In Nicole Krauss’s short story “Seeing Ershadi,” published in the New Yorker in 2018, a ballet dancer becomes obsessed with the actor Homayoun Ershadi, who plays Mr. Badii in the iconic Iranian film Taste of Cherry directed by Abbas Kiarostami. The story takes a turn when the protagonist travels to Japan with her dance company and sees Ershadi in a crowd, then follows him believing she must save the actor from the suicide he commits in the film. With a vividly convincing narrative voice, Krauss’s story embodies the impact great art can have, how a performance can haunt a viewer into seeing their life in a new light. This week, try writing a story that captures the relationship between a viewer and a work of art. What haunts your protagonist into reassessing something in their life?
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:
Sandy and Danny’s summer nights in Grease, Tony and Maria on a fire escape in West Side Story, Joe and Princess Anne’s single day together in Roman Holiday—the summer romance is a common trope in film and literature for good reason. In an article for the online therapy company Talkspace, therapist Cynthia V. Catchings notes that summer is a time “to escape from routine and open up to new people and experiences.” A welcome uptick in the production of serotonin due to the increase in sunlight, the relaxed school and work schedules, and the ubiquity of breezy summer clothing all account for feeling good and at ease. Inspired by fun summer flings, write a short story in which two characters experience a whirlwind affair. Play with the conventions of this trope and try upending the expectations associated with a romantic story.
“It was true what Mrs. Berry said: No one expected to see an old woman in a muscle car, a convertible Mustang with polished chrome bumpers, a hood scoop, and an engine that ran with a throaty hum that we could feel in that soft place just below our stomachs as she pulled alongside us one day on our walk home from school,” writes John Fulton in the first sentence of his short story “Saved,” which appears in his collection The Flounder (Blackwater Press, 2023). Consider Fulton’s nuanced description of his character and how this opens the story and write a long first sentence describing disparate aspects of a new character. What unexpected act does your protagonist experience to open your first scene?
In the television series Yellowjackets, members of a high school girls’ soccer team survive a plane crash in the remote Canadian wilderness and descend into savage clans to stay alive. The dark coming-of-age drama, which incorporates everything from romantic entanglements to cannibalism, brings to mind fictionalized and real-life survival stories such as William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies and the 1972 Andes flight disaster. This week write a short story in which a group of people is forced to survive in a strange and wild place. What dramas arise when the limits of human endurance are tested?
“The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite,” writes the late Martin Amis in his memoir Experience (Hyperion, 2000) about seeing the parallels between real life and fiction, and making those connections in his writing. “The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending.” This week, inspired by Amis’s process, adapt dialogue from your own life into a short story. Compare what really happened with how you write it in fiction. Can you learn anything from life’s seemingly predictable patterns?
Although the summer solstice for the Northern Hemisphere is still a month away, the upcoming Memorial Day weekend celebrated by Americans often marks the unofficial beginning of summer. Some enjoy the long weekend with barbecues, road trips, and beach outings. While others visit cemeteries to honor and commemorate members of the military as well as loved ones who’ve passed away. Inspired by the days leading up to the start of summer, write a story set during a holiday weekend in which grief and celebration come to a head. What complicated emotions do your characters experience while enjoying their time off?
In a scene from Mary Gaitskill’s novel Veronica, the protagonist reflects on an innocent moment from her childhood: “When I was a young child, my mother told me that love is what makes the flowers grow. I pictured love inside the flowers, opening their petals and guiding their roots down to suck the earth.” This week write a story based on a myth told to you as a child, whether it be storks delivering babies, the tooth fairy trading money for teeth, or that chewing gum would stay in your stomach for seven years if you swallowed it. Were there good intentions behind these stories or did they cause more harm than good?
The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape edited by Katie Holten is an anthology of poems, essays, quotations, song lyrics, recipes, and other texts offering a variety of perspectives on trees and their relationship to human life. With contributions from writers such as Ross Gay, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Carl Phillips, the book also includes a “Tree Alphabet” created by Holten translating each letter of the English alphabet into a drawing of a different type of tree. “When we translate our words into glyphs, such as trees, it forces us to re-read everything,” writes Holten in the afterward. Inspired by this “rewilding” of language, write a short story in which a forested area plays a major role. How will the trees speak in your story?
