Creative Writing Prompts for Sci-Fi & Fantasy Lovers

Fantastical creative writing prompts.

In the world of creative writing, we’ve only begun tapping the possibilities in speculative fiction, a genre that includes science fiction, fantasy, supernatural and superhero stories, or anything that ventures beyond known reality.

Speculative fiction is an under-recognized genre: Academia and literary elitists traditionally haven’t given it much credence, although it has been gaining acclaim in recent years.

But the genre fans are rabid. In fact, you won’t find a more dedicated group of readers anywhere else.

Plus, it’s a lot of fun to step outside of reality and see just what your imagination can do.

You can write about knights and dragons, spaceships and far-off planets, the apocalypse, ghosts, or strange islands with magical properties. In the world of speculative fiction, anything goes.

The creative writing prompts below can be used in any way you want. Use your imagination. Have fun with a freewrite, compose a poem, or draft a short story. Who knows? Maybe one of these prompts will inspire a novel idea. And if you’ve never given science fiction or fantasy a shot, this is your chance to test the waters and find out just how deep they are.

15 Creative Writing Prompts

The Speculative Fiction Edition*

1. A plane is flying from Australia to Los Angeles. As the passengers disembark, they start to experience amnesia — all of the passengers except for one. The farther they go from the plane on which they flew, the more severe their amnesia.
2. Four friends on a nature hike discover a deep cave, complete with running water. As they go deeper and deeper into the cave, they find strange objects — human skeletons, an old computer from the early 80s, a gas mask, and strange mango-sized orbs that emit a glowing blue light.
3. The earth has been ravaged by war, famine, disease, and devastating storms. In less than a decade, the population has dwindled from six billion to less than 42,000. There is no law or order. The grid is gone. Everyone is struggling to survive.
4. The year is 1623. A visitor comes to a small, tribal village in Nigeria. The visitor is wearing blue jeans, a Janis Joplin t-shirt, and a baseball cap and is carrying a pack that contains a solar-powered laptop computer.
5. Two children, a boy and a girl, decide to make a time capsule and bury it at the edge of a farm, under a big oak tree. While digging, they unearth a metallic object the size of a shoebox. It’s shaped like a bullet and has the number 8 engraved on it. It appears to be a container, since it rattles when they shake it. But there is no obvious way to open it.
6. A man who sees ghosts checks himself into a mental institute, not realizing that the facility has been closed for almost thirty years.
7. After a near-death experience, a soldier starts to experience a drastic kind of karma — every good deed he does is almost immediately rewarded and every bad deed results in something horrible happening to him. Is the karma real or just a series of coincidences?
8. A surgeon who happens to be an adamant man of science and does not believe in miracles is diagnosed with aggressive, terminal cancer and given six months to live. But three years later, he’s alive and the cancer is gone.
9. A con man who convinces people they’ve been abducted by aliens and takes their money… is abducted by aliens.
10. A deadly virus hits a highly populated metropolitan area, killing thousands of people. And after it passes, those who survived start realizing they have acquired bizarre and impossible new talents.
11. A traveler picks up a souvenir, a strange and colorful rock with one side that is completely flat. As she goes about her travels, she realizes that when she has the rock with her, she can understand any language that people are speaking, but she can only speak her own native language.
12. While on vacation in Hawaii, a young couple spots a strange, huge green bird with a 16-foot wingspan. One of them is terrified as the bird swoops down and lands just a few yards away from them, but the other one is intrigued. When the bird takes off again, the one who was intrigued insists on following it. So they do.
13. A sixteen-year-old who is growing up on a farm is out in a storm, gets hit by lightning, and survives. After that, the kid can hear the thoughts of animals.
14. A young girl starts having recurring dreams about a dragon. In one of the dreams, the dragon says, “You made me.” The girl becomes obsessed with dragons and decides her life purpose is to become a genetic biologist so she can, indeed, make a real dragon.
15. A team of researchers in a submarine are caught in a deadly sea storm. The instruments on board go haywire. They submerge deep into the ocean in search of calm waters until the storm passes. When it does, the sub surfaces but the instruments are still not functioning properly. They can’t get a fix on their location and cannot find land, which should be nearby. Then, the researchers realize their are two moons in the sky and the constellations are completely unfamiliar.

