In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, A Life in Men, published in the New Yorker, Merritt Tierce self-deprecatingly hypothesizes about the reasons a man she is on a first date with at a restaurant might want to sleep with her even though she had sensed that he “wasn’t blown away by my beauty” when she first walked up. “His kids were with their mother, in Brooklyn, and I was good enough for a Tuesday night,” she writes. Write a personal essay that explores a moment from your past when you felt you weren’t good enough in some way, incorporating a layer of humor to balance the emotional pangs. Include small, specific details to evoke the atmosphere and your mindset from that time. Then consider the insights that you’ve gained now that years have gone by. What have you learned from how you see yourself?
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
Get immediate access to more than 2,000 writing prompts with the tool below:
“A saw squeals in the half-built house across the street; a man shouts: Hey hey hey!; a car speeds by on the road out front; the neighbor thuds across the floor on the other side of the wall; a hammer strikes; men speak; a car door slams,” begins Kathryn Scanlan’s story “Study for American Interior (Monday),” published in the Summer 2026 issue of Granta. The story consists of a single dense paragraph, which itself is one long sentence punctuated by a litany of semicolons, creating a portrait of a neighborhood through its sounds. The mentions of “my chair creaks” and “the windows in my room” hint at the narrator perhaps being a writer at their desk. Write a short story composed entirely of a sequence of sounds from someone inside a building listening to the outside world. Even if nothing particularly extraordinary occurs, how can you curate the repetition of sounds to create a feeling?
Once a promising poet, Óscar Restrepo, the protagonist of Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto’s 2025 film, A Poet, is now middle-aged and unemployed, spending his days wallowing in failure. Óscar is seen crying, drinking, squabbling with family members and other writers, and muddling through attempts at forging a relationship with his teenage daughter. When he starts a new teaching job, he meets and begins mentoring a student who shows prodigious poetic talent and this inspires him to write his first poem in years: “But don’t lose faith yet / In this sad poet / For he is trying to write / A happy poem.” Try composing a poem from the persona of a sad poet attempting to write a happy poem. From where does the sadness spring, and what does happiness look or sound like?
As we approach the season for gratitude, consider the ways in which it’s equally important to express and feel gratitude. “Not only does gratitude improve the well-being of the giver and the recipient, but it may also be good for those who witness it,” writes Christina Caron in the New York Times. “Watching an act of gratitude between two people can cause an observer to feel more warmth and affinity toward them both.” Spend some time reflecting on a time when you have witnessed an act of gratitude; maybe it was someone sincerely thanking another person for providing help in a store or on the street, or an exchange between loved ones in which a specific instance of generosity or assistance was acknowledged. Then, write a personal essay about the memories and thoughts that arise when you explore how this type of grateful interaction makes you feel.
In an interview by Joel Pinckney published on the Creative Independent, Hernan Diaz talks about how the “joy of a beautiful sentence” keeps him writing. “How wonderful that this sentence that never existed, that I don’t dislike, now is here,” says Diaz. “And look at what it’s doing! It’s not only conveying meaning, but maybe it’s mimicking what it’s saying in its own structure, or contradicting what it’s saying. Listen to its music.” Taking inspiration from the multitudinous ways in which a sentence can function, write two vignettes: one that features sentences whose structure mimics its meaning; and one that features sentences that contradict what they’re saying. You might decide to first imagine a character and perspective for each piece, one whose personality or motivations align with the way you’re using the sentences.
“Read a book from the library / Donate to a food pantry ... / Casually research becoming a citizen of a country with free health care / Play a few pickleball matches.” In “Things to Do While Waiting for Midterm Election Results,” published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Wendi Aarons presents a to-do list of items that are humorous, desperate, mundane, unhinged, and relatable, that together create a sense of the anxiety of waiting tinged with satirical humor. This week compose a poem that takes the form of a list of things to do while waiting for something nerve-wracking—whether personal or on a larger scale. Allow yourself to be playful with imagery and sound, and experimental with spacing, punctuation, and strike-through text.
