Mystery Story Ideas: 5 Prompts for Writing a Mystery

Coming up with new ideas for a story is a common struggle in fiction writing. That’s where writing prompts come in. These story starters are short texts designed to ignite novel and short story ideas for any genre, from mystery plot ideas to romance story ideas. Prompts can help a writer develop a main character, find a setting where a story will take place, or come up with the central problem a character will need to solve. Here are three ways writers can find fiction writing prompts:

1. 1. Literary magazines: Literary magazines often have a selection of writing prompts to help authors launch new story ideas.
2. 2. Writing courses: An instructor’s assignments in a writing course can become interesting writing prompts that eventually turn into a novel.
3. 3. Writing contests: Writing contests will sometimes start writers off with a prompt that every contestant must use as their jumping-off point.
4. 4. Creative writing exercises: Unleash your mind and just start freewriting. In other words, do a stream-of-consciousness writing exercise focused on the genre that you’re working in. See what comes out and find a prompt from your pages. Find our creative writing exercises to strengthen your writing here.
   

The process of writing mysteries starts with a great idea that develops into a full-blown, dramatic plot full of twists, turns, and a big reveal at the end. Here are six mystery writing prompts to help get you started:

1. 1. Sherlock Holmes joins the LAPD. Sherlock Holmes is alive and well, living in twenty-first century Los Angeles. The master detective finds himself on the beat and solving crimes with the LAPD. He’s an enigma to his colleagues who can’t figure out his mysterious, crime-solving ways. Things have changed in the past 150 years, but not Holmes’s sleuthing strategies for solving a crime.
2. 2. A corpse turns up in an idyllic small town. Happy Camp is a small town where everyone knows everyone else. But when a dead body is found in the middle of the street, no one knows the identity of the deceased. Who are they and where did they come from? The townspeople start investigating, but at the center of this mystery plot is a local police chief who has never solved more than a missing person case.
3. 3. An armchair sleuth and a real detective join forces. It’s December 31st in New York City. Hundreds of thousands of people are gathered to ring in the new year—so who would notice when one person goes missing? A man sitting at home watching the festivities on TV sees something suspicious—a reveler is there one second, then gone the next, snatched by an arm that comes in and out of the camera shot. He teams up with a detective who’s lost her crime-solving mojo to get to the bottom of the mystery.
4. 4. A teenager links the disappearance of his peers to alien abductions. Mystery novel meets sci-fi in this young adult story. A 14-year-old freshman with an interest in UFOs and all things alien discovers a portal underneath his high school. Could this be the answer to the mystery of the students who have gone missing over the years? The only way to find out is to go in there himself.
5. 5. Something strange is afoot in a remote mountain cabin. In this cozy mystery—a lighter mystery subgenre with an amateur sleuth at the helm of the story—a woman takes a solo trip to her family’s lakeside cabin, the house next door is suddenly occupied after being vacant for decades. But the family members are an unusual bunch and something fishy’s going on. When the main character does a little snooping, what she sees will send her on an epic quest to solve the crime she’s witnessed. The police and the FBI don’t believe her, so she’s on her own.

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