Remember, these creative writing prompts are meant to be inspiring. If one of them gives you an idea, run with it. You don’t have to stick with what the prompt says. Change the characters, the situation, the setting. Just go with the flow, and keep on writing. And if you have any creative writing prompts of your own, feel free to share them in the comments.

*All of these creative writing prompts were inspired by the television show, LOST.

Emotionally Charged Creative Writing Prompts

Creative writing prompts that you can really feel.

In fiction and poetry, one of the greatest skills that a writer can possess is the ability to make the reader feel. If you can engage readers on an emotional level, you’ll have them hooked.

Think about it. Most of the books, poems, movies, and TV shows that you love best are the ones with which you forged an emotional connection. You felt like the characters were your friends, so you felt for them. You felt with them.

Sounds easy, but emotionally effective writing can be a complex and difficult endeavor. Today’s creative writing prompts include a few simple guidelines and a list of prompts that you can use to launch a writing session that will produce emotionally compelling creative writing.

Rules of the Road

To engage a reader, we have to create scenes that are so vivid they seem real, even if they are not. Through scenes, imagery, and dialogue, writers can actively engage readers with what’s happening on the page. Here are a few tips for engaging readers:

Show, Don’t Tell

The best writing shows readers what’s going on instead of telling them. If a character is sad, you don’t write, Kate was sad. You write, Kate lowered her eyes and swallowed hard, choking back a sob and blinking away the tears that were welling up in her eyes.

Use Imagery

Using imagery goes hand in hand with showing rather than telling. Instead of writing something like Jack’s heart was broken, use a compelling image to show the reader that Jack has a broken heart: Jack stood in the street with his hands clenched at his sides, and he watched her walk away. She didn’t care anymore. Maybe she never had. His entire body shook and tears streamed down his face. She had betrayed him and now he was all alone. It was over.

Try Dialogue

Feelings can be revealed through dialogue, and dialogue can also incorporate imagery. When you use imagery and dialogue together to show (rather than tell) the reader what is happening and to reveal the emotional aspect of the situation, the reader visualizes the action and becomes a part of it, often experiencing the characters’ emotions right along with them:

“Jack, stop talking. I’m not going with you,” Elizabeth said.

“What do you mean you’re not going with me? We’re supposed to go together.”

“We’re not together, Jack. We were, but not anymore.”

Jack couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re leaving me?” he asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “You and me — we’d never work anyway.” She started to turn and paused briefly. Jack thought she had changed her mind. He saw her hand flicker and for an instant, he knew she was about to reach for him, but then she pulled her hand back, turned on her heels, and walked off.

“That’s it? You’re just going to walk away?” he screamed. She didn’t stop, didn’t even flinch. Jack hung his head. “You’re just going to walk away,” he whispered.

It’s a lot easier to tell readers what’s happening. Kate’s sad. Jack has a broken heart because Elizabeth left him. But when you show readers what’s happening through imagery and dialogue, they can enter the scene and become part of it. This makes reading an experience and it helps readers connect on an emotional level.

Creative Writing Prompts

Apply the guidelines above to show readers the feeling in a piece of writing. The creative writing prompts below will help you kick-start your sentence, paragraph, poem, or short story. These prompts allow you to focus on effectively generating emotion instead of trying to come up with characters, plots, and other basic writing ideas.

The creative writing prompts tell you, the writer, what is going on in a scene or situation. It’s your job to craft words that show the reader what’s happening.

