story starter: The music stops, everyone turns around and they see…
• “Master Jewel Thief Caught And Locked Up!” – That’s what the newspaper headline read on Saturday morning. It’s now Wednesday morning and another diamond robbery took place last night. 
• You come home from school to find scattered papers all over your living room floor and your family is missing.
• The main character of your story finds a letter from their long-lost dad who they haven’t seen in years. The letter has a secret message encoded in it telling your character to find a mysterious door in town. 
• One by one students from your class are going missing. It’s up to you to find out what happened to them. 
• Mysterious symbols are appearing all over town. It is up to your main character to decipher the code and find out the meaning of these symbols. 
• You get an unknown phone call from someone. The person tells you that someone will knock at your door very soon and that you should not open it. You hear a knock at the door – What do you do?

Want more mystery prompts? Check out this list of over 70 mystery writing prompts .

Generations and generations of children have read fairy tales. In today’s modern world it gets harder to come up with a unique idea for a fairy tale. So most writers just put a modern twist on a famous old fairy tale or folk tale. Here are 10 prompts to help you write a modern fairy tale:

• On her 13th birthday, Cassie was cursed to never speak again. She was such a loud, outgoing girl, now she’s almost invisible.
• A young Prince has locked himself in his castle to avoid eye contact with any human person. One look could turn them to stone. 
• Princess Kiara was the prettiest girl in the whole kingdom. Her beauty meant that she could get away with anything. Until one day a witch turns her into a rose – nothing but a beautiful delicate rose.
• After being locked up in prison for over 20 years, the big bad wolf is out for revenge. And he’s starting with the three little pigs. 
• Three brothers are fighting with each other to be the next king of their kingdom – who will win?
• Write a short story of a modern-day sleeping beauty. This time about a girl who was in a coma for over 10 years after a horrific car accident left her paralyzed. 
• What if Cinderella had no fairy godmother and one of her ugly stepsisters married Prince Charming? How else could Cinderella change her life for the better?
• Little Red Riding meets the wolf in the forest. Instead of being scared of him, they become close friends.
• In the story of Hansel and Gretal, write from the perspective of the witch that lives in the Gingerbread house. 
• A kind princess gets locked in a tower which once belonged to a powerful wizard. Instead of waiting for a prince or knight to save her, she creates her own spells to get out. Soon the spells start taking over and turn her into an evil witch.

For more fairy tale inspiration, read our post on retelling fairy tales and our list of fairy tale ideas . You might also want to check out our guide on how to write a fairytale .

Everyone loves a good laugh. Humour or comedy books are a great way to cheer up your readers and go wacky with your ideas. Don’t just think about normal, everyday things – Go wild with your imagination and ask yourself, “What if?”. Here are 20 funny writing prompts to get your funny bones going:

• Cats and dogs rule the world and humans are their pets.
• The world’s unluckiest boy has the worst day ever.
• Johnny has always prided himself on being the best athlete at his school. However, in reality, he is the worst athlete at school, maybe in the whole world.
• The world richest man loses all his money and is forced to work as a cleaner at a company he once owned.
• A five-star Michelin chef loses all their reputation after serving a meal with a hair in it to a famous celebrity. They are now forced to work at a fast-food diner serving burgers and fries to everyday people.
• Jason is scared of everything, including his own shadow! How will he ever cope in the outside world?
• A man obsessed with comic books starts thinking that he is actually a supervillain from one of his favourite comic books. And now he is plotting world domination. 
• To make some extra money on the side, a farmer decides to open a knock-off version of Disneyland.
• A woman with Chaetophobia (fear of hair) gets a job at a hair salon. 
• After watching an action movie, you and your friends start acting like gangsters around school. But you are actually the biggest nerds in school.
• A boy swaps bodies with his pet dog. 
• The world’s longest game of tic-tac-toe – For some reason, it just never seems to end.
• A clown with a fear of balloons has to attend a 6-year-old’s birthday party. 
• The daily lives of a family of cheeseburgers. 
• The son of a mad scientist who rides a snail to school every day.
• The worldwide clown championships are happening. This is where all the best clowns compete to win the golden nose awards for being the funniest clown. 
• A mouse believes that he can talk to cheese. The other mice think he’s crazy – but is he?
• You’re just 100 words away from finishing your essay, but your pencil keeps breaking. You try the computer and it crashes. Then you try a pen and there’s no ink!
• An alien buys planet Earth at an outer space planet auction for $100. He then pays Earth a visit and is disgusted by what he sees. 
• Your family gets kicked out of town for being the messiest people in town. Your lawn hasn’t been mowed in months. The garbage is over the front yard and let’s not get started with the inside of the house.

