Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem (New Directions, 2020) explores a relationship between two men: naive eighteen-year-old Colin and his decade-older lover Ray. Told from the point of view of Colin, whose self-deprecating remarks diminish his image and idolize his partner, readers are brought into his view of the world. In one scene, Colin refers to his partner’s sweat as “an elixir” and his own as “no more than a waste product.” Mars-Jones uses Colin’s unique voice to develop his character as well as mimic his role in his relationship with Ray, setting up his emotional arc. Inspired by this narrative technique, write a story in which your narrator has an extreme view of themselves, whether narcissistic or self-deprecating. What effect does this have on how your story develops?
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 Charif Shanahan’s poem “Colonialism,” which appears in his second collection, Trace Evidence, out this week from Tin House Books, the poet captures a tense and tender moment of childhood rebellion in which the young speaker runs across a bustling four-lane street in Casablanca as his mother rushes after him, spanks him, and says: “Why / Would you do that to me?” Another poem from the book depicts a child in a department store fleeing and hiding from his mother as she searches and calls out for him. The poet’s rebellious, authoritative voice electrifies scenes from childhood while exploring themes of mixed-race identity, queerness, and belonging. Can you recall a childhood memory that, in hindsight, is tied to your identity? Write a poem that captures this scene in which you see a latent part of yourself on display. Try to draw a line, as Shanahan does, connecting your past self to your present self.
For the last sixty years, the Chicago River has been dyed green in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. The tradition was begun by the city’s plumbers in an effort to identify leaks in pipes but stuck and even inspired other cities. Unique traditions enrich a city’s identity and there is no shortage of odd and entertaining ones. In Chandler, Arizona, there is an ostrich-themed carnival; in Boise, Idaho, onlookers gather to watch a giant potato descend at the countdown to the new year; and for Mardi Gras in New Orleans, local bakeries make king cakes with tiny plastic babies hidden inside. Write an essay about a tradition that is uniquely celebrated in your hometown. Describe in detail the origin and longevity of this beloved custom.
In the period of late antiquity, the ides of March was typically the day when citizens in Rome celebrated New Year’s festivals, such as the feast of Anna Perenna, honoring the goddess of long life and renewal, and Mamuralia, a ceremony in which an old man wearing animal skins was beaten with sticks and exiled from the city, symbolizing the shedding of the old year. Many may now associate the day with the ominous phrase from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar: “Beware the ides of March.” Taking inspiration from these myths and rituals, write a story in which a powerful figure is celebrated and then meets their demise. How will you flesh out this character’s personality while setting up the rise and fall of their reign?
“Fish / fowl / flood / Water lily mud / My life // in the leaves and on water,” writes Lorine Niedecker in “Paean to Place,” a long lyric poem that meditates on the region of southern Wisconsin where she was born and lived most of her life. Written in short sections, the poem goes in and out of memories and pastoral descriptions of marshlike landscapes, altogether serving as a testament to the impact a place can have on one’s poetic sensibilities. This week write a pastoral ode to the landscape you grew up in. Whether an urban sprawl or a rural town, try to use the poem’s form and idiosyncratic language to paint a portrait of your experience in this formative place.
“I have always understood myself to be a person who does not go to writers conferences,” writes former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan in her essay “I Go to AWP,” published in Poetry magazine in 2005. Ryan recounts the many stages of anxiety, wonder, exhaustion, and satisfaction she felt attending the Association of Writers and Writers Programs’ annual conference in Vancouver that year. Organized like journal entries, each section of the essay is a rare and personal glimpse into this storied weekend of writerly activities. Inspired by Ryan’s experience, write an essay about how you have felt, or might feel, attending a popular event surrounded by your peers. Take the reader moment by moment through the anticipation and excitement.
In the film Tár, written and directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett, a world-renowned orchestra conductor is caught in a scandal surrounding a series of sexual abuse allegations. The Oscar-nominated film uses persuasive world-building and parallels to news stories surrounding cancel culture, the #MeToo movement, and the culture of artistic fame—including an integral scene with a cameo by New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik—to create a realistic portrayal of a complicated character. This week, write a fictional story that attempts to convince the reader that the events actually happened in real life. For further inspiration from uncanny depictions of reality in fiction, read Miranda July’s short story “Roy Spivey.”
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Ovid wrote a series of letters in elegiac couplets during his exile from Rome called the Tristia. The poems capture Ovid’s final days in Rome, as well as his journey overseas to Tomis on the Romanian coast of the Black Sea, and are addressed to various figures including his wife, loyal and disloyal friends, and he even composes his epitaph. “I who lie here, sweet Ovid, poet of tender passions, / fell victim to my own sharp wit,” writes Ovid, translated by Peter Green in The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters (University of California Press, 2005). Inspired by this epic elegy, write a poem from the perspective of someone in exile. What does your speaker long for, and how does exile force them to voice unspoken concerns?