• While on vacation and shopping in a department store, a middle-aged man comes face to face with the guy who kidnapped his son ten years earlier.
• A woman has three sons, all of whom are soldiers in a military that is at war. Within the span of three days, she learns that two of her sons were killed in combat. Six weeks later, there’s a knock at the door. When she opens it, she finds her third son standing there.
• A family of five is driving across the desert on their way to vacation in California. They get lost, then the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. The cell phone is dead and the sun is setting. The kids are hot, tired, and hungry. Mom is scared and frazzled. Dad, a mid-level sales manager with no survival skills, is frustrated and angry. An animal howls in the distance.
• The only thing that Daniel ever wanted was to be a musician. He loved playing piano more than anything in the world. But after his mom and brother died in a car accident, Daniel’s dad insisted he become active in sports and drop the music. And being active wasn’t enough. He had to be captain of the team or suffer through endless jibes and insults that his father uttered through a beer-induced haze. Then, on his eighteenth birthday, a delivery man brings him a piano, and tells the boy that it’s from his father.
• Rose and Bernie met in high school and married as soon as they graduated. Life wasn’t easy. They had five kids and money was tight. Rose worked as a domestic servant and Bernie had a job with a waste management company. Every day was a financial hardship, but they loved each other. Three years after their youngest child leaves home, Rose and Bernie win the lottery — and they win big.
• A little girl has a sister with a rare and terminal illness, one that eventually takes her sister’s life. The girl vows to become a doctor and cure this rare disease. At the age of 42, she successfully cures a patient with the disease.
• A ten-year-old boy comes home from school and heads out to the backyard to play with his beloved dog, but he finds the dog lying dead underneath a big, shady tree.

As you can see, each of the situations presented in the creative writing prompts above has characters in an emotionally volatile situation. But the prompts are flat. They tell you what’s happening but there’s no essence — no imagery and no dialogue. Craft one (or more) of these creative writing prompts into a scene, a poem, or a short story. Be sure to use images, action, and dialogue to demonstrate what is happening emotionally. Avoid words that describe feelings (sad, angry, excited, remorseful, etc.).

Update: Novel Publicity has an insightful post titled “Bring Your Fiction to Life with Emotion,” which is packed with excellent examples and guidelines for writing emotionally compelling scenes.

When you’re done, be sure to edit and polish your piece to make it as sharp and compelling as possible. Then, come back here and either share what you learned from these creative writing prompts or go ahead and post an excerpt from what you wrote using these creative writing prompts. Good luck, and keep writing!

Creative Writing Prompts for Crafting Compelling Imagery

Creative writing prompts for stunning written imagery

In writing, imagery is the key that can unlock a reader’s imagination. When an image is rendered with the right combination of words, it magically appears in the reader’s mind like a photograph or film clip.

Here’s an example:

A woman wearing a black dress is lying on the floor in a disheveled room.

Now look at the image on the left. Note the details that are missing from the sentence above — the tilting couch and mirror, the shiny hardwood floor, and the brightly colored plastic flower in the foreground. These details were left out of the example sentence to create a white space, which the readers can fill in for themselves.

One reader might imagine clothing scattered across a carpet, a broken lamp, and a woman who has been injured lying on the floor, waiting for help. Another reader might picture the aftermath of a party — dirty dishes, empty bottles, and a woman passed out from drinking too much wine. One reader will imagine a wild and beautiful young woman, another will picture an older, more refined woman.

The perfect balance of description and white space provides just enough detail to make the image manifest, but not so much that the reader’s own imagination fails to be engaged. As a writer, it’s your job to know how much detail you need to include in your writing in order to bring out the most important elements of any image.

Creative Writing Prompts

Today’s creative writing prompts deal with creating imagery in writing. Each prompt consists of an item, which functions as the inspiration for a larger image. You’ll need to paint in the final strokes so the image and its emotional implications become clear.

As you work through these creative writing prompts, try asking questions about the item you’ve chosen from the list. Where is it? Who put it there? Why? When you determine the background of the item you’ve chosen, the image will slowly come into focus. Then, all you have to do is use your words to paint the picture.

You can use these writing prompts to create an essay, short story, or a quick freewrite. You can write a few paragraphs or a few pages. Let the prompt provide the image, and then let a story about that image unfold. Use your words to follow wherever the image takes you. Does it evolve into a scene from a film? A poem? Ride it to its conclusion.