Monologue or single character prompts are a great way to show your main character’s true personality and put the spotlight entirely on them. Monologue scenes or stories, just have one character normally talking in their head about their experiences or worries. Here are 20 monologue prompts to get you thinking deeper about your main character:

• Your character has a big confession to make to the world.
• Alone sitting at a dinner party fit for 20 people, the main character explains how they lost it all for nothing.
• On a bus ride to an important college interview, your character goes through many self-doubts.
• Sitting alone in the dark, Jesse feared the outside world. She just wants to be alone.
• A vegetarian shark explains how he feels like an outsider and doesn’t fit in anywhere. 
• Your main character is plotting the greatest revenge in history in their own mind. 
• You just faced the most embarrassing moment of your life. Hidden in your bedroom the negative thoughts are taking over. 
• A computer geek is reminiscing about all the ways he can take over the world and be the most powerful human alive. 
• Tabitha the house cat knows there’s a mouse hiding in the kitchen. Write a monologue scene of Tabitha dreaming about catching the mouse.
• Write a monologue scene from the point of view of one of the ugly step-sisters in Cinderella. The scene can be set right after Cinderella’s wedding.
• In a monologue format, describe the struggles of being a snail. Think about all the other insects like spiders and ants and how you as a snail compares to them.
• You are a world-famous celebrity who has been kidnapped by one of your biggest fans. Explain how you feel locked up in a basement somewhere.
• Talk about the struggles of being the most popular girl or boy in school. Think about the peer pressure you face daily.
• Everyone thinks that you’re this big, tough guy, but really you’re struggling on the inside. In a monologue talk about your struggles and the judgement, you face every day.
• Snakes are always getting a bad reputation for themselves. From the perspective of a rattlesnake, talk about how you feel when people and other animals run away from you or attack you.
• You were once the greatest criminal masterminds of all time and now you’re sitting in a retirement home, waiting for the nurse to feed you.
• Each snowflake is unique and delicate. With only a few seconds before you melt, write a short monologue from the perspective of a snowflake falling from the sky.
• The lights turn off, as your master goes to sleep. One dog sits by the bed of his master – What is he wondering about?
• Pick any inanimate object from your room right now. Now write a monologue from the perspective of this object. If this object was alive what would it think about? What is it’s daily struggles?
• In a world where monsters exist, write a monologue from the point of view of a vampire that no longer wants to hurt his victims. 

Friendship the ultimate source of all love and pain. Friendship can dissolve overtime or it can grow stronger. Everyone has experienced some sort of friendship in their life, even if it was brief. Here are 10 prompts about friendship to inspire you:

• Jacob is a loner. He hates having to make friends until one day he meets Calvin.
• Socially awkward and really shy, Abigail envies Jessica who makes friends so easily. After a series of embarrassing events, Abigail and Jessica eventually become close friends. 
• Cats and mice can’t be friends. After all, cats love eating mice for dinner. Snowdrop the lonely house cat finds friendship in a dirty street mouse. 
• Everyone wants to be friends with Malcolm. Katie is just one in a thousand kids trying to get close to Malcolm. Is there a chance that Katie and Malcolm can even talk to each other, let alone be friends?
• After years of rejection, Sarah promised herself she would never try being friends with anyone ever again. Then she met Laura. An outgoing, party girl who loves to have fun.
• Bridget has been best friends with Charlie since elementary school. Everything changes when a new girl Chrissy becomes Charlie’s other best friend. 
• Two socially anxious teenagers meet at an after-school club. Both keep on forcing awkward conversations with each other and never actually say what’s truly inside their heads.
• Jake has always been comfortable with his own company and hanging out on his own. Until he experienced true friendship with his best mate. Now he wants to be friends with everyone he meets, but that’s not always possible. 
• One best friend was all Ellen ever wanted. All she ever cared about. Then she found out that her best friend, Katie was moving to another country. Can they keep their friendship going?
• For two whole years, you thought Catelyn was your best friend. So many secrets shared. So many moments shared. But she was just a fake friend – She was never there when you really needed her.

