“A packer faces three obstacles. There’s contingency: a variety of possible futures must somehow be tamed. There’s consumerism: the junk you own needs to be winnowed into a useful curation. And there’s comfort: we want to be cushioned against transit’s sharp points,” writes Joshua Rothman in his essay “Why Can’t You Pack a Bag?” which was published in the New Yorker in 2024. Consider how packing a bag for travel can reveal various aspects of your personality and mindset. Do you tend to be a maximalist or minimalist packer? How do you navigate the constraints of available space against being prepared with clothing and accoutrements necessary for the weather and terrain you will be traversing, and the occasions and activities you expect to experience? In an essay, reflect on times in the past when you were met with packing failures, as well as packing successes.
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:
Rosemary’s Baby, the renowned 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin which was adapted into a film directed by Roman Polanski, takes place in New York City as a young married couple, Rosemary and Guy, move into an apartment building and their relationship to an elderly couple living in the building evolves in horrific ways in parallel to Rosemary’s pregnancy. All the action and suspense takes place in Manhattan, a departure from the settings of rural and small-town environments often used in horror stories, taking advantage of people’s fears of silence, darkness, and potentially foreboding nature. Write a horror story that takes place in a big city. How might the stresses of a busy, densely populated locale, with streets overly crowded with unknown faces and irritatingly intrusive neighbors, create a sense of alienation?
Reflecting on her poem “Bluebeard,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Safiya Sinclair writes, “I was always fascinated with the myth of Bluebeard; the way a man can construct a false image while keeping a hideous secret from the one he claims to love. And how a woman might be so diminished by his falsehood that she begs for her own destruction.” Select a myth, fable, or fairy tale, and focus on its darker aspects, seeking out any evocative themes of duplicity, betrayal, vengeance, or destruction. Reflect on the layers of complexity that the darkness brings to the narrative and see if you can connect it to your own life experiences. Compose a poem that brings the mythological story into a more contemporaneous reality, incorporating especially resonant archetypal characters and dynamics, and allowing yourself to delve into a variety of sounds, textures, and imagery.
When Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature, was asked in a Penn Review interview about her 2015 poem “Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage),” in which the word shade is used forty-four times, she responded that the repetitive gesture was not so much an intentional act of decreation as it was “probably more mechanical, a matter of turning the head and seeing different things with the same head.” Compose a short lyric essay that encapsulates a resonant feeling of this past year and takes a cue from Carson with the repetition of a single word throughout the piece to see different things in, or ways into, your main themes. How can you open interpretation to have meanings ranging from the literal, to the metaphorical, to the oblique or nonsensical? How does the repetition accumulate to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of your state of mind?
In the 2024 documentary Mistress Dispeller, director Elizabeth Lo uncovers a family drama involving a woman in China who enlists the help of a professional mistress dispeller to end her husband’s affair. The profession, which has become common in the last decade in urban centers in China, generally entails coaching, infiltration, and persuasion, the emphasis being on winning the trust of all parties. Lo’s film depicts each person in the love triangle—the wronged wife, the cheating husband, the other woman—as multifaceted, vulnerable, and sympathetic, unfurling a specific but also universal story intermixed with scenes relaying the realities of alienation and connection in contemporary society. Write a short story that imagines a scenario in which a mistress dispeller has been hired to disrupt an ongoing affair. What insights and expertise about relationships does the dispeller bring to the interactions with the characters involved?
Día de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead, a traditional holiday in Mexico with roots in Indigenous cultures that celebrates departed friends and family, is typically observed on the first two days of November. People gather around altars with decorative skulls, marigolds, and foods and drinks, sometimes also writing “calavera literaria,” a form of a light-hearted, satirical epitaph addressing someone who is still alive as if they were dead, which can be used as a way of critiquing a cultural or political figure. Write a series of short literary calaveras, just a handful of lines each, incorporating a simple rhyme scheme to imbue a sense of singsongy playfulness. Even if there are elements of mortality or sorrow in the mix, allow yourself to be silly with sound, diction, and imagery to bring in comic relief about the inevitability of death.
