Creative Writing Prompts for Sci-Fi & Fantasy Lovers

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 8 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.