5 Writing Prompts to Jumpstart Your Short Story Ideas

In creative writing, a prompt is a short text that gives an author a starting point for a story. From a one-line description to a short passage that sets a scene or describes characters, a prompt is meant to inspire a writer with the basic theme or topic for a story.

A short story is generally between 1,000 and 5,000 words long, but that can seem daunting when you’re struggling to get the first sentence out. Prompts are fiction writing story starters that can help a writer arrive at the basic premise of a new story and open the creative floodgates. Here are five writing prompts to inspire short story ideas:

1. 1. Expand on your own story. Comb through your own life experience and think of the first time you felt you fell in love. Did that person end up being your soulmate? Now, your best friend is throwing a dinner party, and she invited that old love interest. You’re not sure how you feel about seeing him again after all these years, especially after the last time you saw each other. What’s going to happen? It doesn’t have to be a love story.
2. 2. Explore a fantastical genre like sci-fi. Your main character is a young boy, about ten years old. He’s watching his five-year-old brother while his mother runs to the store. Outside the window, the sky goes black. Then the power goes out. A strange object lights up the sky, growing brighter as it gets closer.
3. 3. Write a character inspired by someone you know. What if a loved one that you haven’t seen in years suddenly shows up unannounced in the middle of the night. How does the story unfold? Why are they there?
4. 4. Place your characters in a dire situation. Six days in the car together has started to rip open old wounds for a family of five. They arrive at the Grand Canyon ready to get some space from each other. The sky is blue and the weather looks perfect for a hike. As they descend into the Canyon, one family member makes a fateful decision, and the wrong turn. As the temperature drops, the family races against the lowering sun to retrace their steps but will this fractured family be able to work together to survive?
5. 5. Concoct a contained thriller. As Edgar Allen Poe has proven, the short story is the perfect medium for a quick thriller. When two old friends from high school reconnect for the first time in a decade, they renew their vow of silence to conceal a crime they committed as kids. But when one of them has a change of heart and decides to come clean, the other turns to desperate measures to keep them quiet.

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