Check out this post for 56+ writing prompts about friendship .

Superheros are really popular today. It’s not only the comic book geeks who love them now. Get on the bandwagon and write your own superhero story or you could even create your own comic series with these 20 prompts:

• You are the most famous superhero of all time. But what you don’t know is that your father is actually a supervillain which you’ll have to take down. 
• All the anger and rage you built up over the years has turned you into a superhuman with super strength. Will you use it for good or evil?
• Everything he touches turns to bananas that must be the worst superpower ever. When will it ever come in handy?
• A retired villain has to come out of retirement when he notices superheroes ruling his town. 
• After abusing her superpowers, Prof. Buzz loses all her electricity powers. She now needs them back to defeat an ultimate villain.
• A superhero and supervillain get taken as hostages by a group of citizens against superheroes. It is now up to an average police detective to save them both.  
• When the world is about to end, a superhero and supervillain must work together to save it.
• After the death of your uncle, you inherit his magical sword. When held in a fighting position, the sword turns you into a legendary superhero, called the crimson knight. 
• Everything James touched turned to darkness. His head is even filled with dark thoughts. Instead of letting the dark thoughts turn him into a villain, James uses his power of darkness for good. 
• All humans eventually get a superpower. However, David is the only kid at school with no superpowers at all. 
• How was the very first superhuman or human with superpowers created?
• A superhero is framed for killing someone and now is locked up in a special facility where he can’t use his superpowers. This leaves his hometown with no superhero to protect it and loads of evil villains start taking over. 
• Everyone looked up to Lava Knight until he accidentally hurt someone with his superpowers. Now all humans are protesting against superheroes. They demand that all superheroes are stripped off their superpowers.
• You become the very first superhuman in the whole world after discovering that you can move objects with just your mind. You decide to keep it a secret and only ever use it when you’re really desperate. But this all changes one day.
• Michael is murdered by his best friend. A few weeks after his funeral, Michael wakes up alive in a dark coffin. Using his newfound power he breaks through and seeks revenge.
• Sarah can move objects with her mind, but her power is super weak. Until she connects with a group of girls from another high school. Together their bond forms the greatest power that anyone has seen.
• David superpower is controlled by his mood. When he is angry, he turns to fire and when he is sad, he can shoot out water. The problem is David has no control over his emotions, so he has no control over his superpower.
• For years you have played the role of a good superhero. Always saving lives and watching the people you love disappear. Now you had enough, it’s time to be the bad guy, it’s time to play the villain. 
• A mastermind supervillain is tired of people always booing him and wishing him to disappear. He decides to become a good guy or a superhero and tries to get people to like him. 
• Having a superpower was cool until Mindy started losing control of her power. It was like the darkness was taking over her whole body. She is now a danger to everyone, including herself. 

Check out our post on superhero writing prompts for more inspiration!

Blood is thicker than water and that’s what makes families so important. You can hate them or love them, in the end, it all works out. The source of many drama, conflict and joy, here are 20 family prompts to get you started on your short story:

