883 Short Story Writing Prompts - Commaful Storytelling Blog

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Did you know that the iconic Hollywood movies The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Minority Report, and Brokeback Mountain are adaptations of short stories?

Isn’t it fascinating how the authors of these fiction were so good at writing that they were able to catch the attention of readers, filmmakers and movie producers? This just goes to show that length doesn’t matter when it comes to good literature.

If your dream is to able to write stories as compelling the ones mentioned above,

you should consider turning to writing prompts for ideas and inspiration. Below are short story writing prompts you might want to try out next:

A man is riding his bicycle down an unfamiliar road. He shares the road with someone. The two exchange no words, only hostile stares.
You’re wondering why you have so few friends. One of your friends is very interested in social media. And she has a very large LinkedIn network.
You ride a bicycle with handles on either side. These are alleged to propel the bike, but they do not.
Someone gives you a journal from an alternate universe where things are exactly the same except you lead a happy life.
Your perception of the color red changes. Your thought process includes knowing that it’s related to human emotion.
After years of best friends, you learn you hate your best friend and never want to speak to them again.
A parrot can speak perfect English, and says the same phrase over and over. The only person who notices is deaf.
You’re the last person to leave a party. Slowly, the party pieces themselves and becomes alive again.
People begin to see monsters on the subway. It turns out they are actually seeing glimpses of a brilliant supernatural city that’s actually under the MTA.
After constant online chats, you two decide to meet up in person. You’re sitting next to each other. You think you might meet, but then…
Collection of clean, troubled teenagers listen to an evangelical speaker who tells them they have special powers beyond what human eyes can see.
You’ve been raising a duck in your basement. Things have been fine for years, then the duck starts getting peculiarly long wings.
While a couple is eating out at a restaurant, cleaning crews do a walk through and nobody is aware of them.
From captionless diagrams, you can tell no one has ever made sense of these mechanical, electrical, and chemical systems before.
You’ve been working on an annual report for a client and keep putting it off. Then it’s due and you have nothing done.
You are arguing with an insurance representative. Suddenly, the paperwork for a commercial airliner appears.
You meet someone new, and not only do they have your name, they look exactly like you. Except they’re not you, but they have to convince you that they are.
While you’re allowing the bottled genie from the story to grant you three wishes, it dares you to guess how old they are.
The lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs diverge. Bill Gates stops wearing black turtlenecks to work, Steve Jobs starts.
In order to defend your neighborhood from invaders, you go back in time and become the only human in the neighborhood.
You’re a famous painter with a rare talent. Someone from your past spots a painting you did that they know you never did.
An intruder breaks into your house. You try to call your neighbors, but no one answers their phones.
A woman discovers her pet lizard has amazing telepathic powers. It’s been reading her thoughts this whole time.
A group of demons has made a deal with an old man that grants them discounted access to a gateway between their world and ours. At noon every day, they come to collect.
When an astronaut dies in space a hologram is projected of them, answering the questions of those back on Earth.
Someone captures you from the shadows and kisses you ever so tenderly. No one has ever kissed you like that before.
You dream about writing a novel that has convinced scientists that the world really is coming to an end.
Your crush gets out of a taxi. He has a rose in his hand. It’s an immense rose, bigger than his whole body. What does he do?
You are unexpectedly offered the ability to help the many versions of yourself you’ll meet in the future. What do you choose to offer?
Every weekend, you and your buddies grab drinks and flashlights and head into the woods. At the edge of the woods, there are two graves. One day, you find a pair of panties in the graveyard.
You discover a box of crayons in your grandmother’s attic. You notice there is a color no crayon has ever been made in.
You receive an object d’art in the mail from a mysterious sender. When you try to look closer at it, it disappears.
Your TV used to switch channels as it received signals from another dimension. You discovered this by accident one night when you had guests over. When they left the room, along with your reputation for good taste, your TV stopped acting weird and went back to normal.
You’re angry. The last straw is so immense it makes you realize you were only angry because you were scared.
Your face is on the dollar bill. You get really angry and rip every one of them in front of a group of children.
You find a phone on the street. On the screen is the last place you were and it’s ringing. You answer.
There’s a crowd of people at your house. They come inside. The next thing you realize, you’re alone in the house. The front door is open.
You’ve learned that eating the brain of a person will allow you to read every thought he might ever have and control his actions. The first choice for breakfast is the brain of a man you hate.
You realize you can’t remember your email or social security number. Worse, the rest of your memory is erased.
A detective finds himself stuck inside his apartment because someone has written on the walls of his home, in blood, “We will break in tonight.”
Someone leaves you a message. When you listen to it, it sounds like the muffled sounds of a fight. You hit replay and the fight is clearer. The final play by play is accompanied by the sound of you screaming for them to “stay there! I’ll be right there! Just hold on!”
An oppressive government campaign is underway to begin the glorious experience of total responsibility.
You arrive at your front door to visit your grandma and your dog is sitting outside. He’s alive again.
You’re rushing home with groceries. You drop a carton of eggs. When you reach for them, you realize they have turned into snakes.
A young butterfly is about to touch down on a hydrangea blossom. It suddenly thought to itself, “this could either go very well or very badly.”
The last person who died in your town appears to you. He shares with you some things he knew before you.
You’re eating dinner with a bafflingly awkward stranger and quickly forming a friendship. You remember why you’re friends in the first place.
You feel eyes on you. You turn around quickly, then calmly. A puppy is sitting on the bench. Seeing your startled face, it wags its tail.
By the title alone, you know this is a happy story. But when you actually read it, it’s not so happy after all.
You’re doing an interview with a popular celebrity. He/She/They tell you one secret about themselves that they’ve never shared before. It can be something like something that happened behind the scenes or a romantic affair. The audience would build up for a twist and roll their eyes when you reveal that it’s something they already know about the subject…that he’s very close with his mother or that she’s cheating on her husband or that they’re a Satanist.
You feed a homeless person food you’d thrown away. But when he asks for a blanket, you pick up another piece of trash and give it to him.
A spirit enters your body. The spirit doesn’t leave until it learns the one thing you can’t stand to have your friends know about you.
A crafter has found the perfect blend of cotton and polyester to make old matey shirts. However they’ve now found that these are matey only to them.
You make a friend with dreadlocks. Unusual eyes are a common trait in your family, but you don’t notice them until you get to know him better.
She isn’t your kid, but your adult niece has always loved you like a mom. You’re about to be away from her for too long. She tells you a secret.
You follow a message written on the wall into a basement. There you find your future self holding a binder of messages that are addressed to your future self.
Sitting in a coffee shop, writing on a notepad. You can’t finish this story. In the corner, you see something out of the corner of your eye, and when you look, it’s not there.
You’re neck-deep in a body of water. You are convinced a sea-monster will attack you, but when you look down into the water, you see something else entirely.
A person wakes up with no memory of who they are. As they explore the apartment, they discover a collection of photos of themselves.
You’re sitting in a thunderstorm and the sky opens up for the flood to start. Nature washes away all the small things from throughout the year.
After a long day’s work on her child’s stress-ball dinosaur, a workaholic mom is distraught to discover that it has been chewed beyond repair. From her window she spies a herd of dinosaurs roam free, loving their new habitat.
Someone unlike you, with their own name and gender, wins a job you were interviewing for. Your life changes in all the ways.
A captured live couldn’t escape from a cage full of old photos. After struggling to escape, it realizes the cage is its own mind. It is hunting itself.
A normal public bathroom is replaced with a teleportation machine that sends you to the bathroom of your dreams.
Everyone is always telling you to do things. You do. When one of them is never around, you disappear.
You strike up a conversation with a stranger on a subway car. You’ve never seen them before, but think you’ve seen them before.
A boy has a secret. An elderly woman has a secret. The boy gives the woman one of his secrets to hold onto to keep the woman’s secret safe. The boy shows up at the woman’s house asking for his secret back.
Once, the person who would become an empress was willing to lick blood off the dirt. The empress thinks of those days, of her simple desires.
This year, he stopped leaving messages on your answering machine. He now keeps them in a journal he locks up in a safe every night.
After a stealth ship sneaks right past you, you find a hole they left in your wall. A hole that you somehow missed.
You go to a fortune teller. She predicts such strange things that you start to spend your days in constant bewilderment.
You are sitting across from yourself. You have everything figured out. The future is brighter. You have found a way to stop fighting.
You open your voicemail on a surprise birthday and the message on the machine is from your past self.
Someone who acts like a know-it-all suddenly finds out something they don’t know — something serious and important.
Upon falling in love, you start to find new things attractive about the places you go to frequently.
You’re at camp. Three sentences in, you say for the first time that you’re gay. A rival camp leader swoops in to talk to you.
You’ve just climbed a tree. You’re sitting on the top, admiring your view and thinking of your favorite memory.
You find a very thin hole in your favorite denim jeans. Every time you move, you see more places where it’s worn thin. It gets longer and longer.
You work in the sewer. One day, you find a lost wallet. It smells awful, but you decide to track down the person who lost it.
A mother and son from the olden days sit facing each other at a table. The son refuses to speak because he secretly heard his mother plotting to kill him.
You’ve fixed the error on a history test, but now the computer keeps displaying the original answer.
No matter how long you put off reading your horoscope, you always end up reading it anyway. This time, it seemed remarkably accurate for you.
You’re sitting at your desk watching your parents fight. Until you realize they are dolls, and you’re actually at therapy.
You’re trying to type up a report. For some reason, the more you apply yourself, the slower you get at it.
Your roommate wants to meet your parents in person. You have to decide whether to tell them you live with ten other people.
A phone that gives you the name and number of everyone you’ve encountered, just before you meet them.
An older brother and his younger brother take turns calling each other ugly. Then one day, the elder discovers a change about his brother that he cannot cinnamon to anyone.
You’re about to order your fourth soda for the night. You cut yourself off and decide to get some water instead.
Children are disappearing overnight. Adults don’t seem concerned, while everyone knows something is off about the weather.
You hear a bump in the night. The next morning, a lawn gnome has a broken leg and arm and The Minneapolis Skyway System is dismantled.
Write from the perspective of an object that a person begins to habitually interact with in a different way.
A plastic egg sits on your windowsill. Inside is an angry baby robot that claims it will go on a killing spree if you don’t do something to stop it.
A caller to a police hotline hears something strange in the background. A change in the tone of the background noise alerts them.
You step into a new elevator for the first time. Upon looking around you realize whether you use it or not you will never return.
At the subway, a mother with a stroller runs for the handrail at the last second. She prevents the stroller from tumbling over the platform edge, but one baby shoe slips into the dark, underneath the train.
Imagine you’re playing a game where you must release your greatest fear. Your life depends on your choices.
When you see a doublet on the road, it looks like two identical people. When you read it, it says something mundane.
While you are working at your computer, the world around you suddenly goes deathly quiet. Crows whose eyes were black start to look like their eyes contain white-hot flames. The electric thrum of hidden electricity filling the room comes to an end. The lights go out and are replaced by lilac light from the sky above and dwindling gas street lamps. Everyone else is gone and you are left with a viscous purple fog.
A cop sits in his car waiting to catch a speeder. He sees a man running toward him. The man is naked. He’s holding a plate with a cake on it.
You go to a travel agency and book the vacation of a lifetime. You can’t afford it, but nobody would know.
A man is dissecting a dead cat and telling the story of how it died. You’re listening because you’re fascinated.
A boy spends his last day in high school reliving all the memories he’s accumulated since the first day he stepped into the school’s front gates.
It’s the beginning of the world, and a flock of dinosaurs has just lifted off from the ground, with you swooping in to ride one of them.
An old man is covered in ashes when his granddaughter shows up. She shrugs it off as being from the stove.
A request to move a message from an email to an ongoing series of messages in an attempt to make the writing memorable.
You’re outside in the dark. You flick on a lamp. A moth is disturbed, and you follow it’s fluttering.
The world ends just as your favorite TV show is getting sad. You are sad, but you’ve lived long enough to know this is the way of the world.
A soldier encounters the highest of high tech weapons and technology, but when it speaks to him, it has an antebellum southern accent.
Someone writes a novelization of their life without writing dialogue. It winds up being extremely boring, but incredibly contested.
A book falls off a shelf, so you pick it up. But then the pages come alive and you’re sucked into the narrative.