“A packer faces three obstacles. There’s contingency: a variety of possible futures must somehow be tamed. There’s consumerism: the junk you own needs to be winnowed into a useful curation. And there’s comfort: we want to be cushioned against transit’s sharp points,” writes Joshua Rothman in his essay “Why Can’t You Pack a Bag?” which was published in the New Yorker in 2024. Consider how packing a bag for travel can reveal various aspects of your personality and mindset. Do you tend to be a maximalist or minimalist packer? How do you navigate the constraints of available space against being prepared with clothing and accoutrements necessary for the weather and terrain you will be traversing, and the occasions and activities you expect to experience? In an essay, reflect on times in the past when you were met with packing failures, as well as packing successes.
Rosemary’s Baby, the renowned 1967 horror novel by Ira Levin which was adapted into a film directed by Roman Polanski, takes place in New York City as a young married couple, Rosemary and Guy, move into an apartment building and their relationship to an elderly couple living in the building evolves in horrific ways in parallel to Rosemary’s pregnancy. All the action and suspense takes place in Manhattan, a departure from the settings of rural and small-town environments often used in horror stories, taking advantage of people’s fears of silence, darkness, and potentially foreboding nature. Write a horror story that takes place in a big city. How might the stresses of a busy, densely populated locale, with streets overly crowded with unknown faces and irritatingly intrusive neighbors, create a sense of alienation?
Reflecting on her poem “Bluebeard,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Safiya Sinclair writes, “I was always fascinated with the myth of Bluebeard; the way a man can construct a false image while keeping a hideous secret from the one he claims to love. And how a woman might be so diminished by his falsehood that she begs for her own destruction.” Select a myth, fable, or fairy tale, and focus on its darker aspects, seeking out any evocative themes of duplicity, betrayal, vengeance, or destruction. Reflect on the layers of complexity that the darkness brings to the narrative and see if you can connect it to your own life experiences. Compose a poem that brings the mythological story into a more contemporaneous reality, incorporating especially resonant archetypal characters and dynamics, and allowing yourself to delve into a variety of sounds, textures, and imagery.
When Anne Carson, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature, was asked in a Penn Review interview about her 2015 poem “Each Day Unexpected Salvation (John Cage),” in which the word shade is used forty-four times, she responded that the repetitive gesture was not so much an intentional act of decreation as it was “probably more mechanical, a matter of turning the head and seeing different things with the same head.” Compose a short lyric essay that encapsulates a resonant feeling of this past year and takes a cue from Carson with the repetition of a single word throughout the piece to see different things in, or ways into, your main themes. How can you open interpretation to have meanings ranging from the literal, to the metaphorical, to the oblique or nonsensical? How does the repetition accumulate to present a kaleidoscopic portrait of your state of mind?
In the 2024 documentary Mistress Dispeller, director Elizabeth Lo uncovers a family drama involving a woman in China who enlists the help of a professional mistress dispeller to end her husband’s affair. The profession, which has become common in the last decade in urban centers in China, generally entails coaching, infiltration, and persuasion, the emphasis being on winning the trust of all parties. Lo’s film depicts each person in the love triangle—the wronged wife, the cheating husband, the other woman—as multifaceted, vulnerable, and sympathetic, unfurling a specific but also universal story intermixed with scenes relaying the realities of alienation and connection in contemporary society. Write a short story that imagines a scenario in which a mistress dispeller has been hired to disrupt an ongoing affair. What insights and expertise about relationships does the dispeller bring to the interactions with the characters involved?
Día de los Muertos or the Day of the Dead, a traditional holiday in Mexico with roots in Indigenous cultures that celebrates departed friends and family, is typically observed on the first two days of November. People gather around altars with decorative skulls, marigolds, and foods and drinks, sometimes also writing “calavera literaria,” a form of a light-hearted, satirical epitaph addressing someone who is still alive as if they were dead, which can be used as a way of critiquing a cultural or political figure. Write a series of short literary calaveras, just a handful of lines each, incorporating a simple rhyme scheme to imbue a sense of singsongy playfulness. Even if there are elements of mortality or sorrow in the mix, allow yourself to be silly with sound, diction, and imagery to bring in comic relief about the inevitability of death.
