by Bryn Donovan
In the early 1800s in New York City, virtually all leases expire on May 1, making that the day that thousands of people move from one dwelling to another.
A Frenchwoman in the early 20th century is obsessed with trying to create a truly blue hybrid rose.
In the 1930s, African-American intellectuals wrongly assume that a novel is based on a well-known woman in Harlem.
Two sisters in Regency England develop a tendre for the same gentleman.
In 1652 in Zutphen, the Netherlands, the brothers François and Pierre Hémony create the first perfectly tuned carillon.
Adelaide Hermann starts out as an assistant to her magician husband, but when he dies in 1896, she begins performing on her own. Eventually, she becomes known as the Queen of Magic.
An arrogant Italian race car driver in the 1950s crashes his Ferrari, becomes seriously injured, and then attempts a comeback.
A woman in the early twentieth century begins receiving mysterious messages by carrier pigeon.
In 1887, Queen Lili‘ukolani of Hawaii attends the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria and composes the famous song “Aloha Oe.”
Two strangers have an unforgettable encounter when they are both wearing masks at a carnival in Venice.
The king is dead, but the queen has reasons to hide this fact and enlists a few of her most trusted servants to help her maintain the story that he’s still ill in bed or away on a pilgrimage.
After an archeologist’s dig, funded by several private investors, turns up nothing, he forges several antiquities.
A Victorian man saves a woman from a fire. She is wearing only her nightgown at the time, so her reputation is permanently ruined.
In the 10th century, in the extravagantly wealthy Ghana Empire, a goatherd becomes the assistant to a merchant dealing in salt and gold, and he travels in camel caravans along Trans-Sahara trade routes.
In 1920s Boston, Charles Ponzi carries out a large-scale, famous swindle.
Hans Christian Andersen, a poor Danish boy in the 1820s, lives with an abusive schoolmaster as he attends school. He writes fairy tales even though the faculty members do their best to discourage him.
Catherine the Great, empress of Russia, finally meets Voltaire, with whom she’s been corresponding for over a decade. (Note: this is truly fictional. Although they exchanged letters for fifteen years and admired one another deeply, they never actually met in person.)
In the 1970s, idealistic nonconformists form a commune.
During the French Revolution, churches are pillaged and desecrated, and many members of the clergy are deported or sentenced to death.
Wolfgang Engels, a soldier in East Germany, steals an armored personal carrier and tries to drive it straight through the Berlin Wall. When it doesn’t quite penetrate the wall, he evacuates the vehicle, gets tangled up in barbed wire and shot twice, and gets pulled to safety by West Berliners, who take him to a bar.
In Greece in 4th century BC, a man named Herostratus burns down the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
In 1907, a railroad brakeman in Mexico named Jesús Garcia Corona sees that a train car carrying dynamite has caught fire. He drives the car train backwards, downhill at full steam, saving the town of Nacozari before the dynamite blows and kills him.
For the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, the Nazis invent the torch relay as a way to link their regime to ancient Greece, and they popularize the Olympic emblem of the five interlocking rings.
Jim Beckwourth, born into slavery in Virginia, becomes a blacksmith and then a fur trapper before being captured by the Crow nation. He lives with them for many years, rising to the rank of chief, and goes on to become a trader, store keeper, rancher, hotel owner, and an agent and scout for the U.S. government.
After a couple of decades of selling cookies they baked themselves, the Girl Scouts begin selling commercially produced and branded Girl Scout cookies in 1936.
150 General Fiction Prompts
I put this list together with contemporary mainstream and literary fiction in mind and sprinkled in some ideas for thrillers as well. Many of them could also be used in other ways. Some of these are more likely to be overarching plots, and some of them are better suited for smaller plot points in novels (or as inspiration for short stories).
Two sisters travel together to explore the city of their birth, which they remember only vaguely.
A group of friends who were roommates in their early 20s become roommates again decades later.
A therapist begins to suspect her grieving patient of murder.
A scholar discovers the location of the “Golden Library”—the priceless library that Ivan the Terrible had hidden or buried in the sixteenth century.
A woman learns for the first time that a boy she went to high school with had a huge crush on her.
A family’s home is destroyed by raging wildfires in California.
A wedding venue is changed at the last minute, with guests notified in secret, to avoid being the target of organized crime.
A woman tells all her secrets to an Uber driver on a long drive. The driver later begins dating the woman’s sister.
A guy recovers from a breakup by having a spa day with his best female friends.
Two siblings, both married with children, solve financial difficulties by all moving into one house together.
A pilot makes an emergency landing on the farm.
A college student is mistakenly identified as a terrorist.
Someone wins an award that embarrasses him.
