5,000 Writing Prompts

by Bryn Donovan

  The Air Force uses invisibility technology for the first time, but the pilot realizes her mission is morally reprehensible.

  People are nostalgic for snow, so they create artificial snowstorms.

  In a world where pain and suffering have been eliminated, people pay to experience a variety of negative sensations under safe and controlled circumstances.

  A secret society of scientists labors to make medical discoveries and to save the planet, even though a religious fundamentalist government has outlawed their activities.

  Medical researchers are attempting to bring people back to life after they’ve been dead for thirty minutes or even an hour and give them a full recovery. Their experimentation is unethical and/or leads to strange alterations to people’s brains.

  Someone is shrunk to a tiny size to perform a life-saving or planet-saving procedure impossible for a machine or an average-sized human.

  His loved one died, but is alive in a parallel universe, and he is somehow getting messages or clues about her life there.

  An international videogaming competition is more popular than the Olympics ever were, but cheating and foul play are rampant.

  Because it’s too hard to screen for performance-enhancing drugs, they are made legal and are an important component of sports.

  The ability to make visual recordings of dreams has exhilarating and terrifying consequences.

  Drugs and medical treatments can be tailored to a patient’s specific body—their age, medical history, and genetic makeup.

  Patients are woken up from hibernation when the cures to their diseases have been discovered.

  One person begins to notice subliminal coded messages in media, books, public signs, and more.

  At nursing homes for the elderly, robot workers have completely replaced the human ones, and cuddly robot kittens and puppies also keep the residents company.

  A newly discovered old text contains a revolutionary formula.

  AI is now capable of writing reasonably coherent books and movie scripts, albeit with a surrealist bent that many people prefer.

  An entertainment company synthesizes huge amounts of data they collected about viewers’ responses to movies and shows, and they use it to create a TV show that’s dangerously addictive.

  Human biological processes, such as heartbeats and electrical activity in the brain, are harnessed as an energy source that powers cities.

  It’s now possible to implant memories, which can give people whole new abilities.

  It’s now possible to remove or rewrite traumatic memories with almost surgical precision, bringing better mental health to many.

  Negative emotions such as sadness and rage can be removed quickly with this simple treatment.

  Humankind finds a way to move the Earth further from the sun in order to counteract the threat of global warming.

  Humankind finds a way to rapidly grow huge forests of mature trees to counteract the effects of global warming.

  Pieces of an alien spacecraft crash to the earth.

  Aliens explore earth, but humans aren’t able to perceive them.

  An alien is taken prisoner after destroying a town. It was a total accident and the alien feels terrible about it.

  An engineered virus wipes out people who are physiologically prone to depression.

  A woman is hunted by her clone, created when she was still a child.

  A huge volcano has obviously erupted, spreading ash over the entire planet, but nobody saw the volcano erupt, and nobody can find it.

  A glacier melts and the skeleton of a twelve-foot-tall humanoid is discovered.

  Birds and butterflies are able to navigate on long migrations due to proteins in their bodies that align with the earth’s magnetic fields. Scientists put these proteins to a new use.

  Whales and dolphins can be underwater for long periods of time due to a protein called myoglobin. Scientists put this protein to a new use.

  A once-extinct species is re-created in order to control the population of another one.

  After a virus wipes out about ninety percent of the world’s human population, it becomes socially acceptable to take over the property of wealthy dead people with no living heirs.

  A sharp increase in the birth of intersex babies has led to a society in which the binary notion of gender has been erased.

  Most intelligent species in the galaxy aren’t equipped for war, and humans conquer planets with ease. One commander turns traitor and helps an alien race resist.

  A person gets an abstract tattoo of his own design. Strangers snatch him from his home in the middle of the night. The tattoo happens to be a symbol for the shadow world government that nobody knows about.

  A person learns that another person or being is playing her life like a videogame, causing events to happen and seeing how she responds to them. All of the people she thought were real are simulations—characters controlled by the player.

  Humans can rate each other in the same way they’d rate restaurants or movies. People with one-star and two-star average ratings have no luck in dating or finding work.

  A person works as a designer of subliminal messages in visual signs, pop songs, and other entertainment that keep the population calm and law-abiding.

  They made him into a super soldier, but unfortunately, his enhanced powers are susceptible to glitches and hacks.

  In this world, China and the U.S.S.R. joined together to become one big Communist state in the 1950s.

  A scientist learns the real reason why the trees in this grove grow in strange bent and crooked shapes.

  They can’t get any decent volunteers to colonize the planet, so they simply abduct people with a variety of skills and talents and ship them off.