As you shake someone’s hand, you see the name they chose for the Gathering Soul is the name you still call yourself.
You just noticed that this entire piece of writing has been copied down verbatim from another piece of writing. What might it mean?
As you listen to a foreign language speaker the words that come to your mind are different than those you hear.
A boy builds a complex Rube Goldberg machine capable of destroying the world. He builds another complex Rube Goldberg machine to protect it.
Over time, the things your sister collects from your childhood house are sold off one by one. A set of toys. 16 pairs of high school jeans. Books. Another pair of roller blades. When she’s selling off your grandmother’s coffee maker, you finally snap.
You’d been travelling through time with sleep paralysis but just went back a year. You realize it was to the moment you knew you wanted to ask someone out. You’re now on that day again, ready to do it, just to realize the person went completely insane and ended up divorcing you. Your state of mind is starting to deteriorate. You’ve read a few time travel stories and know this isn’t an alternate reality, but you might have gone too far back beyond your intended checkpoint.
You find a very old cell phone. Its memory is full. The only item on it is a note that reads, “ring / ring.”
You think you’ve lost your phone, but it’s in your hand. The battery’s six percent, and the cherries have tiny, sad faces.
Shade is basically Brigitte from Overwatch who helps direct ghosts to mount etna she is a spirit who acts as a guide to lost souls.
You saw a horror movie as a child that stuck with you. Someone brings up the movie to you years later, and you realize why it bothered you.
You’re at a bar signing copies of your book. Someone comes up to you – it’s you from 5 years in the future.
A person practices kindness to get into a good deed kind of mood, not because they necessarily want to.
An error made by time police results in Michael Jackson being given permission to record all tenures.
A successful businessman is hired by an elusive person to pursue someone. The businessman knows nothing about why or who.
You sit in your car in the car park listening to the rain fall. You feel something crawling down your neck.
Someone visits an artist’s exhibit, but their art is all the same subject — the last thing the visitor saw.
You’re at a bar. The bartender is a fifth grade teacher, who demands that you write a story instead of paying your tab. The next day she calls you out for plagiarism.
You get a knock on your door. It’s the person you admire most. He/she is bleeding heavily and cannot remember how they arrived there or who they are.
You go to a restaurant and order the same dish that you always order. When it arrives, it seems as if it’s different.
There are seventeen buttons on your computer mouse. One of them is shaped a little differently, but you’ve never noticed.
A man loses his memory, but he doesn’t know his identity. He seeks out clues and places to start sampling his old life.
A team of Heroes goes on a night out to the same bar every night. They tell a different story every time about the case they’re working on. Eventually they discovered they were being framed, and one of them is the mastermind.
A hyper-intelligent dog reads about the concept of guilt, then offers to adopt it for the human race.
You’ve always wanted to know what’s on the other side of that divide, that cliff, that canyon. Today you may find out.
You return from the grocery store, your cart overflowing with cartons of Vitamin D milk. You try to return them.
You are the original creator, the first writer, of a very popular book series, which is nearing its final book. The author is you, and you are planning on killing yourself before you publish it.
The ghost of a grown man now floats around aimlessly as a shadow of himself, still living with his mother as a ghost.
There is a crack in all things. That one is yours. The explosion you just heard was a bomb being made in your craft lab. Leaving your lab you see the smiling face of a friend, still on the bomb.
It’s been a long day, and you’re looking forward to going home and dumping your burdens onto your favorite person.
There is a large computer screen that only you can see. It displays a moving video of your future. All the choices you make in your current life will determine the video. You can watch it for as long as you want or leave the screen and grow older, or maybe you can write a different future for yourself.
A little girl is sitting on the curb holding a huge flash drive. You ask her, “What’s on the drive?”
Your enemy has captured you and tied you up. You realize you can escape, but you won’t be able to run very fast because you forgot how to walk.
A word appears in your mirror every time you look in the mirror. You write the word on your head when you go to sleep.
A long time ago, the world started quietly generating false memories. But how do you know anymore which memories are actually false? What are the wrong memories versus the real ones?
You’re lying prone in the middle of a dirt road. An ambulance rushes towards you. The sirens seem to be getting further and further away. You panic and roll back to normal speed.
You protect and care for the meerkat-like creature standing in a room with you, but you never talk and he can’t speak. Until one day, you finally speak.
A dog is sitting on a front porch. The dog decides to run away. It walks out into an empty street. The person realizes the dog has never had to use a leash.
A man is sitting on a rock. As people walk by, he tells them a joke. It’s about a priest, an engineer, and an old woman who is in the hospital.
When you see something bad happening, you can stop it. But when it is gone, it continues to happen over and over again.
First you notice it bobbing on the waves. Then you identify eyes, a nose, ears, fur. Suddenly you realize you are watching a person drowning.
If everyone is one another’s mental projection, surfacing as reality finally which person could you be doomed to become?
You live on a space station in close quarters. One night you wake to find your neighbors’ bodies piled in the elevator.
You can type thoughts into your smartphone, which instantly appears in a drop down menu on your computer.
A start-up announces it’s going to transport its customers into the past to let people fight dinosaurs.
You keep waking up in the same bed, in the same body. When you check your mirror, you realize every morning that you are a different person.
There is an asteroid headed right for Earth. It’s 300 meters wide and will arrive in two weeks. Scientists estimate about 40% of the Earth’ s population will die. What do you do?
Some time ago, you pushed the “undo” button. You realized this action caused more harm than good. Now you wander the earth looking for a new way to correct your mistakes.
A person buys a returning device that is a replica of their ex’s handwriting that allows them to write a letter that would be delivered years in the future. They set it to work, but are surprised to see the same handwriting on a piece of paper that became stuck in the effluent pipe.
You’re on a flimsy piece of plywood and shin-deep in an ocean. You have to hold hands with a stranger to survive.
A young person confronts an elder about something that was done to them in their past. The elder begins to break down and cry.
A mysterious rainbow-coloured goo has begun to appear in your room at ground level. It has a yellow tinge, smells of tropical fruit, and feels squishy.
The first hint of autumn is an early call from your grandma, the kind who loves sending you twenty-dollar bills.
You’ve been called into your boss’ office for your Annual Performance Review. She says, “You have been successful in-” and then sits down and begins to cry. You say, “What’s wrong?”
You have a machine that can eliminate your inhibitions but you’re told using it would bring on a tragedy.
A man realizes that one of his bones is hurting him more than usual. They tear open his arm and discover he has a second heart in his arm.
Rumors start swirling about the death of a public figure. Then, everyone — you included — realizes it’s hearsay.
You’re Attending at the local hospital. This isn’t your territory, so you’re forbidden to do anything with the information you gather in a paranormal way.
You want to die so you climb the tallest building in town. You peer over the edge and see someone trying to do the same thing.
You arrange a series of mundane objects in a pattern. You have to rearrange the objects getting more chaotic each time. The last arrangement can’t be solved with the objects you have.
You find out that your pets are having a party and begin piecing together what happened while you were away.
You are given the power to turn yourself invisible, but you can only be invisible for 30 seconds. How do you use it?
You’re enrolled in a study on trust. You get one cur dollar in the mail and are told to donate it to whomever.
It’s your sixteenth birthday. Your parents retire your childhood bed, which you loved dearly, and replace it with a more adult bed.
You find a button in your attic. Pressing it, you see a new truck in your driveway. Days later the truck is still there, and it doesn’t belong to you.
A photograph appears out of nowhere in your home. After looking at it, you realize it’s your last will.
You’re on the ride of your life. You know you’re not supposed to be there and you know you’re going to die.
After watching a healthy child develop dust mites in their ears an addict starts keeping their ears ultra clean.
Your favorite book is now a movie. You go see it with a friend. The movie is a different experience from just reading the book.
Something dies as it becomes aware of its mortality. Think rose bushes. Also can be a rock, a houseplant, a dog, the sun… just think of something.
A mathematician corrects a friend’s math test and explains the flaws in his methods. The friend becomes intolerably arrogant.
You’re building a speech on why you’re the greatest person to walk the planet. As you go on, you realize you’re talking about someone else.
A bomb is set to go off in your hometown in 1 day. It is your responsibility to disarm it, and you can do it.
Years after the worst night of your life, you go back to the scene of the crime to mend your relationship with the perpetrator.
An extraterrestrial race has the power to view every point in spacetime simultaneously, but never displays itself in the future.
While grocery shopping with your significant other, you have a very intimate conversation that goes unnoticed by all around you.
The way you see the world has changed. The clouds aren’t just clouds anymore. It’s not your imagination.
Can you color everyday objects and still understand what they were beforehand or do you only see them subjectively and colored?
There is one page at the end of a book that contains the most outlandish thing anyone has ever said.
A lover has vanished mid-meal. You find the remnants of their last meal lying beside an uneaten dessert.
You’re walking down the street when you accidentally run into a blind man. He’s holding a cane, but describes what happens when it touches you.
You went to bed, and you’ve awoken in a lab, connected to wires and tubes and strange machines by strange people with strange skin.
A line of people are outside a school. As they begin to go in, a voice on the loudspeaker tells them to turn around.
While everyone on an airplane is scared of Flight 191, the one pilot who is not filled with wonder and excitement.
You get a strange text that you have no way of replying to. It just asks, “Do you remember that?” Otherwise, you don’t have the faintest idea what it means.
Your social media, your friends, and your family go suddenly offline. There is no warning and no reason why, and you are completely unaware your online life has vanished.
While searching through your house for a necklace, you notice something better has been left in its place.
You’re taking down Christmas decorations. The previous three years were happy and peaceful. Why are you so sad about taking down the decorations this year?
You’re driving late at night. There’s only one car ahead of you. When suddenly they slam their brakes, you keep going.
If someone said you have a future self living in another dimension, could you travel to that dimension and meet them?
A woman had a vision of the face of her daughter’s killer as she walked through a featureless plain of monotonous gray.
You find a young child who’s been abandoned. When you look for their parents, they’re nowhere to be found. You have to raise this child, because it’s the right thing to do. You grow preoccupied with this – and what happens when you fail as a parent.
You’re talking to a robot, which is described by its creator as a fusion of artificial intelligence and genuine humanity. After a while, you begin to doubt the creator’s claim.
A child is struck by lightning and they’re not harmed. Years later they’re struck by lightning again and some situation goes wrong.
A crowd gathers for a “show” hosted by a man in a red leather jacket. As the evening progresses, the audience realizes the man was in fact the main attraction.
You’re a tattoo artist — well, you will be in eighty years. You remember all the tattoos you’ve ever given people, even though you’ve only just finished giving this person theirs. As you finish, you see a small glowing box appear on your table. You pause a moment, and go to open it.
You enter a room. All of the objects inside are unique. You can feel a connection to one of the objects but you don’t know yet which it is.
You lose everything and everyone close to you. A policeman finds you a few hours afterwards sobbing. “You’re okay,” she says. “What do you mean?” you ask shakily. “Can’t you see them over there?” she says, gesturing towards the group of people surrounding her cruiser. Your friends and family are there, alive. But you aren’t. You’ve died in the accident.
A woman gives birth and then grows something from her hands. It won’t let her be without growing more.
A mysterious letter lands on your desk. The first line is cut off. The rest of the message reads, “the last words… the last…”
You’re sitting at your desk. There’s holes in your shirt. As you look closer, you realize they’re spiduphs.
A farm girl gets a letter through the mail with no return address. It turns out to be signed by herself.
Your house was just granted sentience. It tells you it wasn’t always your house—it was an asylum, once.
There’s a small hole in the wall behind the sink. You notice an eye looking out from it. Your own eye.
Instead of a spider, there’s a very very tiny man in the middle of a web who’s asking to be rescued.
Let the Right One In starts with the premise that vampires can’t stand to be in sunlight. However, in the second film, they can walk in daylight at the beginning.
A man with a van is collecting people from parks. They ask where they are going. He says “somewhere in Detroit.”
A young person who suffered some emotional hardship goes through therapy and emerges completely changed. Their friends don’t recognize them.
There’s a new museum of the future. There’s nothing there- other than the items you bring with you on the last day of humanity.
You find yourself reflecting on how much you miss your great-aunt Samantha. No one knows what happened to her.