A wife discovers that her husband has been repeatedly looking at the Facebook pages of his ex-girlfriends.
An eco-conscious man convinces his wife and family to live “off the grid.”
A woman tries to save a building with historic or sentimental value from being torn down.
A man gets a call informing him that his wife is dead in a foreign country. He didn’t know she’d gone on a trip.
A group of dissidents set out to bring a giant corporation to its knees.
A married couple confronts the fact that their autistic son is showing signs of regression, losing verbal and social skills he once had.
A woman suspects someone she knows is a criminal and sets a trap to catch him.
An older woman who lost her high-paying job pretends everything’s fine even though she’s barely scraping by.
Two actors can’t stand each other and don’t want to shoot scenes together.
DNA evidence proves a man’s innocence after he’s been in prison for thirty years.
A woman gets surgery to look more like the Photoshopped pictures of herself she shares on social media.
A bachelorette party isn’t what anybody expected.
A man’s daughter goes missing, and through investigation, he discovers she’s been abducted by someone he trusted.
After the death of his grandfather, a man teaches his grandmother to drive for the first time.
A woman deals with several different kinds of parents after she sets up a new business driving children to and from their after-school activities and play dates.
A family of four celebrates all of their birthdays, Mother’s Day, and the mother and father’s anniversary, all during the month of May (known to them as “Mayhem.”)
Roommates take in a stray dog and hide its existence from the apartment manager in a building that doesn’t allow pets.
A couple sells their house to a woman who sues them a year later claiming they didn’t disclose structural issues.
A young man gradually realizes his best friend has become completely absorbed in something ridiculous, cruel, or both, and he tries to bring his friend back to his senses again.
A professor uncovers a massive plagiarism syndicate that
eludes all anti-plagiarism detection software—and wants a cut of the profits.
A woman goes on a photography safari in Tanzania and forges a strong connection with a fellow tourist.
A man picks a fight with a younger, bigger guy in order to prove to others—or himself—how tough he still is.
A man who prefers to keep his work life and his private life separate is pressured by his boss to attend the holiday office party—and to bring his wife.
A woman fakes a serious illness for social media attention and money.
A family forgoes their Christmas gift-giving to help another family in need.
A new public sculpture sparks a bitter community fight.
A meteorite crashes into a family’s house, and one family member takes it as a divine sign.
An out-of-shape mother trains for a marathon. At first, nobody believes she can do it.
A family deals with an unexpected and not particularly welcome guest for Thanksgiving dinner.
A retiree purchases used newspaper printing equipment for a song and begins publishing an outlandish newspaper.
A mother tries to make up for the fact that she walked out on her children, and hopes to be a part of her grandchildren’s lives.
A bride-to-be wants to mend fences with her father so he’ll walk her down the aisle.
A divorcing woman whose husband is moving out of the house needs a roommate, fast—and finds one who’s very different from her.
A professional hair and makeup artist, in trouble with the law or with an organized crime syndicate, changes her appearance several times as she hides in plain sight.
A man adjusts to life after losing a leg in a car accident.
A woman who’s frustrated with her lack of options takes a job in a big city ninety miles away from home, which puts a strain on her relationship with her husband and daughter.
A campaign manager learns that his candidate, who has a stellar record of public service, has a terrible secret in her past.
A woman buys a ticket to the world’s oddest and most exclusive flea market.
A man walks in on his fiancée as she’s saying something terribly unflattering about him to her best friend.
Family members’ lives are turned upside down when they allow a famous director to shoot a movie on their farm.
A woman grows jealous of her best friend’s new romantic relationship and attempts to break it up.
A family tries to increase the profits of their small maple syrup business by involving groups of tourists in the sugaring process.
A young woman follows the advice of an antiquated guide to charm, with hilarious and touching results.
A woman sets out to write a rulebook for a successful life; the events in her own life lead her to constantly revise it.
An undercover FBI agent dates a man who works for a crime boss in order to get information.
When a woman loses one of her employees at her struggling small-town beauty salon, her elderly mother volunteers to help her out by working for free. She just needs some training.
A couple who seems to have an ideal marriage announces they’re getting divorced. Their best friends, another married couple, re-evaluate their relationship and make big changes.
Two people keep the date or appointment they made ten years ago.
The new pastor at a church deals with vindictive parishioners who are angry that the last minister was ousted.
After a woman survives both a freak accident and a poison gas attack on a subway, she suspects some entity is trying to kill her.
A woman loans nonprofit money to a friend who claims to be in dire straits and promises to pay it back within a couple of days. He later refuses to pay.
A bestselling author pretends to live a very different life in order to research a character in his upcoming novel.