  Aliens raid a fertility clinic, make off with all the embryos, and raise humans of their own.

  Scientists bore into the center of the earth to obtain and study the minerals in its very core.

  One of the richest men in the world hires young women to undergo surgery and genetic therapy and become actual mermaids, just to liven up parties at his estate. The pay is very good.

  On Ceres, a large asteroid, there’s a fueling station for spaceships. Terrorists take over the station and disrupt space travel and trade.

  New zoos are filled with genetically engineered marvels, such as tigers with translucent skin and birds that can sing Beethoven.

  A person can partially manifest in another dimension, where she’s a child’s “imaginary friend.”

  After a massive hack, the technologically advanced planet is reduced to a bartering system in place of money.

  Because robot “kids” have become so lifelike, amusing, and hassle-free, no one wants to have real ones.

  A person heroically accepts the mission to go back in time and kill his past self for the good of humanity. But then, things get complicated.

  A person learns for the first time that they are one of the living results of an attempted upgrade to the human race.

  An entire population of one particular species of mammal dies, seemingly overnight.

  People with the genetic predisposition to dislike cilantro have a latent superpower.

  Advances in medicine have made it easy for the wealthy to appear to be any physical age from adolescence on up, even though their lifespan hasn’t increased.

  People can loan out their bodies to others; they go into an unconscious state while another consciousness uses the body.

  A person’s consciousness can be downloaded into an artificial body, making them effectively immortal, but one person suspects that her consciousness was tampered with during the procedure.

  Metabolism can be safely adjusted to accommodate a higher caloric intake so that no one is ever overweight.

  Facia
l recognition and ubiquitous video recording by the government have led to a much bigger business in secret, drastic plastic surgery.

  It appears as though many people are beginning to recall their past lives—in startling detail.

  A vaccine for the deadly flu pandemic was created but kept secret from the general public.

  They were prepared for an alien invasion and for a pandemic, but not at the same time.

  It’s now legal in every country in the world to buy organs from living donors.

  A corporation patents the process of 3D printing human organs for successful transplants. A humanitarian thief sets out to steal the secrets to the process and share them with the world.

  Someone believes she’s destroying an AI but murders a person by mistake.

  It’s now widely known that psychological trauma can be passed down genetically from generation to generation, and there are ways to fix it.

  It’s been years since any human has done any writing or drawing by hand, which has had a surprising effect on brain development and function.

  A biologist discovers some scientific basis for the personality types described by zodiac signs.

  A home security AI keeps warning there’s a stranger in the house, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone there.

  When a person first gets a new AI, it uses many faces, many different voices, and a wide range of speech patterns. Over time, through analysis of the owner’s facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language, it settles into the appearance and communication style that pleases the owner most.

  He’s an Empathy Instructor, helping people pass a series of tests to earn their Empathy Certificate.

  Angels are real, but they’re an alien species that hasn’t visited Earth in quite a while.

  A government program infiltrates people’s dreams in order to control them in waking life.

  Hitting the “unfriend” button is more dramatic now that people interact almost entirely in the virtual realm.

  It’s their most amazing weapon yet: the ability to rewrite the collective memory of an entire population.

  The planet’s main export: adorable pets.

  It’s a prison break…from the international maximum-security prison on the moon.

  The asteroids are small, but three of them have hit Earth now, and it’s a serious problem.

  The humans at a research station in Antarctica take in an alien after her ship crashes.

  They’re refining their formula for retrocausality—the way that future events can change past ones.

  The new religion is based on scientific discovery.

  A person learns that in fact, he doesn’t just have bad luck: his series of unfortunate circumstances is part of a large psychology experiment.

  She’s treating someone who was exposed to high levels of radiation during space travel.

  They discover that the Earth is caught in a long time loop. It’s about to go back to prehistoric times and repeat again.

  After she becomes pregnant, no one believes her when she says she’s a virgin. She gives birth to a surprising offspring.

  Since none of the nearby planets were truly ideal for colonizing, they created this one.

  In this environment, no one can touch another person without delivering and receiving a strong shock of static electricity.

  He’s one of many voluntary human subjects getting superpowered senses—hearing, eyesight, etc. They’ve all signed a nondisclosure agreement.

  She thought she’d be in outer space alone for the rest of her natural life, and she’s thrilled to encounter this new life form.

  If he says yes to the space mission, he’ll be working in close quarters with a bitter rival.

  A person gets sucked into a black hole. In one reality, he’s instantly shredded into little pieces, but in another reality, he enters the black hole unharmed.

  Her resume includes adapting novels into interactive virtual worlds.

  The newly engineered crop grows best in environments previously considered useless for farming.