During the pandemic, a popular pastime has been rewatching favorite shows, from recent offerings to classics. According to an article published in Reader’s Digest, this trend can be traced to the concept of status quo bias: the idea of maintaining one’s current or previous decision. Psychologists also note that we tend to stick with what’s familiar to ease anxiety and avoid disappointment and stress. This week write an essay about rewatching your favorite shows. Do you encounter something new each time or find comfort in reliving the same emotions?
In a short essay for Literary Hub’s “Craft of Writing” newsletter, novelist Rebecca Makkai argues that setting is the most underutilized tool in fiction. Makkai explains that a setting should “give the reader enough ambience and context that they can extrapolate a world” as well as take an active part in offering characters something to react to and “trap characters together, destabilize them, provoke change, or provide refuge, urgency, or danger.” Keeping this definition in mind, draft a short story by starting with a clear and time-specific setting. Try to delineate the time period, the physical location, and the relationship this setting has to your protagonist so it can make an impact on your story.
In “When I See Stars in the Night Sky,” Joy Priest writes an ode to the late iconic singer Whitney Houston, tethering her memory to the stars in the sky. “It’s 1988 Her head / Thrown back against a black backdrop She is the only thing / glowing So distant from us in the universe,” writes Priest. The poem then moves into the personal connection the speaker has with the singer. “I love myself / because of her,” writes Priest. Inspired by this poem, write an ode to your favorite musician placing them, as Priest does, in a specific moment in time.
In 2011, Oakland-based artist Alexis Arnold began making art from the discarded books and magazines she continually came across on the street. Arnold transformed the scrapped volumes into sculptures by growing crystals on them. Some of the books she has crystallized include Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, as well as encyclopedias and dictionaries. The results evoke, as Arnold describes it, “geologic specimens imbued with the history of time, use, and memory.” Inspired by the rapidly changing landscape of print media, write an essay that reflects on your first memories with books and print magazines. Do they remain precious to you? For more on Arnold’s art, read “The Written Image: Crystallized Books” in the March/April 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the latest installment of our Ten Questions series, Colin Winnette discusses the inspiration behind his surreal dystopian novel Users (Soft Skull, 2023), which follows a troubled technology designer mired in a controversy surrounding a virtual-reality program he creates. When looking for ways to shape the book, Winnette was struck by a series of tweets by entrepreneur, and cofounder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey about his ten-day silent meditation retreat in Myanmar. “There was something so striking to me about the then-leading personality behind one of the noisiest places to exist online making such a dogged pursuit of silence,” says Winnette. This week write a story set in a silent retreat in which tensions start to rise. How will you sustain the story’s conflict despite there being little to no dialogue?
“I don’t call it sleep anymore. / I’ll risk losing something new instead,” writes Natalie Diaz in her poem “From the Desire Field,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). The poem speaks from the mind of someone unable to fall asleep who attempts to find a sense of relief through their insomnia. “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden,” she writes. Emotions then begin to move away from the tension of not being able to sleep into sensuality and passion. This week write a poem that revolves around what it feels like to experience insomnia. What do you do when you can’t fall asleep?
“Drenched by a summer downpour or softened by spring rain, I have felt an aspect of freedom,” writes Ama Codjoe in her essay “An Aspect of Freedom,” included in the anthology A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing From Soil to Stars (Milkweed Editions, 2023) edited by Erin Sharkey. In the essay Codjoe explores her relationship with rain through the lens of freedom, using personal anecdotes, historical events, and photographs taken during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. “In the rain, or in the ocean, or in a flood of people singing freedom songs and calling the names of our unjustly killed, I feel a part of nature, a part of nature’s self, which may be anything that gives nourishment and everything that breathes,” writes Codjoe. In expectation of the upcoming fertile season, write an essay that explores your relationship with spring rain. As you write, take inspiration from Codjoe’s essay and consider the question: When do you feel most free?
In “When the Novel Swiped Right,” Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist for the New York Times Book Review, tracks the effect dating apps have had on contemporary literature. In the essay, Wilson points to writers who have creatively used dating apps as a narrative device, such as Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, and Sarah Thankam Matthews, and encourages more writers to take advantage of how the apps “make possible encounters among characters who might not otherwise come into contact by virtue of differences in age, race, or class.” This week, write a story that involves two unlikely people meeting on a dating app. What do they discover as they get to know each other?