You’re at your window looking out onto the street when a stranger walks past. He goes to place his hand on the big green doorknob of the house next to yours. He stops, looks at you, and knocks on your door instead.
You’re mowing your lawn when you notice a dead bird who’s been hit by the mower. You feel bad, but it seems to be a mostly clean-cut ending—the bird dies, and you’re free to go about your life. Until its chest flies open and angry crows burst out, apparently alive and ready for a fight—but corneal matter prevents this.
A police officer has a mysterious run in with a jaywalker. Every time he tries to follow up with the stranger, there’s nobody there.
An author spills coffee on the keyboard of his computer and all of the letter ‘s’ disappear. He is forced to write his book without the letter ‘s’.
You’ve decided to change your name. You’re purging all the “you”‘s on the internet and giving them new positions.
There’s a lick missing from your double scoop ice cream cone. You lick your finger and try to regain that missing piece.
A woman suffers from chronic pain, but the medical community can find no organic cause for her pain.
You’re buying your mother’s secret spices. A hand appears from a nearby aisle. It’s a man’s hand. It hands you one of your mother’s secret spices that you’re not allowed to have as a child.
You wait with your cat outside a closed door, but the cat is utopian to the experience, as if it’s no big deal.
You’ve recently remembered a fragment of your prior life, some piece of it that you had previously forgotten. This imperceptible shift has altered everything about your present.
A common household doll gets up, walks around, and at first, doesn’t notice that you’re staring at it.
Everyone in your town has an identical twin, identical except for a birthmark in the shape of their zodiac sign.
Write about a broken promise. Write about a clean slate. Write about a tempting door. Write about a wound that has healed but is now itchy. Write about a road trip. Write about a sacrifice. Write about a new feeling. Written about a flip of the coin. Write about a big secret. Write about a credit card. Write about mailing a letter.
A portal opens to a “fandom” world. You step into the portal, and continue to hop through. Suddenly, there are no more worlds, and then only one.
A person’s brain is used as a CPU to run a futuristic video game that does not involve firing and the shooting of guns. The subject comes out and begins talking.
You receive a call from the woman who you think has been stalking you. It seems as though it’s the first time she’s ever spoken to you.
It’s on a dating app, but every entry is from the same person. You’re growing more and more worried as you realize that they’re all about you.
You’re trying to hold it together while you read a person’s obituary. As you get to their hobbies, smile quirks up the side of your face. They enjoyed crocheting.
A princess finds herself locked away in a tower. She realizes it’s because she’s fearless. She doesn’t know what else to do with her life.
After a three-hundred year war, a genocidal group of robots overthrows humanity. The robots later succumb to a virus.
A single drop of water falls from a leak in a ceiling, freezes in the air and lands in your coffee cup, shattering it.
You draw inspiration from the lyrics to a song. After a certain hour, the song will be suddenly interrupted by a special radio broadcast. Everything that follows will become muddled and incomprehensible.
You look up from your magazine to see that child from The Ring standing in front of you – holding snot in his/her hand.
A teenager falls in love for the first time and is transported to another plane where he spends a life with his beloved. When he is an old man, he is flung back into his life, and feels such pain at the loss of the beautiful soul that he finds it difficult to interact with others.
An old factory has been abandoned for years. New tenants come in and realize that there’s one errant employee who continued to work there, still making things even though the company had long ago stopped making things and gone bankrupt…and the factory made one unsold, perfect product.
You’re sitting with a friend in your private study. Someone arrives excited to speak with you about a project you just launched.
You are a ghost that haunts your own apartment building. No one is afraid of you, but no one believes you’re there.
The cat that the vet just put to sleep was the cat that got hit on the highway. Someone recognized it by a tattoo.
A person has to choose one of two hats to wear daily for the rest of their life – one makes them nervous, one makes them calm.
A woman is afraid she’s going to get lost while driving home. She turns to Google Maps just to be sure but ends up in a bizarre fantasy world.
A person begins to understand what a phone number means. They can see it across the streets, in numbers, lying through the cracks in the pavement or imprinted on everyone’s foreheads.
A teenager is whisked away on his birthday party alone. Years later, he falls in love with a girl at a party and falls into endless tears.
Left alone on a train, you start talking to the empty seat next to you until the conductor comes to move you.
You get given a robot that many people are convinced is human, but you realize it can be anything you imagine.
You wake up with your loved one paying you to feel your back rubbing vigorously. They start to sing a song. You start to cry.
You’re leading a lost tourist through a foggy, dark city at night. You come across a strangely intriguing monster and make a bargain with her.
You’re waiting in an airport and no matter how much time you have to spend there, you don’t feel it’s enough.
You confirm the number on the back of your credit card. It’s different than you remembered it being.
A headstone cracks and crumbles into a pile of dirt. The groundskeeper hastens to apologize to the statue where the headstone once lay.
For every bad fortune, there arises an equal and opposite good fortune. What about a good fortune can oppose the bad one, to even the score?
Seemingly against the laws of physics, you are both slowly and instantly hurtling towards the ground.
A man gives a woman a book to read, but she can’t stop herself from falling asleep as soon as she opens the first page.
Your mom calls to tell you that your uncle has died, but you aren’t sure if that’s true or if your mom is trolling you.
You have a recurring dream in which you are an astronaut. Every time you obtain wreckage from another planet….and from Earth.
Someone sees a brief flash of a human-sized bird. They dismiss it as nothing, only to see a pattern of odd bird sightings after.
You stand at a crosswalk. The light says “Don’t Walk.” The second hand on your watch counts down to a certain number.
You are given a digital photo frame. Again and again the same photo appears on it, until you develop a pattern.
You are the leader of a cult. A business adviser is trying to convince you to network with more people online.
You find an envelope addressed to yourself. Inside is a note from the future telling you to go outside immediately. You’re naked.
They say you can’t change the past, it’s already been written. What if there’s a way to change the past?
Criminal, victim, tempter, and wrath figure all enter a diner. You are the waitress who has to serve them.
A character moves to a new city where old memories still haunt, but they have a new best friend who helps them move on. Reluctantly.
You’re trying to get to sleep when you hear the ticking sound of a clock. When you try to fall asleep again, you hear you tell yourself that you should go to sleep.
Choose a traditional fairy tale archetype. Create a character who fits that archetype. What is their world like?
In a utopian society, there are no public or private words allowed – everyone chooses what to say. What is the first private word you would say?
A product that can make the impossible possible is announced. As a result, society divides into those who are using the product and those who are not. Some people see the product as cheating. Others see the product as the future.
A man who speaks solely in metaphors meets his girlfriend’s family for the first time. And she discovers this about him and is ashamed of him.
Your girlfriend leaves the café for five minutes to wash her hands. When she returns, she finds you asleep, your finger hovering above an empty textbox.
A friend of yours asks you how they can tell if an angel is trying to contact them. He says he thinks an angel shows him omens in nature. You suggest he go look at the local weather and road conditions. When he returns, he’s thrilled. He was reading the local forecast and the newscaster said a storm would be coming soon, and then while he was driving down the highway conditions abruptly changed from clear to foggy. He believes it means he’s being contacted by an angel.
A man is found crying and arrested. He complains that his tears freeze on his face before reaching the ground.
If a new planet were being discovered today, and it was the same distance from the sun as Earth is. How would we hear about it?
One night, you take out a book and go to a page with a yellow highlighter. One of the sentences has been highlighted in green. The green word says, “Go left”. You turn on your blue light and start walking towards the opposite direction of where the word told you to go.
The hunger. She can smell it. A time traveler accidentally arrives in the year animal feed is made from her species.
Your coworker no longer bothers you. Instead, they file multiple reports that you are working overtime every day.
Your neighbors hear you make a noise like a window shattering and see you walking over there. You tell them you’re just trying to force yourself over your fear.
Your child is a rotten kid! They do chores and set the table each night thanks to some magic device.
You’ve decided to make love the focus of your attention. All other pursuits are put on hold. Soon this is the only thing that keeps you alive.
You spend a few moments grieving someone who’s recently died. The next day, they visit you – you don’t believe it’s really them until they tell a joke only they knew the punchline too.
A person gets labeled based on the trait or trait group they fit into most. Something happens to label them as an entirely different group than which is considered more favorable.
In your neighborhood it is considered lucky when a neighbor is hit by a car and not killed. There’s a lottery each time.
Words that seem to have been written in blood on the rain-soaked sidewalk prove evocative for a quiet man.
You used to have psychic powers. Instead of saying goodbye, you try to tell your friend what she’s not paying attention to.
Most of your household chores can be done by a robot. However, there are certain chores that only magical children can do.
You keep falling asleep while watching TV. One day you’re dropped into the show while you’re asleep.
King Terah was playing with his little children. He forgot to watch the bread on the fire and for the first time in his regn, it burned.
You’re on the subway and something horrifying starts unfolding around you. The train stops near a forest. You have a flashlight but it’s rapidly dimming.
You discover you’ve written a novel without realizing it. The pages are torn out and scattered throughout your house.
A man walks up to your older self, punches him, and leaves before you can react. You find out your older self had a terminal illness he never told you about, and upon seeing his followers disappointed in his lack of action, he decided to live life to the fullest.
You receive a certificate for surviving a nuclear bomb test. It’s not dated, but you can feel the date stamped on your skin.
You find a screening room. You can watch any film you ever wanted. Who would you see and what film would you watch?
A man who has suddenly lost all his loved ones discovers a member of his extended family he didn’t know existed.
Someone presents you with a pre-wrapped gift, but when you open it, you realize you received it last year.
You see your reflection in the mirror and realize there’s a person in the reflection staring back at you. You aren’t them.
You open your eyes to find yourself on a plane. The last memory to come to you is standing in the doorway of your bedroom, your arms full of suitcases. Your face is covered in open wounds and bruises. It’s raining. You extend your clenched fist and open your fingers to stare at the droplets of water before them.
Detective Kay Gilmartin is on the verge of retirement. The last case of his career is a child-molestation-revenge case.
You have to walk through town holding a bag of garbage on your shoulder. Someone offers you a huge sum of money to take it off your shoulder.
You’re given a box of crayons. You promptly set down the “yellow” and “orange” ones and choose new colors.
Creating the art of words means capturing an idea and giving it shape and form. What is the idea you wish to capture?
A published author feels jealous of their past self, who wrote terrible inferior novels and who’s only proof of their existence is some terrible one-star reviews.
You think a couple coworkers get trapped in a storage closet. But when you open the door, only one of them is in there.
A person waiting in a line somewhere becomes impatient by the few who have to stray slightly from the group.
A teacher has to give an impromptu presentation about herself. As she stands at the front and begins, she realizes she believes something entirely different from what she’s taught.
People in the future can manipulate peoples’ emotions like they were manipulating a remote control. They can calm you down, make you angry, smack-dab in the middle of eating corn flakes. This bothers you because it wouldn’t bother you to manipulate people’s emotions but it would bother you to know or be certain that people are manipulating your emotions. Your morals feel wrong.
His friends line up. He kisses each one of them on the mouth, but as he kisses them, he realizes he is eternally changing them.
A woman doesn’t understand how she could have been so worried all the time. After much introspection, she realizes she was terrified of herself.
You’re in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. You never learned to swim, and you realize it’s time to learn.
While living through a hurricane, your main concern is setting up a wifi router. You do it, and people start sending you messages asking about the storm.
You’ve been walking endlessly on the same disused section of highway. Ahead, you see a figure. As you get closer, you realise it was yourself.
Everyone in an office has knowledge of the future, but if they make one prediction, their memories will be erased.
In a world where winter lasts continuously without changing into spring, a traveler sets out in search of summer.
A character gets tired of being the way they have always been and decides to change, maybe by choice or chance.
It’s a double homicide anniversary for your grandparents. They shiver as they drive past the place where they were killed.
Your illness allows you to read people’s thoughts. Only, sometimes people’s thoughts are just static radiating from their heads.
A beloved folktale is proven to be untrue, with all evidence to the contrary that had convinced you to support it up till then being solid.
A bomb explodes, but you don’t die. You awaken to find yourself sitting in the middle of a spinning ring.
You’re stuck in traffic on a long stretch of highway. You see a light on the road. A person dressed in all white kneels in the middle of the road.
Write whatever comes to you first, as fully as you possibly can. When it ends, write what comes next.
