Realistic Fiction Story Ideas: 4 Writing Prompts

Realistic fiction is a literary genre that places fictional characters in real-world settings. Unlike fantasy or science fiction, which include other-worldly elements, realistic fiction features naturalistic elements. Novels and short stories often fall under the category of realistic fiction. Realistic fiction writers evoke familiar settings, such as coffee shops, middle schools, and small towns. This form of narrative writing also features human characters, like family members, best friends, and teachers, to create a narrative that may feel relatable to the reader’s own life.

If you are writing realist fiction for the first time, try out some of these fiction writing prompts:

1. 1. Create a historical work. Realism can be in the past. You can use your parents’, grandparents’, and ancestors’ lives as a jumping-off point to tell a dynamic story fleshing out their romances, professional lives, and generational struggles.
2. 2. Dramatize your personal narrative. Dramatize a chapter from your personal life, changing names and places to fictionalize it and creating a clear arc and plot structure that gives the readers a clear trajectory of the protagonist’s journey.
3. 3. Imagine the life of an exciting subject. Spend time in a park, museum, or other public space observing passersby and keep an eye out for details that may create a main character backstory. Articles of clothing, interactions with strangers, and even a person’s posture can put you on the path toward inventing a person’s life and story.
4. 4. Peruse the phone book. Authors sometimes turn to the phone book to find amusing names for their characters. Flip through one yourself, find a name that inspires you, and imagine that person’s world, dreams, and conflicts.

Many great stories fall under the realistic fiction umbrella. Here are a few examples, some of which have become reading staples of high school English classes:

1. 1. Jane Eyre (1847): Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre features one of literature’s most famous heroines. Jane Eyre leads an independent life as a governess while trying to make sense of the mysterious Mr. Rochester, who develops feelings for her.
2. 2. Great Expectations (1861): Charles Dickens’s sweeping novel shows the success and misfortunes of young Pip, an orphan who comes of age in London and meets colorful characters who steer his destiny.
3. 3. Of Mice and Men (1937): John Steinbeck’s famous book depicts two ranch hands, Lennie and George, as they migrate from farm to farm to find work, happiness, and love amidst the Great Depression.
4. 4. A Raisin in the Sun (1959): Plays can also fit into the realistic fiction genre; Lorraine Hansberry’s masterpiece deals with racism, housing discrimination, and upward mobility in an oppressive country.
5. 5. Revolutionary Road (1961): Richard Yates’s stark novel paints a bleak picture of 1950s suburbia, showing the limitations a culture of work and family place on a couple longing to be free.

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