• A brother and sister rivalry ends badly when they both end-up expelled from school.
• Your family is hiding a big, dark secret and they’ll do anything to keep it a secret from your other relatives.
• Your long, lost sister who you thought was dead knocks at your door.
• 194. Your main character has just had a baby. But they are worried about not being ready and if they can ever be a good enough parent.
• Jesse’s mother has brought a new man home. She wants Jesse to see this new man as her step-father, but Jesse isn’t ready to let go of her real, biological dad. 
• Your main character hasn’t seen their father in over 10 years. Suddenly out of the blue their father turns up asking for a place to stay.
• A family night dinner goes badly when an uninvited guest turns up to stir trouble. 
• Your main character just found out that the girl next door is her older sister and your father’s first family actually lives next door.
• James is convinced that his older brother Jacob hates. Everyday Jacob beats James up and embarrasses him at school. After a series of events, Jacob ends-up being the best brother, James could ever ask for.
• After years of getting all the attention from your parents. Your parents bring home a baby boy and now it seems like no-one even notices you anymore. It’s all about your baby brother now.
• Sarah is the youngest of 8 siblings. All her brothers and sisters are all good at something. While the only thing she is good at is being the baby or the victim. And now she has had enough of people always treating her like a baby.
• You are researching your family tree for a school project. You thought your family was small until you stumbled upon some old family photos All those aunts, uncles, cousins that you never saw your whole life. Why keep them a secret?
• After a huge argument, you learn your parents are getting a divorce. Your mom wants you to stay with her, while your dad wants you to come with him. What will you do?
• As an orphan child, Cassie always felt alone. Until she joined an art club and met her two best friends, Edwin and Miranda. Now she found a family that she never thought she’ll have. 
• It has always been you and you mom. Until one day your mom introduces you to a lady and tells you that they are getting married. 
• Every year your family goes on a family vacation. But this year, the annual family vacation has been cancelled.
• After going through some old stuff in the attic, you learn that your great grandfather was a war hero.
• It’s ‘Bring a Parent to School Day’. But your main character’s parents are so busy that they can’t make it, so they bring their much older brother to school instead.
• Your main character learns that their grandpa is a great explorer. For one last time, your main character and their grandpa go on one final adventure.
• There are many benefits to being a middle child. You don’t have the responsibility of being the eldest and you aren’t treated like a baby like the youngest. But still, you always feel misunderstood by your family and are always on the outside. 

From stories with morals (like Aesop’s fable) to light-hearted comedies, animals are great in books. give any animal you like a human voice and your readers are automatically hooked. Here are 20 short story ideas about animals to help you write your next furry story:

• A bear locked up in a cage is rescued by a wolf. Together they become the ultimate hunters.
• Goldie, the goldfish has been forced to share her fish tank with a tropical fish that think she’s the best-looking fish in the world.
• Smitty, the stray cat tries to get a job hunting mice in a posh restaurant. 
• A mouse is caught stealing cheese from the food cupboard by a cat that is scared of everything, including mice. 
• All pigeons learn to fly, but not Musky. He loves to walk the streets with the humans, so never cared about flying.
• A rare octopus with nice tentacles is made fun of. Until he realizes his unique talent.
• Robbie the robin thinks that he is the best singer in the world. But all the other birds think he sounds like a broken flute.
• Write a short story about a dog travelling across America to find his mother. 
• A huge eagle kidnaps a young rabbit and wants to keep him as a pet. But the rabbit is desperate to getaway.
• After 30 days straight walking in the desert all alone, a young camel still has no clue how to get back home.
• Pippa, Rodney and Brax are siblings. Together they must build a dam to stop the water from flooding the nearby village. But every time they start building, those annoying otters keep stealing their materials. 
• A group of forest animals must work together against their differences to protect the forest from being destroyed.
• Write a short story about a magpie with a stealing problem. No matter what this magpie does he/she just can’t help stealing shiny things.
• A house cat notices her owner walk into the kitchen holding a large box. The owner opens the box and out comes a small puppy. At first, the cat hates this new puppy, but soon she becomes protective of it.
• Jerome the chameleon hates people staring at him, so he always camouflages. One day he sees a human and wants her to adopt him. But she never sees him. From that moment, Jerome doesn’t want to hide away anymore.
• A group of young puppies are separated at birth. One of them becomes a circus performer. The other, a well-pampered house pet and the final one a stray dog.
• Penelope is a well-pampered poodle. One day her rich master passes away. She is forced to live in a shelter for dogs, along with other stray dogs.
• The Gorilla body-building competition is coming and this time you want to win. But you’re the weakest Gorilla of the pack.
• Write a short story about the life of being a husky dog working in Alaska to help pull equipment and people around in the snowy landscape. 
• An alpha wolf is kicked out of his pack for playing around with humans. Will he ever become alpha again?