Aroused the curiosity of villagers, who began to circle around a stranger, a notorious experimenter.
You curse as you turn the dial on the radio or TV again and again, and can’t find anything you like.
While swimming, you reach the deepest point in the ocean. On your way back up, you see what looks to be an alternate version of you.
You’re setting up a meeting with someone over a text message. The person keeps breaking the fourth wall .
You’re at a seminar, but you’re the only attendee. At the end, the instructor dismisses you all with a simple wave and says, “Bye.”
A web page consists of an infinite series of progress bars. Each one stops, but the one before it never gives any indication as to whether the current one is complete or not.
Before you are convicted of a crime you discover your town is set up to look just exactly like the town used in your favorite TV crime drama.
There’s a Russian roulette target game on your refrigerator. When you aim your gun at the wheel, the gun on the opposite fridge side turns on too.
You start a conversation on a dating profile. The seed for that online conversation becomes a relationship.
A boy is dragged away from his home by a monster. The boy is killed and the monster reappears at the same time every day.
You are a poor man working as a fisherman. One day, you get the courage to enter a Titanic beauty and request her phone number.
The stars have aligned, allowing you to have lunch in the same restaurant as your future-self. Much to your surprise, you are aware of each other.
The person you find the most attractive has been replaced with someone else, but nobody else has noticed.
Your GPS kicks in and tells you you’re going the wrong way. It keeps it up until you eventually figure out that it’s right.
A guy meets a doppelgänger stranger that he has never seen before. The only thing is that once he has spoken to the doppelgänger he finds everyone else in the world has experienced the same doppelgänger, but just without ever meeting them.
Someone must explain love to a Program, a robot that was designed to accurately understand concepts.
An astronaut takes an egg with him on the space shuttle and waits until there is no one looking to break it open.
You are trapped in the office supply aisle of a big-box store. How did you get there? Why can’t everybody hear you screaming?
A man sinks into an endless sea because his desire for International House of Pancakes violates his moral code.
She asks if she can have a word with you. She paces back and forth in front of you, difficult to interrupt.
You are dating someone, and one day you’re walking down the road and see a poster on a lamp-post, and the person you’re dating was on it, only wilder and happier than you’ve ever seen them. For a moment, you thought they were someone else. Their hair is done up like theirs, but not. Each curl is in a different pattern. They were wearing a hat just like theirs, but each feather is the wrong color. And then you look at the poster and realize it wasn’t that person at all.
A psychic disorder causes someone to know their own future, including their death, then change events in order to avoid it.
Write a story about two beings from two separate worlds, two places you’ve been, two items in your pocket, etc. who meet for the first time.
A scientist invents a time machine. At the unveiling, a child starts crying. The scientist asks her what’s wrong. “What happens to me when you turn the time machine on?” she whimpers. “Nobody knows” answers the scientist. On another slide, a child has a brave look on his face. “And what happens to you when you turn the machine on?” the scientist asks. “I am happy to be the first person to time travel!” says the child, holding his hand aloft. The scientist drives home deeper into the night.
You find an odd shaped fruit in the woods. It tastes terrible, but it’s growing in popularity despite that.
A teenage space warrior approaches a planet with the technology to transform all inhabitants into professional wrestlers.
Every citizen in the town has a murder plan ready to enact. However, there will only ever be room in the town for one murderer.
You put yourself in the doorway between the people you used to be and the person you want to be now. What happens?
You are a time traveler who keeps giving themselves advice. The first advice is the last piece of advice someone gave you.
Go to an airport. Go to the departure board. Look up your place of birth. Tear off that page and throw it in the trash bin.
It’s been years since a loved one has wandered off. The missing person isn’t coming back, but your phone has a new way of contacting them.
When you die, you have nothing to take with you but a skeleton, a shovel, a map, and your thoughts. Every life beyond this one is the same and the only place to find company lies at the edge of the universe.
You’re alone on your first date at a nice restaurant. The waiter comes to take your order and he recognizes you, but you don’t recognize him at all.
Someone receives a voodoo doll as a gift, but the person it’s modeled after is them, not a loved one.
You keep getting phone calls from an unfamiliar number. A female voice on the other end tells you she’s giving you your last warning.
On your birthday, a store clerk does a tarot card reading. They shuffle the cards wrong and get wildly off-the-mark.
You wake up one morning with the exact same body as an actress from a movie you love. You break her arm falling out a tree then get caught in a storm and die.
Your date runs away, but a voice says she wasn’t your date at all, but a girl who looked just like her.
You accidentally lock yourself into a hotel room. It has a small supply of food. You’ll be released when the weather clears.
The day you’ve been dreading finally comes. It arrives as quietly as a house fly and just as mundane.
A transmuting wizard discovers that all he has to do to change metals and rock is circumcise the Earth.
For the sake of your whole family, you have to go up to your most feared person, and tell them how you really feel!
Pulled from the thoughts of its author, an unreciprocated crush comes to life and walks around the room.
There’s a dark building on the hill. Only the lights on the third story are on, and there’s a window that’s always open.
You hear a piece of music you used to love when you were a kid and are reminded of a traumatic moment from your past.
Sometime in the future, they discover that the entire human history was nothing but a computer simulation.
A sheep walks into a bar. The bartender asks if he’d like to tell his troubles to a complete stranger. The sheep agrees and the bartender listens.
Your therapist says you should visualize your anxiety. Your anxiety says make face stickers and teach a bird how to make eye contact.
You’re cleaning your room and find an old lottery ticket. You look up the numbers and the lottery has already happened.
Two surgeons are simultaneously removing the same tumor from the brain of a twelve-year-old girl. To do so they must perform telekinetic surgery.
A husband breaks his wife’s dream-catcher in a fit of rage over her new lover, breaks other things, and leaves.
You’re standing knee-deep in a sidewalk in the middle of a busy intersection. A giant moon hovers above.
When you lie to a friend, they no longer recognize you. Everywhere you go, people stare at you. It’s a regular day until every person smiles, stares at you and then vanishes.
When you phone the university, the receptionist answers your call. She has the voice of your dead grandfather.
You take a pill that lets you remember the future as if it’s right now. It shows you that you truly are alone.
The petals of a flower all come together and form a mouth. It starts speaking in a language you don’t recognize. What language is it?
You’re the star of a romantic comedy, and talent agents and movie studios are bidding on the film rights to your story.
A boy punches a girl in the face, and she doesn’t react. She just says, ‘You aren’t my boyfriend’, and walks away.
A bird live tweets at a man sitting at an office desk with the caption “”woke up in the morning feeling a little melancholy. now arriving at work”.
You own nothing. You earn nothing. Your friends and family come and go quickly. Each time they do, they leave a memory behind.
On a dark, ominous night, you awake. Mere feet from your bed, a creature lies paralyzed and at your mercy.
You find the bodies of a strange couple in your attic. They sit up and start arguing with each other.
A non-believer walks into a shop filled with religious statues, as he tries to leave, he turns around and walks into the shop again.
Someone jabs a needle into your scalp and pulls out a plug of hair. When you look at it later, you find, written in a language that slips back into your dreams, “UR SO SMRTR.”
Capable moon colonies last year, robots this year, flying cars in ten years. The future keeps blowing past your expectations.
A new law states that any person born with a birthmark on their face must immediately have it removed.
A young boy is taken into an anonymous building. He’s told he must stay there for nine years while a magic school prepares him to become a real magician.
A fisherman pulls something into his net. It’s beautiful and feels calloused and sheathed in sea salt.
While hiking, you come across two identical chests. You open one of the chests. It’s full of money. You open the second. It’s full of something else.
You’re moved from your always-empty spotless place to the always-crowded, dirty, people-filled place. You now notice just how unremarkable your special corner was.
A moth flies toward an oncoming car and just hovers there. Its wings are too damaged for it to go any farther.
You’re at the photo development center when you notice that you accidentally developed and printed the day before.
A woman goes to a cafe to return a library book. She tries to leave all the books that aren’t hers in a pile.
Three kids looking for the best views of the solar eclipse discover their favorite place has been turned into a cemetery.
From where you’re standing, the moon suddenly appears upside down. You can’t see anything different about it, but you know it’s upside down now.
While you were at the beach, there was a sailor crying out from the depths in the water. You saved the sailor. Each night afterwards, the sailor comes and stays in your bed.
Your palms can tell the future. Events appear in your palms like ink. You try to scrub them away, but you can’t.
An old man leans against a bar, dying by increments, muttering about life to anyone who will listen. You’re one of them.
You’re sitting on the bench at the playground as a child. A child walks up to you and hands over his Popsicle.
Someone you know begins to change shape. Every time you look at them, they’re closer to the next stage in their transformation.
Your skeleton converses with you about it’s extensive knowledge of metaphysical topics. It never has anything worthwhile to say.
You visit your parents in their retirement home. You notice your father has overdosed on his medication.
You discover a strange man in your garage. As he tells you his story, you realize you were involved with his life when you were much younger.
There is a strong less-than-zero-sum game between reading and writing. Every hour you spend reading is an hour spent not writing. The less you read, the less you write. Every book and story gives you less material for your own stories. Even if you came up with something yourself, it’s fruit that the tree of literature has sown for you. But there are also the benefits. Reading helps develop your world view, increases your vocabulary, and leads you from one piece of fiction to the next. So, what do you choose, reading or writing?
You’re writing a love letter when you realize that you’ve been writing in Comic Sans for three straight paragraphs.
One of your arms is already gone. You use the other to scratch an old scar. The fingers trail down to the elbow and stop there. Suddenly you feel a watery sensation on your long-fingered hand and you see pink liquid flowing down your arm. When the blood calms down and kisses your skin again, you look down at it and see an emerging hand.
You meet a giant in the supermarket. As you’re having a conversation, a car drives by and runs her over, giggling, and drives away.
You dream of a perfect thing, something beautiful happening. Later, it happens for real, and you have to figure out if the exact event happened in your dream.
There are two statues. One person enters and sees only one. Upon exiting, the person sees both again.
Someone named Biff makes a strange offer in exchange for him being able to do whatever he wants in the future.
You’re sitting at your desk paying bills. Except the bills are letters from your brother who is in prison.
You buy a home in Florida. You’re so busy taking care of the house you don’t realize it wasn’t in the condition it was advertised.
Every morning, you take exactly the same walk to the same place. One day, on the way back home, you notice a sign that wasn’t there before.
You pretend not to know someone. They no longer seem important but you keep the pretense because it’s not worth hurting their feelings.
You have the power to magically force anyone to immediately say what they’re thinking. They can’t stop themselves from doing so.
Your boss hands you a task. Your hands become super sticky. Mistaking them for baby bird tongues, the boss takes you to the zoo.
Someone has been murdered. What they are wearing in the coffin is not what they’re wearing in the murder footage.
Early in your life, you receive a letter. As you age, many things become unclear. It’s now looking like a suicide note.
A buffer error occurs in the last moment of your life. You suddenly realize that the person that you think you are would have either said or done something very different.
An unusual household glitch occurs every time somebody uses profanity. The glitch is never present when someone uses “nicer” language.
You’re in a diner, and you start arguing with a stranger. Yelling actually. When you’re done, you discover the stranger is now dead.
Conversations are held in a small room when the door is locked. There are no windows and no doors other than the one you used to enter. When you exit backwards, you are transported to a different room. The stations are all occupied and they all seem to be playing the same tape recorder.
A woman falls off a plane without a parachute. As she falls, she realizes it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.
A great inventor finally succeeds in creating a machine that can predict the future. The machine whispers in his ear. “Learn.”
You bought a perfect orchid plant at the nursery. It survives for months, but not one flower blooms. When you try to return the orchid for a refund, you’re told that it wasn’t a living plant.
In the morning, you replay everything you had forgotten from the night before as you try to wake up.
There is a knock at your door. You open it to find no one there, but outside you can see a single set of huge footprints.
As the sun goes down, the airliner you’re on descends. You hear the wheels just miss the runway, and descending further you see fires and wreckage in the distance. You land with a sudden jerk and you’re thrown forward. No-one else seems to have noticed, and you see a clean spot where the plane just landed and a clear runway ahead.
Someone has kidnapped and replaced you. Your family doesn’t believe you. Now they’re ruining your life.
