If practice makes perfect, what do we do with the imperfections of being out of practice? This week write a short story that revolves around a character who finds themselves unexpectedly back in the mode of performing a skill they once did well, but have now grown rusty after years of unuse. It might be a creative practice—playing an instrument, dancing, photography, writing, or painting—or perhaps it’s a job-related task—writing a report, managing a team, or speaking in front of a large audience. Consider anything learned that one might fall out of practice with, such as a language, camping, or even dating. How does your character adjust to revisiting an old skill? Does everything come flooding back or is there a steep learning curve?
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
Get immediate access to more than 2,000 writing prompts with the tool below:
In her 1955 book The Edge of the Sea, marine biologist Rachel Carson explores the ecology of the Atlantic seashore. “When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself,” she writes, “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” Write a short story that uses a shoreline as its setting. Consider the ways in which this meeting place of earth and water is a place where one might encounter change, conflict, and compromise. What sorts of sights specific to this merging of earth and water are observed, and how can you connect them to the major and minor conflicts in your narrative? Does your story conclude with the implication of further “eternal change,” or do you lead your characters to a seeming point of resolution?
A career criminal, a florist owner, an aquarium tour guide, and a prison drama teacher. The characters in the 2022 French comedic heist movie The Innocent hold an array of colorful jobs, which provide intriguing imagery and set pieces, and assist in placing the characters in specific circumstances with rippling effects. This week write a short story that makes use of multiple unconventional jobs, as you define them. Choose a few that seem wildly different from what you know and are evocative to you personally. How do the tasks of these odd jobs circumscribe your characters’ actions and ways of problem-solving? Incorporate elements of comedy and action into your narrative to create a funny, fast-paced story.
“Sometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions. Had it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?” Patricia Lockwood’s second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, forthcoming in September from Riverhead Books, chronicles a young woman’s hallucinatory descent as she navigates a loss of self during a global pandemic. Think back to the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic and consider the ways in which the rapidly changing world reconfigured your idea of self and your mindset as you dealt with social distancing and lockdown, sickness and death. Write a short story encapsulating a character’s loss of self during a period of social upheaval that catalyzes a gradual distancing from known reality. Whether your character sees this as a chance to start over or a moment to stand their ground, what do these actions reveal about their personality?
In Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Atria Books, 2017), Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo is hailed for her beauty, glamour, and sensational public life, and after announcing to auction her famous gowns to raise money for a breast cancer charity in honor of her late daughter, she grants a last interview to unknown journalist Monique Grant. During their conversations, Evelyn reveals the sides of herself often kept from the public—her relationship with her dutiful daughter, her heartbreaks, and her one true love—and the two connect in an unexpected way. Craft a scene in which the protagonist of your story hides behind a persona. When the facade falters, what is shown to be concealed?
Last month, new research published in the Review of English Studies presented findings from a pair of scholars that solved a centuries-old mystery in Geoffrey Chaucer’s writings. A typo was discovered in a transcription of a twelfth-century sermon referencing a long-lost, and once popular, poem “The Tale of Wade” in which the word “wolves” was mistakenly written as “elves” and “sea snakes” written as “sprites.” In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, he referenced the poem and this same bumbled transcription appeared through the centuries, perplexing scholars as to why Chaucer would include mythical creatures in his stories of courtship with knights and ladies. Write a short story in which a typographical mistake results in a cascade of consequences for those who interpret the language in unexpected ways. Is the mistake eventually rectified or does the story conclude without anyone knowing?
The Last Showgirl is a 2024 drama film directed by Gia Coppola starring Pamela Anderson as a veteran Vegas dancer in her fifties who finds herself becoming obsolete as the revue she has headlined for three decades prepares to close. As Shelly considers other job prospects and a lifetime invested in and shaped by outmoded notions of femininity, eroticism, and glamour, she is faced with confronting the people in her life: the stage manager who remains at the venue producing a new show, her estranged daughter, and an old friend who works as a cocktail waitress and has alcohol and gambling addictions. Write a short story in which your main character is confronted with the harsh realities of social expectations as they age, particularly those around gender, beauty, and worth. What are their personal values around these concepts and how do they navigate the resulting tensions?
Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, centers on the complex relationships between four college friends: Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. JB, a painter, begins a new series of portraits based on his friends, working from memory. When he paints Jude, his enigmatic friend with whom he’s grown distant, he claims it’s a tribute. However, the portrait depicts Jude mid-stumble, highlighting the distinctive walk caused by his lifelong injuries and trauma, and the image is widely seen as exploitative by their friends. This moment marks a betrayal and demonstrates how attempting to capture another person’s essence, even someone you love, can sometimes be dangerous. Write a story about a narrator trying to understand someone they were once close with, perhaps a sibling, friend, or lover. What image do they want to believe? What truths remain unseen?
Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?
In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.
Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt, grow, and evolve throughout our lives by forming new neural connections. But what about actual plastics in the brain? While past studies have presented findings that our bodies are increasingly becoming filled with microplastics, more recent research has shown that a significant amount of these plastics are accumulating in the brain—possibly an average of an entire spoon’s worth. This week write a short story that postulates on the effects of this biological issue. The premise may lend itself naturally to a dystopian, apocalyptic story of sci-fi horror, but are there other elements and genres that you can experiment with, such as satire, romance, or mystery?
Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a film about a matchmaker at a high-end agency in New York City and her own trials of love. She interviews and maneuvers her clients who have very specific demands for their potential dating partners, testing the mechanics of worth and value, and seeing people through the lens of market capitalism. Characters are bluntly forthcoming about age preferences and job salaries, an honesty that may seem surprising when considered against old-fashioned social norms which deem it vulgar to talk about money. Write a story in which one of your characters is uncommonly direct about financial matters—whether about having a lot or a little, or how much they spend, earn, and save. How does bringing money into the picture illuminate issues of class between your characters?
“It was all so different than he expected. / For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated. / For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad; / now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop. / He’d never considered marriage … / Still, a force through the green fuse did drive.” So begins Henri Cole’s poem “At Sixty-Five,” which appears in The Other Love, forthcoming in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a collection in which Cole reflects on the shifting observations of a person as they age and gain new perspective on the passing of time and the accumulation of memories. Write a short story from the point of view of someone older than you, which begins with the sentence “It was all so different than I expected.” Is your inclination to plot out key milestones in your character’s life before you begin writing or to simply see where the character’s meditations take you?
Double-booking can be a hilarious premise for comedy, as in the wedding rom-com films Bride Wars and You’re Cordially Invited in which two weddings are booked for the same venue on the same day, or a terrifying setup for horror, as in the 2022 film Barbarian in which a woman arrives at a rental home already occupied by a mysterious guest. This week write a short story that revolves around a reservation error that results in characters being unexpectedly forced into sharing a space. Do the opposing parties know each other or are they complete strangers? You might consider playing with narrative perspective and incorporating portions from opposing characters’ points of view or experimenting with a fragmentary structure to evoke suspense and disorientation. Is your story a comedy or horror of errors?
Can a typo inspire a story? In the opening paragraph of Anelise Chen’s memoir, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025), the narrator recalls a text message from her mother wherein the phrase “calm down” has been transformed, whether through a typo or autocorrect, into “clam down.” This cryptic mistake becomes the premise for a story of metamorphosis and connections, withdrawal and closing up, and family history, as Chen weaves in mollusk science and explores a long-ago period of her father’s retreat from the family. Spend some time observing words and language you see in your daily life from text messages, signage, advertisements, and labels. Select a phrase that has the potential to be interpreted in an open way and leads you into writing a new story, perhaps one that incorporates science, the natural world, and elements of the fantastic.
In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.
“This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” described in his obituary in the New York Times as “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” When considering the ending of something enormously consequential, the expectation might be that the external drama of that conclusion match one’s internal turmoil, however the sorrow of Eliot’s sentiment comes through in the idea of ending not with something explosive and abrupt, but with something much smaller, anticlimactic, and quiet. Write a short story that revolves around an ending of some sort—whether it be the world, a war, or a relationship—and include some portion of these last four lines of Eliot’s poem.
“Nothing happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.” In Devs, a 2020 science fiction television miniseries written and directed by Alex Garland, the viewer is presented with heady questions around determinism and free will as more and more is revealed about a quantum simulation project at a cutting-edge tech company that appears to have the ability to simulate the world at any and all places and times, past and future. Write a short story in which you examine these ideas through characters with opposing opinions about the freedom to change the course of one’s life. You might choose to delve into science fiction or fantasy, or develop your story around a romance or a comedy of errors. What events in the past lead each character to their respective ways of thinking?