“I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother and her inconsolable nostalgia.” In the first pages of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Murmurs From the Hills: Rwandan Tales, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books in November, the author recounts a genre-defying collection of stories reminiscent of an oral history. Blending mythology and memoir, the stories recount the horrors of the Rwandan civil war and genocide along with other memories lived and passed down by family members. In this hybrid form of storytelling, Mukasonga creates a retelling of history—and therefore a retelling of the present and the future—with contributions from a complex range of voices with layered knowledge. Write a lyric essay that braids some of your early memories with stories passed down from your ancestors. Allow yourself the freedom to invent your own mythologies.
A coffee grinder, the soul of a man who drowned to death, a board game, a house, angels, God, mushrooms, and trees are all characters in Olga Tokarczuk’s third novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Polish in 1996 and forthcoming in a new edition, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, in December from Riverhead Books. The narrative chronicles the universe of a fictional village called Primeval through short vignettes of different characters, both human and nonhuman, over the course of three generations during the twentieth century. In “The Time of Misia’s Grinder,” Tokarczuk writes: “Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people.” Write a collection of vignettes about diverse characters that collaboratively reveal a microcosm of points of view in a specific time and place. What objects will give voice to the philosophical and existential questions you wish to explore?
In Matt Longabucco’s collection The Hummingbird, published by Nightboat Books in October, the poet’s attention flits from subject to subject with sharp observations of mundane goings-on, attending to contemporary life in all its forms. In one section of the title poem, Longabucco moves swiftly from the natural environment to the objects of workday technology: “big ant / scales my power cord / achieves the plug / prepares to mount the keyboard / I give it a decisive flick / we’re both surprised when an instant later / it’s flat against the windowpane / six feet away, intact and unharmed….” Compose a poem that revels in the unbroken interconnectedness of energies and emotions that are revealed when you pay close attention to the vividness of your immediate surroundings. How might the world around you generate a sense of openness and abundance when you find ways to intertwine a multitude of its everyday offerings?
In the anthologies What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2019) and What My Father and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2025), editor Michele Filgate collected over a dozen essays by authors writing about their struggles in communicating with parental figures. Write your own essay about something you have always felt like you could never talk about with your mother, father, or other guardian. What were the barriers to honesty, and what do you imagine could or would have helped you break your silence? Was it more about what you didn’t want to say or what you perhaps didn’t want to hear back in response? You might bring in your personal reflections about honesty and vulnerability in other relationships to shed insight on your parent-child dynamic.
“I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa,” said Ray Bradbury in a 1970s interview published in the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series in 2010 about the ways in which science fiction seems to look into the future, but is in reality a reflection of what has already happened. Write a science fiction story that explores an urgent contemporary issue through the “reflection” of an imagined future. Consider Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which examines the very real issues of book burning and censorship through a firefighter in futuristic dystopia. Think carefully about how you twist a serious subject by placing it in an extreme, far-off premise.
In Sophie Klahr’s second poetry collection, Two Open Doors in a Field (The Backwaters Press, 2023), the sequence “Like Nebraska” consists of each poem beginning with a simile. Examples include: “She listens like a horse…,” “He speaks like a slow evening…,” “She rustles like a stream…,” and “He drinks like the faithful….” This week, taking inspiration from this repeated format, compose your own short series of poems that revolves around the relationship between two people, alternating beginnings in the same way. What are the main themes in this relationship you wish to explore? You might consider gesturing to a palpable arc, or ebb and flow, of the duo’s inner thoughts as the sequence progresses and shifting the imagery and tone throughout to illuminate a narrative.