You’re going to be on a TV show. Members from the audience have taken to tearing you apart, they are shouting at you.
Traveling into the center of the earth, you look out the cave. Only your eyes, nose, and tongue stick out. You uncomfortably realize that hundreds of millions of tiny bugs live inside your mouth. And your eyes. And nose.
You dream of being on top of a mountain that is on fire. You see people you know being engulfed in flames.
You say a word to yourself to remind yourself of something remarkable you felt or saw. You return to the memory only to learn the word was the indicator all along.
On your way to your destination, there is an incident. The man beside you tells you his situation and you consider helping him.
A man begins to take his barber seriously after accidentally muttering a curse after getting a haircut.
A group of criminals has just held up a bank. While counting their deposits, they start cartwheeling across the street.
Another list of prompts might be used for memoirs. In this context, I’ve found that the best prompts are those that inspire memories, not so much bad writing prompts as prompts that inspire recall about certain events. So I’ve come up with a couple of lists of prompts that might be used for this purpose. Some are funny, some are dark. They might work some of the time, but maybe not on everyone.
A crime has been committed on the street where you live. The story focuses on the life of a bystander who discovered the body.
There’s a contest online where people are uploading first-hand accounts of paranormal experiences. You recount the time you heard voices while walking home from the store.
Something has happened and mothers have to have their babies at home, sometimes with the help of a stranger.
Everyone dresses up in their funniest Halloween costumes. When you take yours off you find it’s still there.
You’ve inherited some old coins. As you move them around looking at them, you accidentally sequence all of their sides.
A new trend is making its way through the music world. It’s said that every time you hear a song on radio, then hear another song on radio afterwards, certain parts of the first melody will be played again.
A perfectly normal paper bag from the grocery store, even brand new with the wrappers on, will kill you if it’s left alone with you in an enclosed space.
You find yourself unable to say “no” to a request for a ride from someone who promises not to talk to you the whole ride if you accept.
A man is about to present his new invention, a watch with a thermometer, to a small group. It’s frozen at 5 minutes to midnight.
Before bed, you list your successes from the previous day in your forgive book. Afterward, you feel lucky.
A pile of rocks outside your house has suddenly changed shape into a beautiful house. You go in to explore.
You’re a ghost now. First, you scare a child who’s pointing frantically at you. Then, you leap into a dog. Then, you float around the corner to a church.
You meet a thief who takes things when he meets someone new, but he usually leaves behind a page of a book instead.
The universe gives you two doors, behind one lies absolute happiness and productivity. Behind the other is utter ruin and misery.
You meet your doppelgänger. You immediately refuse to acknowledge each other and become bad friends.
You’re in your kitchen and you realize a hurricane must be coming. A clap of thunder. You rush to the front door and it’s locked. The doorframe begins to crack and splinter. You force yourself under the door, and back into your home, side first.
Whenever you have a secret, you gather up many sheets of paper into a tight braid. When you want to reveal it, you unroll the weighted scroll, which immediately tells you what to do. You forget about the scroll. Each night, as you lay there sleeping, you wake from a vivid dream of erasing the roll of paper from your neck.
Cozy up with the blanket. As soon as you can reach a hand out of the blanket, a creature beneath begins to hold onto your fingers. You stay there. You start to see.
A scientist creates a portal to another world. Eventually, she learns the portal is stealing her youth.
A teacher tells his or her students there will be a test given on the last day of school before summer break. On the day of the test, the teacher doesn’t show.
Your parents gave you a nickname you’ve always hated. One night, you say it to yourself repeatedly until you start to like it.
A woman is invited to a party by her normally quiet partner. She looks amazing and has been waiting for this moment for a very long time. She smiles –
A man believes he’s a bigot, but he later discovers that he’s actually prejudiced against homophobes, islamophobes, and rappers.
Several people are about to enter a room together. Someone leaves before they have a chance and watches them walk into the room.
There’s a book of famous last words on your shelf. You reach and see that your own name is in it, the death sentence for a crime you are yet to commit.
In a matter of days, the atmosphere used up all available oxygen. you don’t have much time. you’ve got to find a way to provide yourself with oxygen. if you get the oxygen you need, will you keep breathing, or will you be staying in a world without oxygen?
You are given an antique box with three wishes inside. Never using them, you hide them in drawers around your house.
You check your bank account and realize that some of your credit card numbers have changed and you didn’t notice.
Life had lulled over the campus. No one felt it. Until rumors began circulating about a last-man-on-earth movie in production starring irritated professors and students.
Your dead brother’s name appears at the top of your Google homepage. The search engine tells you he is ready to have a chat with you.
You’re shopping for the first apartment with your significant other. Then they tell you to look at someone in a foreign language.
You arrive at your psychotherapist’s office bright and early, as usual. But this time, the office is empty.
You’re brushing your teeth for what seems like the hundredth time, when you stop and realize your mouth has opened and the toothpaste has all been used.
Your house is haunted. The ghost makes you misplace things, forget things, and even makes the fridge light flicker every third night. Eventually, you invite its spirit to come sit with you in a chair.
A man who leaves unpleasant notes in the lockers of high schoolers tries to find out what happened to a particular victim of bullying.
After you take a selfie to post to Instagram, you notice someone hovering in the distance in the background.
A single decision takes you from doing your normal job to the chance at fame/grief/love/great success/failure/certain death.
You find a letter written in a very old language. You can’t read it, but somehow you know what it says.
A witch releases monsters from a bottle. The monsters turn out to be more trustworthy than most humans are.
Insomnia and anxiety begin occurring in schools among young children. When questioned, they say they are afraid of the dark.
A collection of video clips are stitched together to result in a seamless movie. It is three scenes of events you can never remember.
On a treadmill at the gym, you get too close to the edge and stumble over. You stand up and see the TV hanging mid-air, despite no wires attached to it.
When you wake up without a single person in the world you realized you just wanted everything to stop.
You begin to shrink, and shrink, and shrink. Every time you got smaller things appeared too big, more far away, until you can’t even distinguish individual people.
You’re sitting in the waiting room of a psychotherapist. The chair across from you has the word go on it.
There’s a magic loophole in the fabric of time that perpetually takes you back to whatever age you feel most nostalgic for.
You fall asleep at your desk at work and in the morning you wake up and it’s the same day, only if you’d only woken up that morning you wouldn’t have fallen asleep in the first place.
A woman is declared dead. So, everyone laughs, and puts contact lenses in her eyes and lipstick along her lips.
When a digital camera is inserted in the eye socket of a skull, it is given the ability to see things.
After the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs, you spent two days locked in your bathroom chanting. Today, you continue your chant.
A person buys a house, months later they notice the ghost of a woman standing in the corner of their kitchen.
Three volunteers are observing an experiment at a nuclear power plant. The scientist conducting the experiment stops you while you’re walking down the hallway. She gives you a phone and tells you to call your friends and tell them what is happening.
You’re dying and you can’t remember anything other than the fact that you’re dying and it’s the most terrifying thing you could ever imagine.
A hypnotist is doing some work on you. Your mind starts to work differently. What are the implications of this?
A beginning author from Harlem with dreams of becoming a star releases a manuscript that becomes wildly successful. Everyone blames a government conspiracy for its origin. He tells them he wrote it in a bout of insomnia. It’s a lie. He loves this attention.
You’re trapped in a restaurant. The lights go off and the shadow at the center of the room begins to grow.
You begin to suspect that the reason that everything you’ve been looking for has been looking for you lately is that it’s starting to get lonely.
At a dinner party, a story starts to unfold. As you listen, you realize that it’s about your life. You tell this to the host and are escorted from the house.
A blogger writes a compelling post about cultural appropriation. She receives a strongly worded comment on the post by an anonymous person criticizing her for not hiring a trans woman of color to write the story.
Someone awakens with no memory. They dress themselves and go out for groceries. A stranger approaches them and asks “How are you this beautiful morning?”
You abandoned your old cat for a new one when you adopted a new child. You come back to your home town and happen upon your former pet, who seeks your forgiveness.
An editor selects random people and puts their birth dates together. He thinks this will create an increase in the birth rate.
A cop burst through the door of an abandoned building. He goes outside and tells his dispatcher the place is clear. There’s a note on the door that says, “Thanks.”
You know everything that’s going to happen in the future. You only hope you can explain it to someone before you vanish.
You allow your mind to drift into another world and you see something that gives you a jump-start on a new work of fiction you’ve been considering.
A person with a certain heart condition starts talking about a dream from when they were young, before they got sick. Something about the dream helps the listener to understand the person in front of them more.
A basketball court from Looney Tunes re-materializes in front of a high school. The characters from the show are forced to exist here in the “real world” that they abandoned many years ago.
A man follows a firefly through the woods to meet a witch. After making a deal, he finds he can’t shake her when she pops out of his forehead.
On a late night, you see leaves dropping from the tree in the backyard. They float gently on the air towards the ground.
Each day you wake up to discover you’ve been hidden in a random place. You sleep the same number of days of being hidden away.
A person’s shadow has come to life and is trying to convince them to do things they wouldn’t normally do.
Someone has posted a Craigslist ad that says, “I want to affect the world in a big way! Contact me for details!”
A spaceship filled with all the souls who never should have been born lands. What happens to your world?
A window is broken by a hail storm. Water remains stagnant in the bottom corner as the sun shines upon that space.
You set up an appointment to see a hypnotherapist. They hypnotize you into deciding to quit smoking.
The best teacher you ever had moves to another country to teach at a school overseen by a violent, despotic leader.
A man points a gun to his head. There is one bullet in the chamber. He is playing life or death Russian roulette.
You can stop time. Except for ten minutes a day. Those ten minutes must be spent trying to change certain aspects of your life.
You’re coming home late from work, walking through the forest. You come to a clearing, in the middle nestled with gravestones. Below one, a small package is wrapped with a ribbon.
An elderly man on the street tells you stories about his long and full life. He steps on a flower and you have to help him out.
A homeless person hobbles into your office, takes off a shoe and holds it out to you. There’s a quarter inside.
Someone who is depressed is out with friends when their phone goes off. They see they have a new text message. But before they can see who it’s from, they jump off a building and commit suicide.
A plastic surgeon successfully removes the extraneous bits from celebrities that keep cropping up in the tabloids.
You visit a foreign country and all the people know your name. They leave you notes under your door.
A number of houses in your neighborhood have their own interior designers, as well as exterior, yards, and street layouts. There are more people in these houses, though.
A young man bobs his head and moves without rhythm while listening to a sound that no one else can hear.
A witch arrives in your hometown to warn everyone that a curse will be placed on the town. She leaves before anyone believes her.
You visit your parents’ house, clean and comfortable, it gets you curious, so you start looking. You notice the family portrait missing.
You’re walking down a street when a stranger holding a grudge races toward you. They call out your name.
You meet the man of your dreams—the same man of your dreams. Every night, you dream that he will rescue you. Then, you wake.
You eye the piece of pizza on the table across from you. Wrapped around the triangle crust is a single eyeball.
You’re falling asleep on a plane. The jet’s engines stop and you’re feeling great—but then the plane smashes into the ground.
A couple’s relationship is resurrected, ironically, through the two of them engaging horrifying activities.
A publisher has asked for a sequel to your recent critically acclaimed novel. The sequel is an unrelated story.
When a group of ghosts realize that they’ve died at midnight, they despair at the thought of having to wait an entire day.
During a thunderstorm, you are struck by lightning. Later, someone asks you what it was like being struck by lightning, to which you answer, “It was only a little tingling.”
You’re reading over another version of your will and happen to mention an ancient book. You know there’s a loose page in that book.
You’re sitting in the office of a councilor. You’re discussing your habit of traveling back in time to prevent each death that has happened to you.
You and your friend are unwinding after work. The bar is too noisy, so you retreat to your house. On your way upstairs to bed, your friend stops you. He gestures over to the wall where there is a shadow with a grin impossibly wide. He says he painted it in college.
The setting is now post-apocalypse. We’ve destroyed ourselves and the buildings are strewn. There is a bunker, however, where someone survived. They’ve been in the bunker for so long now they shouldn’t be surprised by anything still left, however there’s a box that is marked with the words “Do not open.” They open it anyway.
A man sees what appears to be his pet, but it’s quickly revealed to be something entirely different.