The future can be an existing and scary place. You never know what will happen in 100 years from now. As writers, you can use your imagination to take your readers to a new Earth of the future. Will the planet be a dusty no-mans land or an earthy haven for all life-form in the universe. Here are 10 futuristic ideas to get you thinking about the future:

• It’s the year 2,075 and scientists have discovered a way to make humans immortal. But only the rich and important people are offered this treatment.
• Humans expected the world to have robots and flying cars by now. But instead of going forward, evolution starts reversing. Soon people will end up back in the caveman times barely being able to speak. 
• In the year 2,250 Earth has become a giant zoo where humans are locked up like animals. Allens from other planets come to see humans locked up behind bars and even pay to see them. 
• The poor were treated so badly that in the future they all become mutated monsters. And the rich hide away in their big mansions behind lasered security gates and force-field walls. One the power goes down and the poor enter the rich people’s land.
• Global warming causes the Earth’s atmosphere to change unexpectedly. Now all plants and trees are alive. They can walk and talk and what’s even worse is that they are preparing for a war against humans.
• Earth’s weather system has dramatically changed in the future. Now the weather forecast talks about balls of fire falling from the sky and tornadoes made of water flooding random towns.
• Earth was created as a prison for all badly behaved humans. And now that the prison sentence is over, everyone can finally go home to their real planet.
• After years of horrific weather conditions and natural disasters, humans have learned to adapt to the various environmental changes.
• In the future, there has been a serious drop in the human population. After viruses, war and human nature have killed the majority of Earth’s population. Now humans are considered an endangered species .
• With Earth nearly fully wiped out, a group of survivors discover the location of Area 51 (a secret government facility).

It is only by remembering the past, can humans fully grow and develop. Bad or good, the past of impacted so many lives and needs to be remembered. Go back in time to a year of your choice and imagine how it would be like to live there. To help you out, here are 10 historic short story ideas about the past:

• It’s the 1930s and you are making your first debut as a circus clown. However on the first night of the circus opening things end very badly.
• In the year 1512, the island of Seram was discovered in Indonesia by an explorer named, “António de Abreu” and his team. Write a story from the perspective of one of his team members. 
• The plague, known as the Black Death arrived in England in the year 1346. It killed over a quarter of the population. Imagine if you and your family were alive then, how would you cope?
• Write a short story about how the first wheeled vehicle was created and what it was used for.
• How was the first-ever newspaper or media company started? Your main character in this story is the first-ever reporter.
• 246. Tell the story from the perspective of a young African slave travelling on a ship from Spain to Haiti in the year 1502.
• Thomas Saint designed the first-ever sewing machine. Write a story from the perspective of Thomas and how he came up with the idea.
• It’s the year 1914 and your father has just set up a telephone in your home. Write a short story of how the telephone changed the lives of your family and friends. 
• Your main character is a spy in the year 1570. They have been hired to protect the queen from a secret league of assassins. 
• Your main character is one of the first female pirates in the year 1702. To be the captain of a ship she dressed up as a man. Write a short story about her adventures out at sea.

A good story idea is difficult to find. We hope that this list of 250 short story ideas inspires you to write the best short story ever written. You can pick one or combine multiple prompts together to create the ultimate idea for your next short story. Once you got your story all mapped out and planned, you can use our story creator to publish and share your story with our online community of writers.

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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55 episodes

Award-winning dreampunk & fantasy author Anna Tizard plays the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to create unique writing prompts, by mixing words you've posted at annatizard.com/play. Results are often hilarious at first, but after a little digging, they develop into wild, weird & unexpected stories. This is a creative, evolving show: Shows 1-37 usually have in-depth discussions on writing before game play. Shows 28-33 are Alice in Wonderland specials. Shows 37 & beyond focus on storytelling, and the story brainstorms are deeper & richer. Dip in wherever you fancy! A ton of fun.

Brainstoryum: Creative Writing Prompts & Story Craft Anna Tizard

• MAY 10, 2024

#54. Writing Prompts with Magic, Monsters… and Morose Literary Magazines?

Enjoy more zany, imagination-bending journeys into fantasy fiction using writing prompts generated by the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse. Get writing!   Today’s show features story ideas sent in by listeners based on “the foggy box”, plus new short story ideas, impromptu storytelling and creative writing tips from award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard.   Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get exclusive material from her series, The Book of Exquisite Corpse. All at www.annatizard.com. INTRO: Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 54 of Brainstoryum. I hope you are ready for some wild new story ideas and writing prompts, because today’s show is positively bulging like the 3 socks of destiny which contain words… Whose words? Your words? Maybe, if you’ve sent me some on the Play page at annatizard.com…   But before we begin new journeys into the weird depths of our imaginations, I have some brilliant ideas to share with you, sent in by listeners who responded to a writing prompt the last show. This is what I truly love: a bit of collaboration, sharing the wonder and weirdness of storytelling. So let’s get on with the show...