An Uber driver becomes a drug smuggler.
After a young woman breaks off a serious relationship with a man who seemed like he would’ve been a perfect son-in-law, her parents scheme to bring the two back together.
A woman kills an attacker in self-defense and faces trial for murder.
Weeks before the wedding, a groom regrets his choice of best man.
A man becomes known for the songs he writes about the details of his mundane life.
A man in the afterlife, who believed he was unimportant on earth, witnesses the profound and wide-ranging effects his death has on others. He then tries to find his way back in time to prevent his own death.
Two people planning their own 25th anniversary party realize they each have very different recollections of key events in their shared history.
Twin sisters convince their friends that they’re able to communicate telepathically, although in fact, they’re terrible at guessing one another’s thoughts.
A teacher’s life becomes complicated after an aspect of her private life becomes public.
A couple, friends, or siblings agree to give one another’s hobbies a try.
A couple desperate to adopt make a terrible first impression with the adoption agency.
A parent looks for a job after staying home with the children for twelve years.
When a couple buys a fixer-upper home and it turns out to be a money pit, they burn it down and try to make it look like an accident.
Three generations of a family go on a cross-country road trip to attend a relative’s wedding.
A man’s secretive attempts to arrange a spectacular surprise 50th birthday party for his wife lead her to fear he’s having an affair.
A woman’s beauty procedure goes horribly wrong.
Parents, teachers, and teens clash over whether a subject should be taught in a high school classroom.
A man infuriates his parents and/or children by writing about or telling people about their very personal or painful experiences.
A woman wants to see Jerusalem before she dies.
A man has more trouble than he expected getting over the loss of a pet.
A newly successful woman gives all her family members generous gifts. It causes unexpected problems.
A man quits his job, buys a trailer, and spends a year traveling across the country.
A woman resorts to shady measures in order to make her startup business a success.
A man finds a newborn baby in a tote bag on the subway.
An art restorer discovers a work of art is a fake—but revealing this would be disastrous to the struggling museum.
A middle-aged actor is told that if he were going to make it, he would’ve done it by now. He sets out to prove that person wrong.
A celebrity’s career is destroyed after she is quoted out of context.
Long after a picture of her unconscious in a public place is shared far and wide, a woman conquers her addiction and struggles to build a new life.
Five very different people who all go to the same fast-food restaurant or diner every day get to know one another.
A woman gets a job at the most exclusive restaurant in the country, where reservations are made years in advance.
Someone tries to figure out what to do with the huge salt and pepper shaker collection their dead relative bequeathed to them.
A man believes he can communicate telepathically with a loved one who’s been in a coma for a long time.
A community deals with a tiger on the loose.
A beloved sports figure’s use of performance-enhancing drugs is revealed.
A woman attempts to change the bad reputation of fruitcake, her favorite Christmas treat.
After two years of fertility treatments, a couple is expecting quintuplets.
A mother is plagued with suspicions that her young child has been replaced by an imposter.
A man struggles with guilt and anger after a loved one’s suicide.
A marketing team rebrands a very old-fashioned product for younger consumers.
A man quits his job, comes home, and learns that his wife is pregnant with their first child.
After a man’s girlfriend breaks up with him, he becomes more and more involved with tracking her movements and her interactions on social media, all the while perceiving himself as a romantic and a victim.
A massive earthquake in the U.S. Pacific Northwest triggers a tsunami that washes over much of Portland, Salem, Eugene, Olympia, and parts of Seattle.
A man is asked to identify the dead body of his husband. He recognizes the body in the morgue, but it’s not his husband.
A literary critic becomes disgusted with the viciousness of her own work.
A man who’s never tried skiing before pretends to others that it’s not his first time.
She’s by far the best sales associate in the store, but she has a bad habit of occasionally giving a customer an item for free.
A man is in love with a woman who claims her husband is abusive. The man murders him and then learns he may have been misled.
The thing she admired about her husband—his ambition—makes her marriage a nightmare, because nothing is ever good enough for him.
A man designs a world-record-breaking amusement park ride.
A woman’s two best friends have each privately confessed to her they’re in love with one another, but are terrified to act on their feelings. They’ve both sworn her to secrecy.
A man writes an advice column under a female pseudonym. It becomes wildly popular.
A woman pressures her husband to hide something significant about himself or his life from her parents.
A man becomes increasingly alarmed at how differently his wife talks and acts when she’s with her family.
A woman accidentally captures a murder in the background of her selfie for Instagram.
A woman’s friends abandon her because they feel that five years after the loss of a loved one, she shouldn’t still be clinging to grief.
A man’s business relocates him to a place he never expected to live and expects to loathe. He winds up loving it.