In a 1988 issue of the Yale Review, an essay titled “Making Contact: Encounters With Readers” by Annie Dillard, who passed away earlier this month, consists of a series of short segments recalling the letters, notes, and items she had received from readers who felt compelled to write to her. Dillard recounts readers who sent her missives about their lives, short stories they had written, existential questions, religious objects, medical journal articles, a marriage proposal, pamphlets about God, dead insects, and numerous bits of ephemera. Taking inspiration from this form, think about memorable things that you have received in the mail or in person over the years. Compose a chronicle of people who have given you these letters or objects, and write short reflections that explore both the content and the context of these interactions. How might the collection reveal something about the role you play in others’ existences?
As part of the marketing campaign for the recent sci-fi thriller film The Last House, in which a family must figure out how to survive after being sealed inside their home due to a mysterious menace taking over the outside world, Netflix constructed a tiny living space inside an advertising billboard thirty feet above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles where an actor was “trapped” inside for several days. The stunt attracted passersby who interacted with the actor and visited him daily. Write a short story that revolves around the deployment of a publicity stunt connected to a storyline for a new film, book, or amusement park ride. You might decide to take the point of view of a confused onlooker or the performer within the stunt. Allow yourself to play around with layers of artifice and performance, and mix the real with the surreal.
“The swallows screech at dawn / Birds which day from night divide // We are quick shuttles / Weaving the blurred thread of mystery // Dusk is our element / Brushing the edge of a moment,” writes Blaže Koneski in his poem “Swallows,” translated from the Macedonian by Kristian Josifoski and published in the May 2026 issue of Poetry magazine. Swallows have long been known for their close relationship to humans—the way they build their nests on the sides of buildings and bridges, their anticipated annual migrations as harbingers of spring and autumn, and as a symbol of resilience for sailors through long journeys and homecomings. Write a poem that draws upon the physical traits and behavior of swallows, or another common bird, weaving in symbolism and connections to your own relationship to the natural progression and patterns of passing time.
What books do you turn to when you need a bit of consolation? Comfort reads are books that readers return to again and again; knowledge of the trajectory of the story providing a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling and relief from stress or melancholy. Whether you’re feeling downtrodden because of a dreary time of year, a recent crisis, an illness, or general distress, a comfort read—even if just reading a few pages or excerpts—is liable to restore cheer from its well-worn familiarity. Write a personal essay about some of your favorite comfort reads, whether novels, poetry collections, memoirs, graphic novels, or even children’s picture books. Recount your earliest reading of the book and other times when you have turned to it again. Even if you have found different things to value in subsequent readings, what are the reliable elements that continue to provide an uplifting feeling?
In Sam Raimi’s latest horror film Send Help, a woman who is constantly underappreciated and passed over for a promotion by her lousy boss finds herself suddenly trapped on a deserted island with him. In this new environment, the tables have turned. Injured in the catastrophic plane crash that landed them on this island, he is now dependent on her canny survival skills, a dependence she finds herself more than eager to exploit. Write a short story in which, due to an unexpected event, a role reversal occurs between two main characters. What were the original power dynamics between the characters? Are there benefits and disadvantages for both characters when the tables are turned? In Raimi’s film, the characters occupy a gray area as sympathetic characters—see if you can play with drawing out moral or emotional ambiguities with the characters in your own story.
A $4.99 Costco rotisserie chicken, a plastic lawn flamingo, personal injury lawyer advertisements, a sad desk salad, a red Solo cup, a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign, a gas station bathroom key, and Botox are among the list of twenty-five objects in Emily Keegin’s recent New York Times piece “Welcome to My Museum of America,” a hypothetical museum showcasing Americanness. What are the relics you feel exemplify what it means to be an American living in contemporary society? This week write a poem exploring several objects that you would put in such a museum. Pick your objects carefully, reflecting on how each one might encapsulate something significant or insightful about the nation’s history, priorities, values, and habits. Select a diverse range of objects so that you can experiment with humor and fluctuations in tone.