• APR 26, 2024

#53. Short Story Ideas: Weirdness, Wonder & Inventing Creatures

More zany, imagination-bending journeys into fantasy fiction using writing prompts generated by the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse. Get writing!   Today’s show features story ideas sent in by listeners based on “the boisterous rocking chair”, plus new short story ideas, impromptu storytelling and creative writing tips from award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard.   Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get exclusive material from her series, The Book of Exquisite Corpse. All at www.annatizard.com.

• APR 12, 2024

#52. More Story Writing Ideas; Uniqueness & Originality; Clowns, Creatures, Hauntings & Plunder

It’s time once more to be inspired (and amused) by zany, imagination-bending writing prompts using the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse. Today’s show features story ideas sent in by listeners based on “the susurrant plunder”, plus snippets of storytelling exploring a rich array of new short story ideas and writing tips from award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard. Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get vol 1 in The Book of Exquisite Corpse plus exclusive material not published anywhere else. All at www.annatizard.com.   INTRO: Hello imaginative people! I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 52 of Brainstoryum. Well, my personal life has been a bit manic lately, with major roof works going on. The noise has been like 3 or 4 ogres trying to smash their way in through the ceiling with truncheons; I was quite surprised to look out the window and see humans, mere humans on the scaffolding. So today I’m grateful that I can bask in one of my favourite distractions: the delicious escape of storytelling, brainstorming ideas and sharing them with you. So whatever you’ve been up to this week, I’m glad you’re able to enjoy this with me.   I have a packed show for you today with some new great story ideas suggested by listeners, plus there will of course be 3 new bizarre writing prompts today plucked from the depths of the socks of destiny.   First things first - let’s hear the story ideas sent in by my highly imaginative listeners. The "susurrant plunder": a curious phrase indeed. It sounds like murmuring treasure; stolen goods that whisper? The rabbit hole I dived into when this phrase came up was one of treasure hunting and a secret history of pirates. But this is only one rabbit hole among countless possibilities, since everyone’s imagination is unique...

• MAR 29, 2024

#51. Creative Writing Ideas Galore: Enter the Transdimensional World of Your Imagination

Time to be inspired by zany, imagination-bending writing prompts using the word game of Exquisite Corpse. Includes story ideas sent in by listeners based on “the transdimensional witch”, plus storytelling with a rich array of new short story ideas and writing tips from award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard. Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get vol 1 in The Book of Exquisite Corpse plus exclusive material not published anywhere else! "Hello imaginative people. I’m Anna Tizard and this is episode 51 of Brainstoryum. I hope life is treating you well, but whatever your state of mind is, I feel certain that today’s show can only improve your mood as I share the magic of storytelling – but not just mine.   In the last few episodes, I’ve been inviting you to share your story ideas based on writing prompts that have come up on the show, and today, there are some really good ones I can’t wait to read out.   But before I do, and before I reach once more into the socks of destiny for 3 new writing prompts, someone has written a poem about me and the show...  

• MAR 15, 2024

#50. The 2nd Anniversary Special! A Celebration of Short Story Ideas & Writing Successes

In this 50th episode and 2nd anniversary of Brainstoryum, Anna Tizard shares some of the best (and weirdest) Exquisite Corpse writing prompts that have come up in the show; plus, successes from other authors who’ve used inspiration from the show to write and publish stories; listeners’ ideas based on the “pedantic staircase”; and 3 new rounds of the imagination-bending word game.   Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get vol 1 in The Book of Exquisite Corpse plus exclusive material not published anywhere else! https://annatizardsubscribe.ck.page/e631e9eb31

• MAR 1, 2024

#49. A Sack-full of Short Story Ideas – Including Yours!

Time for some zany, imagination-bending writing prompts using the word game of Exquisite Corpse. Enjoy interactive storytelling and some great ideas for writing short stories, with writing tips from award-winning fantasy and dreampunk author, Anna Tizard.   In today’s show, listeners and readers suggest their own story ideas based on a writing prompt from the last show: “the frozen chaise longue”. Next, Anna mixes listeners’ word suggestions into bizarre sentences and brainstorms new story ideas from the results. Subscribe for free to Anna Tizard’s private email list and get vol 1 in The Book of Exquisite Corpse plus exclusive material not published anywhere else! annatizard.com

• © Anna Tizard

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