Gotham City is having some growing pains as a merging of cities. The city schools may close, or a large corporate neighborhood may take over. Either way, you are one of the souls affected by shifting city lines.
You meet yourself from a different life. They insist that the story of the past is better without you. You argue that there’s no point in waking up every morning if they think that’s true.
You’re hiking up a mountain after forgetting your water bottle. You decide to go back and get it. Suddenly, you stumble upon someone who needs help.
You have one interesting animal friend. They all look identical, which your neighbors find odd and feel the need to call the police.
You’re viewing your town from the highest viewing point above town. You realize you can see everyone’s secrets.
There’s a monster in your closet. It steps outside and shines a spotlight in your direction. You swat at the light, and you realize it’s a glow-stick.
You feel something skitter across your clammy palm. It’s a small plush teddy bear, chewing gum. It stomps its feet and says, “I know you are but what am I?”
You’re trying to decide on a new location for the wedding. Every place you envision with your fiance, there’s a specific ghost or spirit that appears.
You find a red button. If you push it, a robotic voice says, “I love you.” After that, the world collapses.
Uncanny valley is a phenomenon in which a computer generated character, robot or zombie is close to being realistic, but something about it is off.
What if the person you keep kissing turns out to be a thief and now they are forever stealing that shoveled walk?
It’s the future, and humans have learned to embody different sensations physically. They come out of coffins strong, drunk, sick, etc.
A cab through funhouse mirrors ends up making reality even more unsettling and surprising than before.
Two people materialize out of pure light, discussing their doubts about their place in the universe.
You answer your door and find a very convincing replica of yourself, armed with evidence proving everything you believe isn’t real.
A woman you’re interested in picks up a soda can and suddenly her face twists in disgust. You realize that she just turned into someone else.
A person trapped in an unfamiliar town finds someone has started a fire that could burn the town to ashes.
Your whole neighborhood is a smear of blackness. What do you touch to make sure you’re really there?
Your future child is floating idly in a sensory deprivation tank. You reach in and speak to them one last time.
A magician is able to overcome his stage fright by doing a small performance for very intimate crowds.
Find two people from different times and spaces who meet. Don’t forget to show what made them meet as well.
Two new people are hired at the office. A rather uptight fellow who happens to be incredibly beautiful, and a hunchback with a smile that seems almost contagious.
A butterfly tattoo imprints itself on your ankle. It spreads wings and flies away the following day.
It’s a bright sunny evening, so you decide to go walking down the street. Along the way you hear a popping sound. Suddenly, red firecrackers burst out of the ground. They spell out something that reads “HAPPY NEW YEAR!”
Remember a time when everyone around you was saying something to you. What was their one word? Now think about how their message shifted once you knew what their word was.
Identified by skittering feet or madness, the intruder makes the acquaintance of the residents in your home.
Ashamed by his infant son’s crying, a father decides not to rescue him from an inferno that destroys their house.
Late at night, there’s a strange noise coming from your attic. Progressively more frightened, you search for its source.
A person consistently selfless in their behavior is drawn to a person that constantly berates and abuses them.
You dream about sending someone a message. In your dream, you scrawl it in a note and leave it on their desk.
Your town is swept up by a moral indignation spreading like a virus. People begin treating you differently because of your status as an Outsider but you’ve never heard of any Outsiders.
You arrive at your family’s home. They built it together – all of their experiences are etched into the walls.
In a new town, you call an 800 number about the blade on your ceiling fan. The person on the other end is dead silent.
A cult of people are convinced the world is going to end. They have a spaceship ready when it happens.
You’ve been tagging along with your coworker for weeks, listening to her conversations. She speaks wordlessly about something, and then suddenly turns and notices you.
You receive a piece of mail with no return address. As you’re tossing it away, you notice it’s addressed to a place you used to live.
You’re creating a monument to mark humanity’s finest hour. As you build it, the only question is whether you’ll devote a special place to your loved ones’ in-novel glory.
A man takes his favorite photograph to a lab to be developed. When he picks up his film, he sees a horned silhouette in the background of where he once stood before his photograph was taken.
The only thing you remember about your childhood is waking up one morning and finding your toys were soaked in blood.
Your brother disappeared years ago and you still miss him. Some people say they’ve seen him in the woods. You go to look for him.
The first story you ever wrote is now a bestseller. Your name is changed and your involvement erased.
Someone wrote something unkind about you, so you’re returning their books, notebook, clothes, wallet, house key.
You’re driving to work. The people in the cars around you are driving backward. You realize you’re in the wrong lane.
The safest place in the world is the place where the monster lives. It lures you in with promises of affection.
You find a digital memo on your computer from six days ago. It says, “You friend is having an affair.”
Dream you are the only person who avoided a terrible fate. Everyone you love dies in the same accident but you are safe. You don’t remember when you found out but you are haunted by your memories of their last days.
Levitation is suddenly a thing. It’s the new weightlessness. All of the world’s problems will be fixed because of it, we’re told. They’re not.
Someone is under a table at a party. You hear them contemplating whether they should leave under the table and let everyone know they were there the entire time, or if they should stay and grab someone under the table to go somewhere else.
Ever since you were a child, whenever you were lonely, accompanied by a single note played on the tin whistle, you knew your ghost friend was there.
You get to take home a mermaid you’ve seen at the aquarium. Once you’ve got her back to your apartment, she comes to life.
You start each day with a cigarette, and before you light it, you have to smoke the cigarette a day in the future.
It’s Sunday and you feel empty for some reason. You go to a drug store and realize you destroyed the planet in your sleep.
A person is hit by a car, police tag the car and give the driver a fine. However, the victim’s phone call goes through and the driver learns their fate.
Someone you dislike calls you to let you know they have important information about you, but they won’t say what it is. They want to meet you in an hour.
After an argument, you see a stranger crying. You decide to leap into action to get them help. Instead, they regroup and keep on their course.
A man named Bob loses his lottery ticket one day. For the rest of his life, every coin he finds has his face printed on it.
When you apply for a new job, they ask you to tell them about previous jobs you’ve had, and you have no memory of ever working.
You go outside in the rain to save your cat. The rain continues out of a sense of guilt from causing the weather.
Every night when you go to bed your nose bleeds, waking you up. This is fine until it starts seeping through the covers onto your pillow.
Your political party wins an insignificant amount of power. For your whole life you have wanted this to happen.
An army pacifies its citizens through empathy – ordering officers to only arrest people they would leave their partners for, and to never arrest people from CPS hospitals.
Someone writes a letter explaining everything they’re grateful for. They mail the letter and the next day it’s gone.
Years later, you receive a card congratulating you on going into remission from a disease. There’s no address or signature.
You have an apartment filled with strange and idiosyncratic collectibles. You can’t think of anything else to collect.
A 17th century princess is about to be beheaded but escapes into modern times. A detective is trying to find her with a description all based on her time period.
A person has been getting threatening phone calls. As they try to decide whether to tell anyone, the threats grow more graphic.
A young adult novel you forgot you’d already written has been published. You re-read it and see certain similarities to your current work.
Every night in your dreams, the sun descends from the sky and floats above you. All you have to do is stretch out your hand.
You’re touring a zoo. You hear a little cry from a locked cage. When you look inside, you see a human being. The things people lock up.
You rush into your home, start picking up mail from the floor, and discover a flyer from one of your neighbors looking for your runaway dog.
An obligation is lifted from your shoulders. You don’t know who took it, but they’ve been holding onto it for far too long.
A “what-if” story where you change something in your life. e.g. – what if you didn’t marry your wife.
You talk to an organic plant before work. A coworker asks why. Your coworker doesn’t remember that you talked to your plant.
Abigail married Thom knowing he was a miser. What she didn’t know was that he would meet further torment in death.
Scribble some ideas, and then let a tool like the Snowflake Method be the one to help you find a story to tell.
After going on a very exciting adventure, the narrator’s friend is afflicted with amnesia and you are sent back in time again to set it right.
Your significant other has a capacity for changing into animals. What is their favorite animal? What quality do they like best about being an animal?
You visit a scientist friend to analyze the dreams you had last night. They’re the same all the time.
After a brush with death, you wake up in a hospital room with your phone. It’s playing the last voicemail you ever received.
You’re in your car, driving down the winding roads of the freeway on ramp. In the trees, you spot a figure resembling a person.
You’re at a party, the conversation is dull. Suddenly, in the corner, you spot a guy who makes the whole room interesting. You recognize him, but he doesn’t recognize you. He was your high school boyfriend. It’s been seventeen years, but he’s just as handsome as you remember. You’re pulled to him magnetically, helpless to resist…
Someone finds a snow globe with a functioning miniature world inside–however, the world vanishes after a day.
A spider stops spinning a web and starts to reroute an entire portion of the internet infrastructure.
Using your index finger to write, you draw your name in the sand. The tide washes it away as you stand to leave.
Write about a duplicate, a replacement. What’s unique or precious about this replacement? Or, what’s mundane about it?
A list of children’s toys is given to you. They have left the order of items on the list intentionally scrambled. It’s your job to decipher them.
You wake up in your house, with no doors. You head outside, only to find that the neighborhood is also doorless.
You see a police car pull into your driveway. When you gather your belongings, you discover you don’t have any of the required documentation for your cat.
In the woods on a chilly autumn night, you discover the tip of a baby’s nose on the end of your finger.
You have the power to kill people with a touch of your hand, but only if you can do the murder in a ghost-like wispy form.
Sharon turned the key in the door to Steve’s apartment. She was more than aware of what she would find inside.
You watch your dog hours, sometimes days, walking in circles. You ask him to please just pee in the corner instead, and he snaps, biting your hand and ripping it off.
You find yourself trapped for a long time in a dark room. As you stumble around, you count the turns you take.
Your best friend dies when you’re eight. You miraculously travel back in time to the summer when your relationship started, and you get to tell them what they are to you now.
You’re shivering with a fever and call on a friend to come give you advice. When he arrives, he introduces you to one of his friends.
A demon is lurking between the benches in a library. Someone sits down next to you, and the demon sits across from you. Can you idea the demon out?
The doors to a tavern have a peculiar but sturdy look. Three men walk by, they are dressed very oddly and they pause at the front door.
You’ve built a time machine. You use it to travel to the past and save someone’s life. They thank you and give you a coin from the future. The coin is a rare and valuable one. It becomes a valuable heirloom to your family. Years later, you find out that person was your parent when they were a child.
You’re in the penthouse of a hotel when a man-sized armadillo crashes through the window, having crawled up the side of the building, destroying much of it in its path. It doesn’t look as though it’s going to be able to fit through the hole it created, but you think for sure that it’ll fit.
Someone you knew from your youth reappears in your life, telling you they came from the future to solve your personal problems.
You’re counting down from 100. If you reach one before you get to zero, you get a wish. Ninety-nine … ninety-eight …
A scientist discovers a new law of the universe, but while his peers laugh and congratulate him, he knows that they all fear the ramifications.
A single moment gives you a brief optimism you can’t let go of. You share it with someone you care about, but when you tell them about it, they look at you with pity.
You’re holding your newborn child in the nursery. Your infant has grown old, his/her hair has turned white.
Woman eats cookies. Battered, shocked and jaded, Luke Cage is no longer the unthinking brute from his youth. Unlike all heroes, he struggles in spite of his power. Transformed by an experiment, a nearby disaster scene, and time in prison working imperial on his mind, he seeks to prove he can be a hero again. A teenager is putting together a comic book pitch and needs a new identity to the public. Femme Fatales, Terror Twins, and a Pink Raider. For this, and other previews, click Kickstarter .
You open the doors and windows of a house. Anything hidden in the dark inside will escape into the night.
There’s a sinister cult-like group in your neighborhood. One of them lives in your apartment building.
You’re looking through your grandparents belongings when you find a mysterious music box. It plays an evil sounding symphony when the lid is opened.
Someone enters the person’s home or car with the intention of robbery. A conversation occurs between the intruder and the victim, as well as one adjacent to them, showing people can reconcile differences.
The witch with one green eye and one blue eye shows up uninvited at your door / a source of fear shows up at your door for coffee.
As the new boss, you name the company elevator “The Fallen,” after all the guys who have dated the new intern.
While searching for your brother, you stumble on an ancient spell. The only downside is it only works on twins.