“I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother and her inconsolable nostalgia.” In the first pages of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Murmurs From the Hills: Rwandan Tales, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books in November, the author recounts a genre-defying collection of stories reminiscent of an oral history. Blending mythology and memoir, the stories recount the horrors of the Rwandan civil war and genocide along with other memories lived and passed down by family members. In this hybrid form of storytelling, Mukasonga creates a retelling of history—and therefore a retelling of the present and the future—with contributions from a complex range of voices with layered knowledge. Write a lyric essay that braids some of your early memories with stories passed down from your ancestors. Allow yourself the freedom to invent your own mythologies.
A coffee grinder, the soul of a man who drowned to death, a board game, a house, angels, God, mushrooms, and trees are all characters in Olga Tokarczuk’s third novel, Primeval and Other Times, first published in Polish in 1996 and forthcoming in a new edition, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, in December from Riverhead Books. The narrative chronicles the universe of a fictional village called Primeval through short vignettes of different characters, both human and nonhuman, over the course of three generations during the twentieth century. In “The Time of Misia’s Grinder,” Tokarczuk writes: “Perhaps coffee grinders are the axis of reality, around which everything turns and unwinds, perhaps they are more important for the world than people.” Write a collection of vignettes about diverse characters that collaboratively reveal a microcosm of points of view in a specific time and place. What objects will give voice to the philosophical and existential questions you wish to explore?
In Matt Longabucco’s collection The Hummingbird, published by Nightboat Books in October, the poet’s attention flits from subject to subject with sharp observations of mundane goings-on, attending to contemporary life in all its forms. In one section of the title poem, Longabucco moves swiftly from the natural environment to the objects of workday technology: “big ant / scales my power cord / achieves the plug / prepares to mount the keyboard / I give it a decisive flick / we’re both surprised when an instant later / it’s flat against the windowpane / six feet away, intact and unharmed….” Compose a poem that revels in the unbroken interconnectedness of energies and emotions that are revealed when you pay close attention to the vividness of your immediate surroundings. How might the world around you generate a sense of openness and abundance when you find ways to intertwine a multitude of its everyday offerings?
In the anthologies What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2019) and What My Father and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2025), editor Michele Filgate collected over a dozen essays by authors writing about their struggles in communicating with parental figures. Write your own essay about something you have always felt like you could never talk about with your mother, father, or other guardian. What were the barriers to honesty, and what do you imagine could or would have helped you break your silence? Was it more about what you didn’t want to say or what you perhaps didn’t want to hear back in response? You might bring in your personal reflections about honesty and vulnerability in other relationships to shed insight on your parent-child dynamic.
“I often use the metaphor of Perseus and the head of Medusa when I speak of science fiction. Instead of looking into the face of truth, you look over your shoulder into the bronze surface of a reflecting shield. Then you reach back with your sword and cut off the head of Medusa,” said Ray Bradbury in a 1970s interview published in the Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series in 2010 about the ways in which science fiction seems to look into the future, but is in reality a reflection of what has already happened. Write a science fiction story that explores an urgent contemporary issue through the “reflection” of an imagined future. Consider Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which examines the very real issues of book burning and censorship through a firefighter in futuristic dystopia. Think carefully about how you twist a serious subject by placing it in an extreme, far-off premise.
In Sophie Klahr’s second poetry collection, Two Open Doors in a Field (The Backwaters Press, 2023), the sequence “Like Nebraska” consists of each poem beginning with a simile. Examples include: “She listens like a horse…,” “He speaks like a slow evening…,” “She rustles like a stream…,” and “He drinks like the faithful….” This week, taking inspiration from this repeated format, compose your own short series of poems that revolves around the relationship between two people, alternating beginnings in the same way. What are the main themes in this relationship you wish to explore? You might consider gesturing to a palpable arc, or ebb and flow, of the duo’s inner thoughts as the sequence progresses and shifting the imagery and tone throughout to illuminate a narrative.