“I tell my audiences over and over, you should rethink the old gray women in your life that you take for granted,” says Luis Alberto Urrea about writing his new novel, Good Night, Irene (Little, Brown, 2023), in the May/June 2023 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. “My mom’s own madness wrecked her. But you try and you try to give something back, and in this book, I finally gave my mom a happy ending.” Inspired by the most important women in his life, his mother and his wife, Urrea began a journey of research and exploration to tell this personal tale. Write a short story that reimagines the biography of someone close to you. How would you offer grace or a new perspective?
At the end of the nineteenth century, French impressionist painter Claude Monet repeatedly painted the water lilies he planted in the pond of his famed water garden in Giverny, France. According to the description of his “Water Lilies” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, after nearly sixteen years Monet achieved “a completely new, fluid, and somewhat audacious style of painting in which the water-lily pond became the point of departure for an almost abstract art.” This week write a story in which an artist reaches a turning point in their practice. What are the conditions in their life that lead to this needed transformation? For inspiration, read Rachel Cusk’s story “The Stuntman.”
In Nathacha Appanah’s novel The Sky Above the Roof, translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan and out now from Graywolf Press, a family drama unfolds through the eyes of several characters. After seventeen-year-old Wolf steals his mother’s car to search for his estranged sister, he causes an accident for which he is arrested and incarcerated, forcing his mother and sister to fight for his release. Instead of using a linear narrative to tell the story of what led to this event, Appanah builds the family’s fractured lives into the novel’s structure, each chapter offering a new version of events. As the novel progresses and more details about the characters are revealed, the reader is able to piece together the story. Taking inspiration from nonlinear narratives, build a story around a single life-altering event. First, try listing the characters affected by the conflict then write into their individual perspectives, taking into account each distinct tone, diction, and background.
According to a 2022 YouGov online poll, half of Americans consume true crime content, and one in three say they consume it at least once a week. Popular podcasts such as Serial as well as television shows and streaming series such as Unsolved Mysteries and Dahmer are proof of the continuing trend. The suspenseful genre invites enthusiasts into the lives of serial killers, kidnappers, law enforcement, and in some cases, the victims of the crimes. The poll showed that many enjoy the genre for the sense of suspense and excitement, but also to understand criminals and their motivations. This week, write a story inspired by true crime dramas. Whose perspective will you write from?
In a recent New York Times article, reporter Gina Kolata writes about a series of medical discoveries and family secrets surrounding eighteenth-century German composer Ludwig van Beethoven. An international group of researchers published a paper last month after DNA analysis of what were known to be strands of Beethoven’s hair. Their report debunks many long-held myths about the composer including his cause of death, how he lost his hearing, and his living descendants. Inspired by this scientific and historical drama, write a story in which a scientific discovery reveals intimate secrets about a famous person. With the steady rise of genetic research being conducted, consider the intersection between science and personal history.
In response to a series of pension reforms by French president Emmanuel Macron, municipal waste collectors began a strike earlier this month, leaving over 10,000 tons of trash to collect on the streets of Paris. Viral videos have documented the City of Light transformed into a strange landscape of black bags, abandoned toilets, strewn furniture, and cardboard boxes. This week, write a story in which a set of events triggers a city’s landscape to change dramatically. The setting can be based on real events or surrealistic, as with Donald Barthelme’s short story “The Balloon,” published in the New Yorker in 1966.
Adam Mars-Jones’s novel Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem (New Directions, 2020) explores a relationship between two men: naive eighteen-year-old Colin and his decade-older lover Ray. Told from the point of view of Colin, whose self-deprecating remarks diminish his image and idolize his partner, readers are brought into his view of the world. In one scene, Colin refers to his partner’s sweat as “an elixir” and his own as “no more than a waste product.” Mars-Jones uses Colin’s unique voice to develop his character as well as mimic his role in his relationship with Ray, setting up his emotional arc. Inspired by this narrative technique, write a story in which your narrator has an extreme view of themselves, whether narcissistic or self-deprecating. What effect does this have on how your story develops?
In the period of late antiquity, the ides of March was typically the day when citizens in Rome celebrated New Year’s festivals, such as the feast of Anna Perenna, honoring the goddess of long life and renewal, and Mamuralia, a ceremony in which an old man wearing animal skins was beaten with sticks and exiled from the city, symbolizing the shedding of the old year. Many may now associate the day with the ominous phrase from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar: “Beware the ides of March.” Taking inspiration from these myths and rituals, write a story in which a powerful figure is celebrated and then meets their demise. How will you flesh out this character’s personality while setting up the rise and fall of their reign?