You and your friend decide to run away together, abandoning everything you know. You tell absolute strangers you’re a prince.
It’s Sunday morning. You go to church. After, you have fun in Pancake Fest, but as you’re riding home on the train you start to see all the things you forgot to pray about that morning.
For a full year, you identify strongly as a person who loves to eat mushrooms, but one day, you are offered a mushroom kebab at a conference and you absolutely cannot bring yourself to eat it.
You feel estranged from human society. One day, you overhear a group of strangers plotting your death.
A bilingual person has a misunderstanding with a cashier because they can’t speak the language they’re writing in.
After a long graveyard shift, you notice the last person to visit your store is a lawyer. What will they try to sell you?
The house you grew up in is on fire and your first action is to grab a talisman that will bring you luck for the rest of your life. What is it?
You go on a job interview. You discover your entire identity has been faked and that the position doesn’t even exist.
A body in the road. A police chalk outline on the road. Writing on the chalk outline akin to the alphabet cut out in the shape of the outline.
A person hears a strange noise in their house. As they get used to it they realize it’s the sound of their own breathing.
A pair of teens want to run away. Everything that happens in the story is a clue about where they might go.
To break a bad habit, one performs the action it takes to break the habit on oneself. “I broke that bad habit by hitting myself in the face with a hammer. It works really well.”
You’re at a red light when it turns green and your foot presses the gas. You look down to see no one in the car, start, then realize it’s you in the driver’s seat.
It’s been said that time is a river and life is just a series of moments stacked on top of each other. While this person would agree, they also believe they get to decide how the water in that river flows.
A revolutionary new programming language allows a programmer to write a program so that if any input is erased, the program will rewrite its own code.
You constantly perform a strange ritual, and feel its effects. You suspect the ritual wants something of you.
After several weeks of exhausting training, you’re eligible for youth immortal status. You’re surprised to be considered, but when you arrive in the gates of heaven, you quickly learn something is wrong.
You’re leaving the grocery store when you see a Grimm Reapers in the parking lot and a dead person seeking transport. When it sees you it shouts, “Please take me away.”
You can never quite remember the whole dream, just fragments of it. Yesterday, you were in a house, but you were outside…
A mail carrier can see which households are the homes of children, by seeing the sugar plum fairies in the sky above them. The longer the sugar glum hangs around a house, the younger its occupants are.
A prisoner on Death Row gets the call they’ve been waiting for, but it’s not to grant their freedom.
Maga prepares her army of pink flamingos to invade the countryside. They’re snapping pics and posing for selfies as they go.
A man is about to drive home from work but before he does a strange and beautiful woman hands him a phone that makes him think.
Tomorrow was your 19th birthday. It’s your first birthday where you’re allowed to do anything you like. Nevertheless, you still cry.
A child, who is not yours, comes to live with you. It’s not at all scary at first, but over time you start to notice something strange.
A raven tries to fly backward into a tree. It fails over and over again, but always tries again. Until…
A woman checks all the locks on her doors before she goes to sleep. She wakes up with no window open.
At the bus stop, two women talk about their old lives. It’s revealed neither remembers having lived the life they described. Every day, you discover a new tattoo on your body. Each tattoo has words that cannot be read.
You hear your friends talking about a new indie band in a music store. The next week, you see an ad on Spotify for the group starring the lead singer that looks kind of like a mutual friend.
A group of people find a map that will lead them to a great buried treasure. Everyone has something holding them back from going with the group.
A person wants only to make people happy, but because of this desire they are cast out from their society.
Your phone is set to record reminders in the morning, but you might be missing something when you listen to it.
A Lottery ticket is drawn. The winner can choose to change their past. The concept of memory and regrets are discussed.
You’re making plans to play a prank on your roommate. You notice a smiley face drawn in the plastic coating on the back side of the task chair.
An ordinary thing in your house goes missing. The whole story revolves around figuring out what happened to it.
You wake up from an inverted nightmare of your life turned perfect, being woken by your inverted loved one.
It’s just another ordinary day. You aren’t paying much attention to anything. Maybe you’re working or walking home from work. You hear a loud bang. You turn around but you don’t see anything. As you walk home, you keep looking back, but you don’t see anything. You get home. Everything is normal.
A couple drink a million coffees and a million beers trying to fill the hole that their addiction left.
A new billboard appears in town, for a product or service that has only been dreamed to exist at this moment.
You’ve been given a warning about your impending death, but no explanation as to how it can be avoided.
You’re having a morning cup of coffee. It tastes off. You set it down and when you bite into your toast think it tastes unusual. You find a dead bee on the plate.
A hiker stops to take a snack break. She locates her handkerchief and unfolds it to find a severed finger.
While interviewing patients in a mental institution, a psychiatrist prescribes them with art therapy.
A team of scientists learn about a new species. Upon investigation they discover they’re not as friendly as they initially believed.
A good metaphor is the spray of the rainbow – it is available in widely variable intensities — but only within a certain angle. Every rain form gives too little water, or much too much.
You’re a perfectly average person. Your personality is no different or unique than the next person in the room, and you all have the same job to do. The only difference between you and the others is, when someone walks by you, they completely forget you’re there.
Alternate reality timelines are being discovered in all different kinds of universes, some intertwined, some bizarrely in reverse.
Every family gets two facts about their relatives wrong. Tell the story of how they found out one of those facts was wrong.
You’re at a traffic intersection. A car drives by every ten minutes. Later, you realize the driving pattern has kept you safe.
Your friend begins acting strangely nice, and it makes you wonder if they’re trying to manipulate you.
You develop a sudden craving for a certain type of food even though you’ve never eaten it before. That’s when you find out you’ve come into contact with one of the ingredients.
So you know how that saying goes if something seems too good to be true it usually is? It turns out that for about a week in October it’s true.
You are greeted by a sweet, innocent, 8th grade girl that no one has ever seen before. Some neglect her, others feel afraid of her, while others welcome her as an old friend.
A man and his wife rent out their apartment on AirBnB, only to have a guest that was more than a guest.
You inherit a grandfather clock that you take great care of. It has a piece of paper in it that says, “If you figure out what it means, please call my daughter!”
The emergency broadcast system allows you to recall the first thing you remember or the first moment you ever felt alone.
Everyone orients their bedroom based on north instead of east, so there’s always a conflict with the sun.
Your father, and his father before him, were professional magicians. This was done with sleight of hand.
An adult who has lived a good life experiences the crippling realization that all of his or her efforts were for naught.
Your mouse has gotten new batteries. It’s been squeaking and zooming around more than it usually does.
You open a drawer and discover a set of sealed envelopes. You can’t tell if they are addressed to you or not.
An old woman begins telling you about the days when she was young and her mother was a beautiful, famous, rich star.
A woman on the street approaches a family and starts telling them secrets about them, then vanishes.
For the past three months, someone has been following you around, leaving a snowflake in your pocket.
The person you betrayed comes back after death, forgiving you, and can see the other people you’ve betrayed. You begin to see them, too, and grow paranoid. A memory reaches out to you, or tries to.
Creating that one idea could attract the muse, make you temporarily psychic and unlock knowledge of the future.
A man regains his senses. He’s been living and working as a seal. He doesn’t know who he is or what he looks like.
You, and your identical twin, learn the ability to walk through walls. You convince your brother or sister to do it with you.
You keep looking over your shoulder on a dark, long road that you have travelled many times. You turn back for a moment and discover a tidal wave has smashed everything in your absence.
You begin to lose the little things which make you who you are so you try to take a break from space and time in order to find some way to return them.
Your corpse sat upright in your bed for around a hundred days. It wasn’t until then that you finally died.
On a bridge, you see a strange man who has climbed to the top of the railing. He holds your gaze before jumping to his death, and you see before hitting the ground that he wasn’t male after all.
The most important thing your great-grandfather has ever said is “I slept through the entire thing.”
Your body starts the process of putting itself back together. It starts from the left foot. When the foot is almost done, the leg beside it begins to grow.
After hours of making excuses for yourself your brain says, “Listen, sally, you’re not in control here. Get it together.”
You hear voices coming from downstairs. They claim to be television writers from the future who have purchased your house.
In the corner of your parent’s bathroom are seven pills you found being taken for hair growth by your mother. You decide to take them yourself. The putrid stench crawling up your nostrils turns to roses.
A message written on a slingshot knocks a bird out of the sky. It recovers from the impact, but its song is muted.
You’re arranging crime novel covers on a shelf everyone you attempt to interleave them, you turn the shelf into a wall.
You’re watching the news. You see yourself on the screen, delivering an award acceptance speech while on fire.
Someone buys you a model human skeleton from the internet. You notice some of the joints are movable.
Someone is chalking up all the inanimate objects they encounter. What happens when drawings of doors start working?
You’re eating lunch at your desk. Without warning, the watercooler next to you spews sand. You start to choke.
While traveling in a foreign country, you get caught stealing something. Rather than being arrested, they send you on a mission.
You’re the owner of the world’s most unique bar. You tell stories about your clientele to keep the drinks coming.
A person confronts someone else over something they did earlier in their life. They apologize and that person refuses.
You’re at the park throwing a rubber ball at one of those chain link fences with all the random objects hanging from it. You pick up a quarter and realize you used exactly that same quarter in the same spot last week.
You’re dining at a restaurant where an insect has been killed and cooked into each dish. It’s the only place you feel welcome.
You misplaced a very important key. You break into your house again and again to look for it in the places you’ve already checked.
You pack your suitcase for your next trip. Strangely, though, it remains the same every time you use it.
A hypnotist is on a cruise ship. One of the ship’s guests keeps falling overboard. The hypnotist keeps bringing him back.
You are locked alone in a hospital room, clawing at the walls and begging for help. When you fall asleep, the dream begins.
You meet a stranger. You think it’s strange that they seem like a slightly older version of someone you know.
You’re trying to break up with your significant other. When you tell them, they turn into a pile of ashes.
Someone tells you about the time when they got hurt in their youth. It involved the woods and a ghost story being told around a campfire.
You find yourself remembering the times people told you to make stuff up more often. They were right.
You arrive home after a day of work to find all of your friends waiting for you. You’re excited! You love seeing them. They all come over, crowd around you, and say that they’re sorry for being absent for some time. Then they all show you different parts of their corpses.
You’re at your mother’s house for Christmas. As a child, you always remember this one thing you wanted.
Deep in the woods of a country you’ve always loved but have never visited is a tree that reflects your soul.
When he was a boy, your grandfather buried his action figures in the backyard. He has since been having a secret, undiscovered adventure.
Your heart tells you sad stories, which you write on postcards and send to strangers. They all write back to you.
Your body and mind are switched, through science or magic. Still alive, you must learn a new life, a new way to interact with the world, all from the inside.
You find you’re living in a world in which you have all your needs met without having to work for anything.
You’re given a box with a button on it. If you press the button, something good will happen to someone you care about. If you don’t, something bad will happen to a stranger.
When you first fell in love with them, your world was turned upside down. Now in some ways it’s been turned the right way up again.
You’re watching a blank television. It flickers with static, but no source of interference enters the room.
A character inside your favorite novel you’ve never had a reason to meet is now responsible for your flickering lights.
The man at the next table over turns around and looks right at you. You look away, but then he says your name.
A man is told that he only has three minutes to live. He spends the last three minutes of his life doing the opposite of what he normally would.
You order a book online without knowing the book’s title or who the author is. When it arrives, it’s blank.
You’re sitting at the bar eating ribs. You see a couple at a table, fighting with one another. When they are done, they get up and fix their hair and makeup and return to their table and act like nothing had happened.
A person discovers the magic of literal dreaming. That is, they fall asleep in the dream and wake up to find that the world has changed as though it was the dream world.
Returning to childhood homes can be tricky for some. You’re in one such home when the doorbell rings.
You’ve been exposed to a strange radioactive gas that imbues inanimate objects with an eerily sentience.
You get in a taxi and end up going in the wrong direction. You get out at your destination anyway and decide to walk back. In the process, you realize the mistake was paranormal in origin.
Incapable of convincing anyone around him that he is actually having premonitions, Richard Ames convinces himself that it is actually possible to talk to the dead.
A young person receiving an inheritance discovers their great-grandfather was the wanted outlaw Jesse James.