In a 1988 issue of the Yale Review, an essay titled “Making Contact: Encounters With Readers” by Annie Dillard, who passed away earlier this month, consists of a series of short segments recalling the letters, notes, and items she had received from readers who felt compelled to write to her. Dillard recounts readers who sent her missives about their lives, short stories they had written, existential questions, religious objects, medical journal articles, a marriage proposal, pamphlets about God, dead insects, and numerous bits of ephemera. Taking inspiration from this form, think about memorable things that you have received in the mail or in person over the years. Compose a chronicle of people who have given you these letters or objects, and write short reflections that explore both the content and the context of these interactions. How might the collection reveal something about the role you play in others’ existences?
As part of the marketing campaign for the recent sci-fi thriller film The Last House, in which a family must figure out how to survive after being sealed inside their home due to a mysterious menace taking over the outside world, Netflix constructed a tiny living space inside an advertising billboard thirty feet above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles where an actor was “trapped” inside for several days. The stunt attracted passersby who interacted with the actor and visited him daily. Write a short story that revolves around the deployment of a publicity stunt connected to a storyline for a new film, book, or amusement park ride. You might decide to take the point of view of a confused onlooker or the performer within the stunt. Allow yourself to play around with layers of artifice and performance, and mix the real with the surreal.
“The swallows screech at dawn / Birds which day from night divide // We are quick shuttles / Weaving the blurred thread of mystery // Dusk is our element / Brushing the edge of a moment,” writes Blaže Koneski in his poem “Swallows,” translated from the Macedonian by Kristian Josifoski and published in the May 2026 issue of Poetry magazine. Swallows have long been known for their close relationship to humans—the way they build their nests on the sides of buildings and bridges, their anticipated annual migrations as harbingers of spring and autumn, and as a symbol of resilience for sailors through long journeys and homecomings. Write a poem that draws upon the physical traits and behavior of swallows, or another common bird, weaving in symbolism and connections to your own relationship to the natural progression and patterns of passing time.
What books do you turn to when you need a bit of consolation? Comfort reads are books that readers return to again and again; knowledge of the trajectory of the story providing a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling and relief from stress or melancholy. Whether you’re feeling downtrodden because of a dreary time of year, a recent crisis, an illness, or general distress, a comfort read—even if just reading a few pages or excerpts—is liable to restore cheer from its well-worn familiarity. Write a personal essay about some of your favorite comfort reads, whether novels, poetry collections, memoirs, graphic novels, or even children’s picture books. Recount your earliest reading of the book and other times when you have turned to it again. Even if you have found different things to value in subsequent readings, what are the reliable elements that continue to provide an uplifting feeling?
In Sam Raimi’s latest horror film Send Help, a woman who is constantly underappreciated and passed over for a promotion by her lousy boss finds herself suddenly trapped on a deserted island with him. In this new environment, the tables have turned. Injured in the catastrophic plane crash that landed them on this island, he is now dependent on her canny survival skills, a dependence she finds herself more than eager to exploit. Write a short story in which, due to an unexpected event, a role reversal occurs between two main characters. What were the original power dynamics between the characters? Are there benefits and disadvantages for both characters when the tables are turned? In Raimi’s film, the characters occupy a gray area as sympathetic characters—see if you can play with drawing out moral or emotional ambiguities with the characters in your own story.
A $4.99 Costco rotisserie chicken, a plastic lawn flamingo, personal injury lawyer advertisements, a sad desk salad, a red Solo cup, a “Live, Laugh, Love” sign, a gas station bathroom key, and Botox are among the list of twenty-five objects in Emily Keegin’s recent New York Times piece “Welcome to My Museum of America,” a hypothetical museum showcasing Americanness. What are the relics you feel exemplify what it means to be an American living in contemporary society? This week write a poem exploring several objects that you would put in such a museum. Pick your objects carefully, reflecting on how each one might encapsulate something significant or insightful about the nation’s history, priorities, values, and habits. Select a diverse range of objects so that you can experiment with humor and fluctuations in tone.
“To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return,” says Jhumpa Lahiri in her 2021 Sebald Lecture “In Praise of Echo.” In the lecture, Lahiri invites readers to think of translation in broad terms, as not simply restating something in another language, but as a “miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.” Spend time with this idea of translation as transformation and write a personal essay about an experience in which you metamorphosed an experience, an emotion, or yourself into a different “language.” This language might be a visual art form, music, a different genre of literature, or another form of expression.