  The aliens on this planet are doing the best they can to make the human explorers believe the planet is deserted.

  Time travelers frequently wind up at this specific, random time and place by mistake, and they’re trying to figure out why.

  People with a genetic predisposition for resilience to sleep deprivation are recruited for this particular job or mission.

  Tiny bots are used to deliver drugs directly to the site that they are needed in the body.

  The village will reward the hero for slaying the dragon. Except it’s not really a village—it’s a settlement on a distant planet. And it’s not really a dragon.

  Her clone thinks she’s the original. But she’s wrong. Isn’t she?

  No one’s going to believe him unless he uses himself as a test subject and documents the results.

  Earth has one big democratic government. Aliens have hacked the latest election.

  In this world, people were able to not only train but actually domesticate elephants, and the countries with elephants won all the wars and dominated the world.

  Their job is to gather up trash that humans have put into Earth’s orbit over the decades and haul it out further into outer space.

  A method to reverse global warming worked too well, and now the planet is going through another Ice Age.

  The spaceship is programmed to blow itself up if the pilot is about to use it for anything destructive.

  The metamaterial suit is so thin you can’t even feel it against your skin, but it renders you invisible.

  The commuter spaceship has been hijacked.

  Since cockroaches are nearly indestructible as a species, scientists put them to a special use.

  A particle accelerator opens up a hole to an alternate universe.

  150 Horror Prompts

  Some of these are skeletal (ha) plots, while others are images or suggestions. There’s quite a bit of overlap between horror, mystery, and fantasy, so don’t be surprised if you wind up writing a mystery or fantasy based on a horror prompt.

  A musician practices. When she finishes a piece, she hears someone clapping for her, although she lives alone.

  Frightening events in a small town lead its citizens to dig up the grave of a deceased inhabitant.

  Someone gets on the elevator by himself and is never seen by his friends or family again.

  The Furies—the vengeance deities of classic mythology—are back in business again.

  A collector buys an unpublished manuscript by an obscure writer that describes a terrible historical event a year before it occurred. The collector learns the writer wrote many unpublished stories...

  Creating a hybrid of a human and this particular animal turns out to be a bad idea.

  A person has the ability to make other people very ill.

  The dead walk out of the sea.

  An individual begins seeing and hearing from someone who looks just like her – and learns she had a twin who died at birth.

  A killer places an advertisement for a willing victim and finds one.

  A basement contains jars filled with unusual specimens.

  A person finds new photos of herself on her cell phone that she has no memory of.

  The spirit of a brutalized slave or prisoner of war wants revenge on his tormentor’s descendants.

  A couple vacationing in a remote area begins having the same nightmares.

  All the circus performers were killed in the train wreck.

  The television switches to another station of its own accord and plays footage of something horrible that happened long before the technology existed to record it.

  A spouse or sibling dies. He or she begins to take over the body of t
he surviving spouse or sibling.

  Weekend adventurers explore a cave and can’t find their way out again. Then they encounter something terrible…

  Authorities go through the cluttered apartment of a deceased man who lived alone with no known friends or relatives for decades and find something disturbing.

  A group of teenagers trolls everyone else in an online group by telling made-up stories about terrible things they’ve done. Things then get out of hand.

  It’s bad luck in the theater to mention the Shakespeare play Macbeth by name, but someone in the company keeps doing it anyway…and the superstition proves true.

  Every exhibit in this carnival sideshow is fake. Except this one thing.

  An individual develops a terror of water – drinking it, touching it, or even being near it. There’s actually a good reason why.

  The grandfather clock starts running backwards.

  People in this neighborhood begin having freak accidents that involve normal appliances and machinery, such as blenders, weed whackers, and garage doors.

  The cure for a new deadly epidemic is almost scarier than the disease.

  He locked the doors and shuttered the windows; it came in through the roof.

  A woman is happy when her dead loved one comes back to life…but he’s changed.

  This centuries-old beauty secret is effective but horrifying.

  A killer toys with his victims by orchestrating a series of false hopes for them.

  She wakes up in the middle of the night and runs out to a certain tree.

  Tourists on a ghost tour, along with their guide, fall into the hands of an evil presence.

  A young woman is impregnated by her handsome new boyfriend, who turns out to be something other than human.

  The empty swing is swinging.

  A bride on her honeymoon discovers she’s not her new husband’s first wife…not even close.

  Long ago when he was a baby, a man’s parents made an unwise deal in order to bring him back from the dead.

  Members of a family or people in a town begin sleepwalking and doing strange things in their sleep.

  A young man confesses to a killing that hasn’t happened. The murder he describes takes place while he’s in custody.