An older man gets his hair dyed and wears a new outfit. He’s walking with a different sense of poise and purpose.
You sketch yourself into an imaginary situation, then realize the subject isn’t in control of the plot.
A tape recording falls out of a carpet. It has a woman on it calling someone telling him she’s being followed.
While investigating a crime, a detective examines the clues at the scene of the crime. His eyes start to fill with tears as he realizes the implications of what happened. That’s not what happened, he says. Not exactly.
A perfume called Appendix will make anyone who wears it fall in love with the next person they smell.
The local news declares that a tax inspector is missing. Two days later, they report that they found him stuck in a tree.
A computer is infected with a toxic virus and must be shut off. The programmer’s attempt to do so only collapses the computer’s system. Eventually all trace of the virus is erased, but it takes all of the user’s hopes and dreams with it.
Your heart falls out of your chest and behind you on the ground. When you turn around, a masked man is holding it in place like a camera flash.
You’ve been exploring a cave, you’ve been underground for days, alone, when you come to a large archway above which is light coming down from the opening above.
On your birthday, you find that a young woman has inexplicably moved in. She leaves every morning and night by an unseen portal, returning hours later. But how many hours has she been missing?
All of your friends refuse to Travel because they refuse to see death. Add your own prompt to the comments, or just read along!
You walk into a fast food joint and notice that it’s entirely empty, except for a person at the register wearing a parka with reindeer antlers.
You’re aboard a boat. A captain tells you that if you look over your shoulder, you’ll see a shark. You do and it’s also right behind him.
Your neighbor runs up to her apartment and frantically calls you to share some troubling information about their behavior.
You open a book a family member wrote back in their school days and find a recount of the fight a bully and you got into. Now you have to write part of their next book to try and defuse the situation.
You’re posting a video to YouTube. It’s a singing competition. But at the moment of upload, you stop. Your voice betrays your feelings in the last note, you wait. No one thinks differently.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of the city, you feel something in your pockets. When you look, you find a penny.
You suddenly lose all sense of balance and tumble from your seat. You’re trapped on the floor, grasping at your clothes for any signs of life.
Every time you have french fries, you think of that time an old fry crate buried itself in your driveway.
To mourn the loss of both of his beloved daughters, the King declares that he is raising his next daughter as a son. This makes her the heir to his throne.
A young woman receives and answers a letter from herself as a teenager describing the horrors of her adulthood.
It’s your birthday. Someone wants to give you a gift, but there’s a catch. You must experiment and decide whether or not you should accept the gift.
You find a message under a door but it’s from a decade ago. Your roommate has lived here for 9 years.
Someone visits you in the future. They’re here to talk with you about the future, where this person has returned from.
You lead two opposing armies into a series of battles to the death. One army must win each battle, or the two sides must agree on a ceasefire once both are nearly wiped out.
A bird flies into a window and loses its way. Your character, who has been watching the bird, picks it up and carries it on their shoulders, trying to remember if you had any childhood pets.
Your favorite priest has been accused of child molestation. Then you remember either you or your family have been molested.
A recurring character from your writing keeps acting differently. Your characters keep taking over your writing.
Someone asks you to be his/her best man/woman at his/her wedding. The person’s feelings for you will never be the same as their feelings for the person they’re marrying.
You give your partner a photo of yourself. When they ask for more, you tell them you’re the only one that you love.
You go to the grocery store or coffee shop every morning. At the same exact time, a sorceress enters it, wearing the same thing you wear.
Urban photographers capture portraits of impenetrable, uncooperative animals wandering streets and abandoned buildings. The next day it’s discovered new mutations in the population of those animals.
It’s raining, and you and your friend are talking about the future. You tell them it soon won’t exist. Time travelers are headed to kill your friend. What will you do?
You drop your phone on a plate of spaghetti. You pull it out as it is ringing. The screen is clean, but your phone is dripping with sauce.
Your everyday circumstances have become the driving force in people’s anxiety, but you’re blissfully unaware.
You get a job managing a hedge fund. The manager of the hedge fund you are replacing tells you that if you have any advice for staying ahead of the market, she’d love to hear it.
You visit a hologram show depicting scenes of nature. You discover the scenes are actually videos of your own life.
You’re running from the cops. Then you turn a corner. Your foot falls through the sidewalk and you fall through to the sewers.
You’re writing with a pen on your skin. You notice that you’re not writing words, you’re writing a recipe.
You feel a sudden sense of dread when you see the person sitting next to you on the bus has rings under their eyes.
Have you heard the one about a Jewish person trying to get his baptismal immersion certificate annulled?
Every night, a group of women dress up as casualties from war and disasters in order to raise empathy in bystanders.
You just watched the cutest cat videos ever. You check your watch and realize you just missed a very important meeting.
A rocket carrying colonists sets out for a planet that we may now colonize thanks to microwave ovens.
You sit with someone calmly meditating. You hear a gunshot and they flinch, but don’t fall unconscious.
You’re getting ready in the morning, getting your costume for a child’s party, putting on your makeup.
A song is playing in the background. As you listen, the volume gradually increases until your whole reality is just the song.
You’re a moon-man used to living in peace, but humans have arrived on your moon and everything’s changing.
Someone discovers the phone number to God. Over the course of days, they conduct a war of prank calls.
The first bilingual dictionary includes paintings next to each vocabulary word. Upon looking at the paintings, you realize the paintings describe the meaning of the words.
The people tell you, if you tell a lie, your mouth will turn into a spider with a star-shaped spot on its back.
A friend of yours has just bungee-jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge. You walk along the same suspended paths that he did. Instead of jumping off, you stand idly by, holding a cup of coffee. The cup never arrives at your lips. It becomes stained with droplets of water and the exhaust of ships fitted with fog-resistant, GPS-monitoring radar. You do nothing.
You are in the land of the dead. There is nothing but sand and old troll-like creatures playing on the beach.
A man robs a bank and does all of his bank-robbing business on a brightly colored rubber bathtub toy.
You see a news story about a young Olympian. Underneath it is a list of crimes she committed in order to get to the Olympics.
After spending a fun night out drinking beer, you’re on your way home. You drive off the road. When you wake up, you scream.
Pets turned sentient and took over the planet. Now they rule, they blame us for how we treated them. Now we’re pets, and we have to struggle to survive.
A couple goes on an exotic vacation. Driving through the mountains, they hit a castle-sized billboard. It topples onto their car.
There exists a Sword of Slaying Whatever the Unseen Sees Coming, soaked in liquid, but as soon as it touches a magnetically sealed jar, its blade wilts, as if it were merely made of paper.
Dreams have become so popular that they lost their luster and they’re indistinguishable from reality. You begin to rob banks in your dreams to replace the excitement that you’re missing from work.
Time travel is invented. Transparency is outlawed. Chapter 1 begins with a man unsuccessfully trying to kill a transparent person with a dart gun.
Someone in your life is getting sicker. The parts of their body are dying one by one until nothing is left.
A recently released prisoner convicts someone with an aluminum bat. Her intent? To turn the bat into a gold bat.
The shrunken head of a monkey falls out of the airplane luggage basket. It starts to yelp obscene suggestions.
Learning to swim for the first time as a teenager. You try to rescue someone from drowning. You realize you have forgotten how to swim.
You hit three years and one day using a product. The product begins to malfunction, so you decide to replace it. The new product works fine, but the one you replace is fixed as well.
An explorer goes on a far journey, searching for a legendary treasure. He finds a half-buried urn containing his heart.
A thief is stopped. They give up any chance of escape to save the flower they’d torn out of the ground.
You’re swimming in the ocean and you realize you’re unable to let go of the wet sand, but touching the ocean.
You’re in the backseat of a car nodding off. You suddenly see the driver you’re riding with wasn’t your friend after all.
You’ve become disoriented and ended up elsewhere. Around you are unfamiliar people whom you don’t know, doing familiar things.
You’ve been chipper since you got that prescription of Wellbutrin. But the effect is erratic, and you’re not sure it’s all because of the meds.
After a car accident, you’re revived by electricity sent through your body. It light fixes everything else about your life.
You spot a man across the train car. Your heart pounds. You realize it’s the person you love, but they don’t recognize you.
There is an awful wailing noise. Coming home, you see you are the only other resident on your floor of the apartment building.
You are told that you’re going to die in a brief moment of panic. You come to a stunning realization about death.
You read somewhere a list of three steps someone has to take to win at something. You say the first step out loud to test them. It works.
A factory produces beautiful, decorative doll bodies. Once you start looking, you realize you might own one.
You start hearing whispers all around you. It goes on for days, weeks. You might hear them even now. Do you stop?
A person buys a small house from another person. After they leave, they realize that on their first night in the house, they forgot something very important there.
You’re listening to the voice of a motivational speaker. You start to suspect that someone at the back of the audience is imitating her.
You’re standing on a ferry, looking into the sky. Everyone around you is silent but there’s a distant scream, getting closer.
You fall for someone who has turned into a completely different person from the one you fell in love with.
You’re riding the bus when the word scenery comes to mind. You look out the window and try to process its meaning.
You’re on a rowing boat when a jellyfish takes in a big breath, inflates itself, and climbs aboard. What do you do?
Your friend wants to erase your account on facebook, since she’s feeling ignored by you on it. But you learn that you’ll lose access to your memories.
In third grade, you received a key on a chain as a gift from your parents. You remember it fondly, but the people closest to you have no recollection of it whatsoever.
A neighborhood haunted by disappearances decides someone is organizing a night of Halloween mischief. They get together to solve the mystery.
Police arrest a man for public nuisance after it’s discovered that he blows up balloons and releases them into the air.
You finish your breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and milk. You turn on the TV and see the news anchor cracking eggs on a frying pan and stirring a milliliter of milk into his cup of coffee.
You pick up the phone. There’s a stranger on the line. He says, you have one hour to live, starting… now.
When your child was young, you were able to produce a sensation of joy simply by holding your hand, close to their body, oddly. Now that your child is grown, you can still do so.
Screaming, stumbling, writhing in pain and fear, you drop to your knees. But instead of wet, hot roads, there’s sunburn, stiff, abrasive cloth, and hot leather.
You claim you’re going shopping. Instead, you buy a lottery ticket. While checking the numbers, you realize you stepped into someone else as you came in.
Your mom is micro-managing your house for the holidays while you’re away. What helpful advice do you leave for her? What happens when you get back?
You’re an actor on TV, supposed to run out the door after being scared by an explosion. You don’t, and people you work with talk about you.
You’re bringing a relish tray with you to a dinner party. As you reach the top of the stairs, you realize it’s a dinner party with corpses—all preserved, all glaring at you.
Every afternoon, the family cat would always catch the same lizard in the backyard. Until one day, the lizard was gone.
You’re living in a world where the zombie apocalypse happened, and now everyone is less afraid of zombies, more afraid of being lonely, and obsessed with equipping their zombie survival kits with weapons, food, and companionship. This leads to shops, which you exit, where you find yourself faced with your own “zombie survival kit.”
A man stumbles upon a buried metal capsule in the ground. He opens it and goes inside, and meets the creator of the universe.
You’re a famous artist whose long dead. Your work is being destroyed and vandalized by the people of your hometown.
A grandma warns her adult grandchildren, all around the same age, that she is going to tell them a story and that she is going to ask them a question.
A girl goes out with a guy from a podcast. When she comes home, he’s still there, sitting on the edge of her bed.
The first person you see in a given day doesn’t remember you, even though you remember them perfectly.
The police have finally arrested the culprit responsible for the string of church vandalisms. But it’s not the person you expect.
While walking, you see your childhood self slip and fall. When you take a photo of him, he smiles and waves.
Every day you relive a tragedy as it is happening again. You realize you can imprint something on the event that would alter the way it plays out. You can save a person, experience an event that never happened, get revenge on someone. Exactly how it would happen remains a mystery.
A voltiger hides in a bunker. Not just a voltiger, but a super voltiger. At least that’s what he told people. There was something almost tangible about him, as if he let pieces of his power ooze out, drip out, leak out, so to speak.
A curse placed upon a woman causes her to become less and less feminine. The woman will do anything to get her femininity back.
You’re in a car with someone who is making small talk when they suddenly break the fourth wall to address you directly. Act surprised.

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