Oftentimes it’s the underrated things in life that make the perfect inspiration for a poem. In “For the Poet Who Told Me Rats Aren’t Noble Enough Creatures for a Poem,” Elizabeth Acevedo rises to the title’s challenge by honoring the “inelegant, simple,” and tenacious animal that is often hunted down. In “St. Roach,” Muriel Rukeyser writes to the humble cockroach and captures the moment in which the speaker reaches out and touches one. This week write a poem inspired by an animal that might be considered vermin and reflect on why you might fear or avoid this creature.
Valentine’s Day is commonly known as a day to express affection for loved ones with greetings and gifts, but its origin remains a bit of a mystery. Some suggest that the holiday dates back to Lupercalia, a Roman festival to ward off evil spirits and infertility that was later banned in the fifth century, while others have said that the true origin of the day is related to a priest named Valentine who was martyred circa 270 CE by emperor Claudius II. According to one legend, the priest signed a letter “from your Valentine” to his jailer’s daughter. Other accounts tell the story of St. Valentine of Terni, a bishop who secretly married couples to spare husbands from war. What is your personal history with Valentine’s Day? Using these origin stories as inspiration, write an essay that explores your memories of this holiday of love.
Depths of Wikipedia is a popular series of social media accounts dedicated to posting obscure facts published on the free online open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia. Posts include Jimmy the Raven, a raven actor who appeared in hundreds of films including The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life; Mr. Ouch, a hazard symbol developed by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association with children’s safety in mind; and the dinkus, a typographic symbol consisting of a line of asterisks often used as section breaks in a text. This week write a story that incorporates one of these curious Wikipedia facts into your plot.
If you had the chance to send a poem into space, what would you say? Last week, the Library of Congress announced a collaboration with NASA to send a poem written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón into space. The poem will be dedicated to NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and engraved on the spacecraft which will travel 1.8 billion miles to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa to gather detailed measurements and determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life. In honor of this momentous occasion, write a poem dedicated to a celestial body of your choice. Explore the galactic neighborhood with NASA’s interactive map of our solar system.
Every year on February 2, thousands of spectators visit Punxsutawney, a small town in Pennsylvania, to watch whether a groundhog sees his shadow or not. The first Groundhog Day celebration at Gobbler’s Knob was held in 1887 and the tradition predicts how long the winter season will last. Similar superstitious traditions connected with animals include the ancient Greek art of ornithomancy, the practice of reading omens from the actions of birds, and the Woollybear Festival in Ohio, in which fuzzy woolly bear caterpillars predict the winter forecast. Do you participate in any superstitious traditions? Write an essay that reflects on your relationship to any rituals or superstitions you believe in.
“On stage, bodies in motion paired with words deliver both language and emotion. I have that same hope for the novel I’m struggling to write,” writes Kathryn Ma in a recent installment of our Writers Recommend series about the impact watching live theater has on her writing. “Dialogue travels, reaching me in the dark. I’m not taking down notes, but my ear is. If I’m open and lucky, the magic might follow me home.” This week write a story in which your character is moved by watching a live theatrical performance. What is the play about? How does the performance taking place on stage mirror the struggles your character is enduring?
In Rachel Mannheimer’s debut book, Earth Room (Changes Press, 2022), the book-length narrative takes the reader to places such as Los Angeles, Berlin, the Hudson Valley, and Mars. Some of the settings are used in a straightforward and narrative way, but others act as a sort of emotional backdrop against which intimate relationships and observations on sculpture, performance art, and land art can be examined. Inspired by Mannheimer’s original use of place, write a poem titled after a city. Try to challenge yourself by exploring the emotional and psychological undertones you associate with that place.
According to the Chinese zodiac, 2023 is the year of the rabbit, which symbolizes longevity, peace, and prosperity. The zodiac is a repeating cycle of twelve years, and each year is represented by a different animal with symbolic traits. Next year will be the year of the dragon, which represents strength and independence; followed by the year of the snake, which represents curiosity and wisdom. Write an essay that reflects on the animal associated with your birth year and how it relates to your personality. Can you find any similarities? As an added challenge, consider the animals associated with your family members and whether these signs hold true to their qualities.
Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Sam Esmail’s forthcoming film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, HBO’s miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—novels with apocalyptic themes are appearing on screen more and more. Whether through satire or stark realism, this suspenseful setting allows writers to explore profound themes of survival, friendship, trust, hope, and resiliency. Inspired by apocalypse novels, write a short story that imagines the end of a modern civilization. Will you lean more toward satire, realism, or another form of expression entirely?