• A pair of baby shoes
• A torn photograph
• A broken bottle
• A guitar pick
• A rusty hand saw
• A “no smoking” sign
• A pair of fishnet stockings
• An oxygen tank
• A partially deflated basketball
• A fishing rod

Once you’re done, come back and tell us how these creative writing prompts worked for you. And keep writing.

15 Tasty Creative Writing Prompts

Creative writing prompts that are good enough to eat.

We all want our writing to be compelling, even mesmerizing. One effective way to captivate readers is to engage their senses.

When you trigger a reader’s sense of sight, smell, sound, touch, or taste, you illicit a physiological response to your writing, and the reader will connect with it on a deeper, sensory level.

Food is a great way to stimulate readers’ senses because food has the rare ability to affect any or all of the senses. We see food, smell it, touch it, and taste it. We even hear it. Just think about french fries sizzling in a greasy skillet. Mmm.

Writing about food or incorporating food into our writing is an ideal way to engage readers’ senses. That’s why today’s creative writing prompts focus on food, drink, and delectable treats.

Taste These Creative Writing Prompts

Each of the creative writing prompts below presents a specific sensory stimuli, telling you which sense is being engaged (sight, smell, sound, touch, or taste) and which food or drink is involved. Your job is to choose a prompt and build a scene around it, write a poem about it, or compose a short essay that includes it. You can write anything you want, but the goal is to get the prompt in there.

You don’t have to use the writing prompt verbatim in your piece of writing. Feel free to reword the prompt in any way you see fit. You’ll see that some prompts include a lot of detail while others just provide basic information. The details are available with some prompts to give you ideas. They are absent from others to challenge you. Choose accordingly.

Bonus Challenge: Each prompt engages one sense. Try to expand that to include other senses as well. Earlier, I mentioned the sound of french fries sizzling in a skillet. How do they look, taste, and smell? If you touch them, how do they feel? (Hot, I bet!).

1. Sight – a banana split: three scoops of ice cream with split banana on either side and a big mound of whipped cream on top laced with chocolate sauce and sprinkled with chopped nuts. All topped off with a plump, red cherry.
2. Smell – pizza: cheesy, doughy, saucy, spicy pizza baking in the oven.
3. Sound – fizz: cola being poured into a glass full of ice cubes.
4. Touch – greasy fingers: digging your fingers through a box of hot, buttered and salted popcorn in a dark movie theater.
5. Taste -  medicine: cherry-flavored cough syrup.
6. Sight – feast: the spread of a holiday feast (think Thanksgiving). Are your eyes bigger than your stomach?
7. Smell – coffee: waking up to the smell of hot, freshly brewing coffee.
8. Sound – crunch: the sound in your head when you munch on crispy chips or crackers.
9. Touch – dough: the squish of kneading dough between your fingers, the smooth texture of it when you pat it and roll it out.
10. Taste – hot/spicy: you dip your chip into a bowl of salsa and when you take a bite, your mouth goes up in red-hot, spicy flames.
11. Sight – fruit: it’s a hot day. You open the fridge and there’s a big bowl of chilled, fresh, summer fruit – colorful, juicy, and sweet.
12. Smell – fast food: you’re driving through town with your windows down and pass that intersection where you can smell all the fast food restaurants.
13. Sound – whistle: you’re not feeling so hot, so you put the teapot on. Soon, it starts to scream…
14. Touch – water/apple/teeth: it’s Halloween and you’re bobbing for apples. You stick your face in the cool water, chomp around searching for purchase and feel the apples bobbing against your face, floating away from you. Then, you get a ripe little apple lodged firmly between your teeth.
15. Taste – sweets: after a light but satisfying meal, you order your dessert. It’s rich, sweet, and freshly baked. You bite into it and your taste buds explode with delight.

Did you find these creative writing prompts helpful or challenging? Share your thoughts or leave an excerpt from the piece you wrote by leaving a comment. And keep writing!