In the film Tár, written and directed by Todd Field and starring Cate Blanchett, a world-renowned orchestra conductor is caught in a scandal surrounding a series of sexual abuse allegations. The Oscar-nominated film uses persuasive world-building and parallels to news stories surrounding cancel culture, the #MeToo movement, and the culture of artistic fame—including an integral scene with a cameo by New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik—to create a realistic portrayal of a complicated character. This week, write a fictional story that attempts to convince the reader that the events actually happened in real life. For further inspiration from uncanny depictions of reality in fiction, read Miranda July’s short story “Roy Spivey.”
In a short essay for Literary Hub’s “Craft of Writing” newsletter, novelist Rebecca Makkai argues that setting is the most underutilized tool in fiction. Makkai explains that a setting should “give the reader enough ambience and context that they can extrapolate a world” as well as take an active part in offering characters something to react to and “trap characters together, destabilize them, provoke change, or provide refuge, urgency, or danger.” Keeping this definition in mind, draft a short story by starting with a clear and time-specific setting. Try to delineate the time period, the physical location, and the relationship this setting has to your protagonist so it can make an impact on your story.
In the latest installment of our Ten Questions series, Colin Winnette discusses the inspiration behind his surreal dystopian novel Users (Soft Skull, 2023), which follows a troubled technology designer mired in a controversy surrounding a virtual-reality program he creates. When looking for ways to shape the book, Winnette was struck by a series of tweets by entrepreneur, and cofounder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey about his ten-day silent meditation retreat in Myanmar. “There was something so striking to me about the then-leading personality behind one of the noisiest places to exist online making such a dogged pursuit of silence,” says Winnette. This week write a story set in a silent retreat in which tensions start to rise. How will you sustain the story’s conflict despite there being little to no dialogue?
In “When the Novel Swiped Right,” Jennifer Wilson, a contributing essayist for the New York Times Book Review, tracks the effect dating apps have had on contemporary literature. In the essay, Wilson points to writers who have creatively used dating apps as a narrative device, such as Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, and Sarah Thankam Matthews, and encourages more writers to take advantage of how the apps “make possible encounters among characters who might not otherwise come into contact by virtue of differences in age, race, or class.” This week, write a story that involves two unlikely people meeting on a dating app. What do they discover as they get to know each other?
Depths of Wikipedia is a popular series of social media accounts dedicated to posting obscure facts published on the free online open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia. Posts include Jimmy the Raven, a raven actor who appeared in hundreds of films including The Wizard of Oz and It’s a Wonderful Life; Mr. Ouch, a hazard symbol developed by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association with children’s safety in mind; and the dinkus, a typographic symbol consisting of a line of asterisks often used as section breaks in a text. This week write a story that incorporates one of these curious Wikipedia facts into your plot.
“On stage, bodies in motion paired with words deliver both language and emotion. I have that same hope for the novel I’m struggling to write,” writes Kathryn Ma in a recent installment of our Writers Recommend series about the impact watching live theater has on her writing. “Dialogue travels, reaching me in the dark. I’m not taking down notes, but my ear is. If I’m open and lucky, the magic might follow me home.” This week write a story in which your character is moved by watching a live theatrical performance. What is the play about? How does the performance taking place on stage mirror the struggles your character is enduring?
Noah Baumbach’s film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Sam Esmail’s forthcoming film adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, HBO’s miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven—novels with apocalyptic themes are appearing on screen more and more. Whether through satire or stark realism, this suspenseful setting allows writers to explore profound themes of survival, friendship, trust, hope, and resiliency. Inspired by apocalypse novels, write a short story that imagines the end of a modern civilization. Will you lean more toward satire, realism, or another form of expression entirely?
It’s awards show season for the film and television industry, but behind the camera are all the hardworking folks that make these shows happen. From florists arranging dramatic centerpieces, to chauffeurs driving celebrities from venue to venue, to the graphic designers of the envelopes holding the winners’ names—each individual helps make these one-night-only events possible. Consider what happens behind the scenes at one of these massive events and write a story from the perspective of someone working for an awards show. Imagine the mounting pressure throughout the night, the unexpected responsibilities that may arise, and the difficult celebrities one might encounter for the details in your story.
The multitude of popular astrology apps—such as Co–Star, the Pattern, and Time Passages—exemplifies how the ancient study of celestial bodies predicting what happens on Earth is still very relevant. Many rely on astrological readings for career and dating advice, financial decisions, spiritual guidance, and even for what books to read. Write a short story in which a character relies on astrology to make a major life decision. How does their relationship to this divinatory practice change once things are set in motion?