“To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return,” says Jhumpa Lahiri in her 2021 Sebald Lecture “In Praise of Echo.” In the lecture, Lahiri invites readers to think of translation in broad terms, as not simply restating something in another language, but as a “miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.” Spend time with this idea of translation as transformation and write a personal essay about an experience in which you metamorphosed an experience, an emotion, or yourself into a different “language.” This language might be a visual art form, music, a different genre of literature, or another form of expression.
In a 1981 interview published in the Paris Review, Gabriel García Márquez tells Peter Stone how his grandmother inspired the narrative voice in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family and presents its fantastical elements with utter naturalness. Márquez wanted to write the novel’s magical narratives “with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.” Write a short story that incorporates mystical or supernatural elements while maintaining a tone based in reality, in which these elements are considered commonplace. What themes and truths about your characters are easier to express in this imagined world? As you write, consider what Márquez says about storytelling: “A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe it.”
In an interview published in Poetry Northwest, C. E. Janecek speaks with Asa Drake, author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026), about language and its imprecision, and when it’s best to leave things unsaid. “In customer service one avoids negation because it often points to a conflict,” says Drake. “For example I might say ‘walk please’ instead of ‘no running’ and replace a rule with a directive. I’m really interested in why the command is less offensive than the rule.” Write a poem in which the speaker gives instructions to prohibit an act or behavior. Begin each stanza with an imperative verb and try avoiding negative words such as “don’t,” “no,” “never,” or “not.” How can you portray what is forbidden to a reader without explicitly naming the rules?
Music often has the ability to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia, whether it’s favorite songs played over and over during a certain phase of life or heard on the radio for a season. Songs can be introduced or recommended by loved ones, and lyrics might remind us of a particular person. Music could have even been sung along to during childhood road trips with family or become the perfect soundtrack for a specific town or city you’ve visited or lived in. Jot down a list of several songs that bring you back to a certain someone, someplace, or sometime. Write a personal essay composed of a series of vignettes about each song and the sense of nostalgia and associated memories that arise when you listen to the music. As you write, you might want to listen to the songs and incorporate lyrics into your essay.
This week compose a short story arising out of a two-part exercise that illuminates a new side of the old “show, don’t tell” strategy. First, imagine that your main character has just experienced a significant change in their life, maybe something unexpected or even shocking: a sudden relationship breakup, news about a family member’s health getting worse, winning the lottery, or running into a long-lost love. Then write a short story that takes place the day after this revelation as they go about their day—whether looking out a window on a bus commute, walking in the neighborhood, or preparing a meal—but refrain from mentioning anything about what happened the day before. Instead, focus on how your character’s observations and feelings about their immediate surroundings might be colored by their current state of mind.
If familects are the unique words and phrases that are created within a family from inside jokes, shared experiences, and specific needs, then we can think of friendlects as the parallel for private languages created between close friends. These specific, social dialects bond a family and friend unit. What happens when the two languages meet? Write a poem that incorporates a word or phrase that is only used within your family and one that was created with a friend. In your poem, you might find yourself exploring themes of intimacy and the powers and shortcomings of language as a mode of expression and communication. You could also consider how communal bonds are built, ideas around belonging and unbelonging, and being an insider or an outsider. How do you bond with others through language?
In Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy film The Christophers, a young Black artist takes on an assignment to forge a series of paintings by an elderly, white, formerly renowned painter, whose earlier works are worth millions. The older painter’s grown children hope that the eventual sales of these forged earlier works will provide them with an influx of wealth as the painter has not produced noteworthy pieces in decades and has since been “canceled.” Initially an antagonistic relationship between an older artist and his supposedly hired-out-of-nowhere assistant, the two eventually warm toward each other and develop a bond through their exchanges about the value and legacy of art. Write a personal essay about an instance when you forged an unusual bond with an unlikely stranger or acquaintance, despite significant differences in age, identity, and temperament. What conversations and ideas brought you two together?