Earlier this month, the National Endowment for the Arts notified hundreds of independent publishers, theaters, museums, residencies, and nonprofit arts organizations about the termination of their funding, affecting countless writers, visual artists, dancers, performers, actors, and directors. How can artists continue to create when their support is suddenly taken away? Write a short story about an artist who finds themselves without the support they need—whether financial, emotional, or otherwise. Where does your character turn and how do they keep going? Will your story take on elements of fantasy, horror, tragedy, satire, or dark comedy?
Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey, a new documentary directed by Pippa Ehrlich, who won an Oscar for My Octopus Teacher, chronicles the rescue of a pangolin from wildlife traffickers in South Africa. In one sense, the film is about the progression of a baby pangolin named Kulu who learns skills such as foraging, gains a healthy amount of weight, and heals from his trauma before being set free in the wild. But another rescue enters the story as Gareth Thomas, a middle-aged man with a troubled past, volunteers for a nonprofit pangolin center and finds meaning in his life after spending over a year rehabilitating and eventually letting go of Kulu. Write a short story in which your main character is on a rescue mission and ends up being healed or redeemed in an unexpected way. What are the obstacles along the way that provide moments of comedy, suspense, or pathos?
In his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2019, guest editor Anthony Doerr lists several dos and don’ts one often hears about writing short stories and describes his love for reading and writing stories that break those very rules. Some of the rules Doerr mentions are: “Don’t start with a character waking up. Jump right into the action. Exposition is boring. Backstory slows you down. Stick with a single protagonist. Make sure he or she is likable. Don’t break up chronology.” This week, think carefully about the reasoning behind one of these oft-cited rules, then write a story that explicitly goes against it. How can the incorporation of an aspect of experimentation or innovation effectively push against the possibly clichéd rationale behind the original rule?
In the opening pages of We, the Casertas—a Gothic novel by the Argentine author Aurora Venturini first published in 1992 and translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude in a new edition forthcoming in May from Soft Skull Press—the main character declares with a youthful, fearsome confidence her damaged relationship with a cruel, rage-filled mother who misunderstands and mistreats her. With the use of this limited first-person point of view, Venturini sets up a complex, intensely subjective protagonist who is suffering yet defiant. “My mother knew that she could never tame me,” she writes. Write a scene in which a young person expresses their thoughts about a parental figure. How would things appear differently if written from the point of view of a young person, a parent, a complete stranger, or an elderly person looking back on a distant memory? Write one or multiple scenes to complete a short story.
In Laura Wolf Benziker’s short story “The Green World,” published in Evergreen Review, a mother on an outing with her child at a water park has to abandon her glasses to go down a slide and experiences an unsettling transformation through her blurry, uncorrected vision. “She…stood up with a small flutter of panic,” writes Wolf Benziker. “Now she would need to trust, like a baby before it has learned how to see.” Write a short story in which your main character temporarily experiences a shift in sensory perception, such as a loss of taste or smell from illness, or muffled hearing from swimmer’s ear or air travel. What is revealed about your character in how they respond to this difficulty?
A mysterious lunch meeting at a restaurant in the financial district between a middle-aged actress and a handsome, much younger man opens the story of Katie Kitamura’s novel Audition (Riverhead Books, 2025). The reader is momentarily left in the dark as the unnamed first-person narrator recounts this lunchtime assignation and it’s not until the third chapter of the book that the details and reasons for their initial meeting come to light. Start a new short story in which two characters meet and the nature of their connection is kept ambiguous. Are they friends, lovers, family, colleagues, or something else? How can you use shifting points of view and dialogue to maintain an atmosphere of suspense and inscrutability?
“The difficulty of living through long minutes is a central concern of Cléo From 5 to 7, a film set in real time and real space, which follows an aspiring young pop star as she endures time—the real running time of the film—waiting for the results of a biopsy,” writes Laura McLean-Ferris about Agnès Varda’s 1962 film in an essay published in frieze magazine. “Subjective time periodically bloating and stretching in confusion and loneliness, while objective time ticks on.” Unlike with a film or play, the reader of a story sets the timing of their engagement with the work by their reading pace, on their starts and stops. But the writer, too, has many tools to bloat and stretch time within the confines of a story. Write a short story that moves slowly and in “long minutes” to allow certain moments to stretch or contract according to your main character’s state of mind.