Listen to these writing prompts via text-to-speech for the visually impaired.
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Each week, The Coil posts new writing prompts, photo prompts, and keywords to help you bust through your writers’ block.
Happy Monday! It’s time for another round of prompts to get your creative juices flowing. Come back every week for new writing prompts and ideas to help you get out of writers’ block funk and stay active with your pen or keyboard with no pressure. Practice makes perfect! Here are some ideas. Just dabble, and see where it goes. (If you’re someone who thrives on the pressure, then, hey, twist these prompts into something for our monthly 100-Word Stories contest or DaguerreoTyped historical photo prompt challenge!) You can read past weekly writing prompts here for even more ideas.
Writing Prompts
Every New Year’s Eve, at exactly midnight, a heavy iron door appears in the back of your closet. Where does it lead you?
You wake up to find that everyone’s shadow has detached and begun walking north. You follow your own shadow into a dense, fog-heavy forest, where you find that thousands of shadows are building a city out of “yesterdays.”
For New Year’s, you make a resolution to “see yourself more clearly” this year. The next morning, your reflection in the mirror doesn’t mimic you; it stays in bed while you brush your teeth. By the third day, the reflection begins packing a suitcase.
Your New Year’s party has ended, but one guest remains on your sofa, wearing a mask made of dried moths. They claim to be the personification of the “Upcoming Year.”
You inherit an old lighthouse on a cliffside where the New Year arrives an hour earlier than the rest of the world. Inside, you find a mechanism that doesn’t track time, but “possibility.”
Photo Prompts
ALT TEXT Image Description: A dark tunnel, perhaps leading down to a subway system or an underpass beneath a busy road. The tunnel contains stairs going up to the street, but all you can see of the street is a bright white sliver of sky. There are muted yellow lights along the stairs and inside the tunnel that make a sepia glow over the whole scene.ALT TEXT Image Description: A small, simple log cabin made of vertical brown logs sitting all alone among a snowy mountainscape. The cabin is high on a ridge, but the viewpoint is close to the cabin, so we can see it close-up. Snow covers the cabin’s gabled roof. In the background, there is the slope of a mountain with tall pine trees surrounding the far side of the cabin. The sky is winter gray.ALT TEXT Image Description: A blurry woman is behind a sheet of glass, perhaps a door or a window, that is frosted so that you can’t see through it clearly. The woman has her hands up on the glass in front of her, so one hand is in clear focus against the glass. The woman’s hair is cut short around her chin and appears to be a dark brown, though her whole body and face are blurry. She appears to be wearing a blue button-up with three-quarter sleeves.
Keyword Prompts
eldritch
limerence
palingenesis
quiddity
crotchet
tenebrous
petrichor
quay
Instructional Prompts
Write a scene where a character enters a room, but describe the setting using only two senses: smell and sound. Do not describe a single visual element or physical texture.
Write a conversation between two people who are talking about something mundane (like a broken toaster or the weather), but have them actually be arguing about a deep-seated betrayal. The betrayal must never be mentioned by name.
Write a journal entry from the perspective of a child in the 1800s who has found something “magical” in the woods. Describe the object using only the limited knowledge and language a child of that era would have.
Describe a busy dinner party from the perspective of the family dog sitting under the table.
Write a poem that begins with a character receiving a package he didn’t order.
For the visually impaired or those using TTS reading aids: this is the end of the prompts.
Each month, The Coil presents an ekphrastic contest for writers and lovers of history. Here is this month’s historical photo prompt. Winner receives $25.
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