“I sit hunched over an open folder, I peer at Lorraine Hansberry’s cursive script, neat and sharp like the thoughts in her eyes,” writes Tisa Bryant in Residual (Nightboat Books, March 2026), an experimental memoir written in the aftermath of her mother’s death in which she includes works by Black women who haunt her meditations and creative work. Bryant writes toward a “shared Black imaginary” as she moves through reflections on art, loss, and literature. Begin composing a hybrid essay that incorporates elements of memoir and criticism by first brainstorming a list of people who haunt your thinking—you might jot down writers and artists you admire, or figures from fiction and nonfiction works. Write a series of vignettes in which you explore these specters while observing how they have infiltrated your personal life. Allow yourself to delve deep into diaristic details, perhaps even adding drawings or photographs.
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:
Argentine French author Copi introduces himself as the recipient and translator of a series of letters from a Parisian rat named Gouri to his former “master” in the 1979 novel City of Rats, translated from the French by Kit Schluter in a new edition forthcoming in March from New Directions. In the faux “Translator’s Preface,” Copi writes, “Decryption is not always a simple matter, although I think I’ve managed to the best of my ability here, even if certain passages penned in the rats’ language (two or three entire paragraphs of nothing but the letter ‘i,’ for example) fell away under my ruthless scissors.” Throughout the zany, fabulist narrative that is both whimsical and sexually obscene, the rat embarks on a reckless journey of adventure and crime. Write a short story in which you pose as the recipient of letters from a nonhuman character. As you select your character, consider the thematic possibilities that can be plumbed and how you might explore elements of conventional fables.
Susan Stewart’s seventh poetry collection, Bramble, forthcoming in April from the University of Chicago Press, traverses a wide range of poetic forms and subjects—including progressions throughout nature, illness and grief, and Biblical allusions—striking tones that are elegiac, invocatory, conversational, and observational at various points. The collection’s title might be one way to connect interpretations of the pieces through their depictions of entanglement and struggle, the presence of thorny destruction, but also of protection and blossoming. Taking inspiration from Stewart’s Bramble, write a series of poems that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on a complicated aspect of your own life, whether related to family, romance, spirituality, your job, or your creative practice. Where in other works of literature has your metaphorical subject been used, and how has it functioned?
In her foreword to a reissue of Audre Lorde’s 1982 book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography, forthcoming this month from Penguin Classics, Evie Shockley writes about Lorde’s version of writing about the self, in which mythologizing becomes a method to explain the inexplicable. Shockley writes: “What biomythography foregrounds is the way myth is central to her writing of her life, her writing for her life, her writing life, her life writing. A myth is a story that explains the nature or origins of a phenomenon—a story that often involves the supernatural.” Write a personal essay that takes inspiration from Lorde’s form and offers context to a particular event from your past by drawing from the lives and stories of people you have known, both in real life and from works of art. Does a supernatural tone arise from this incorporation of mythology to imbue your narrative with a sense of wonder?
On again and off again, breaking up and making up, will they or won’t they—romances are oftentimes full of ups and downs. Write a short story that revolves around a phase of fluctuations in a romantic relationship between two characters. You might choose to have the events of the narrative unfold in just the span of a day or two, or, if the story takes place over the course of months or years, you could spotlight vignettes of intense emotion when the characters are splitting up or getting back together. Whose point of view works most effectively for the tale you wish to tell? Are there elements of comedy, tragedy, horror, or suspense?
“I love snow and briefly. / I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold. / I love my twenties and want them back every day. / I love time. / I love people. / I love people and my time away from them the most.” In his poem “Love,” published in the American Poetry Review, Alex Dimitrov lists dozens of beloved things, each line beginning simply with, “I love.” The items listed often play off of each other and seem to meander associatively, in a stream-of-consciousness manner. Compose a poem that uses a list format to meditate on things you love. You might begin each line with a repeated phrase, or allow the entire poem to encompass one long list. Try experimenting with associative thinking, fluctuations of line length, and playful tones.
“This letter is likely too oblique, no doubt, too fragmented. It is not in the tradition of the epistle. Perhaps not an offer to correspond. I am no correspondent. Accept this witness as a journal glimpse,” writes Heid E. Erdrich in Literary Hub’s Letter From Minnesota series in response to the national turmoil over recent ICE operations in Minneapolis. “In my mind, our city is a body, alive and coursing through us, even where sacred streams are sluiced under streets.” Write an open letter or a note to yourself that includes bits and pieces of language from recent news events with your personal reflections on ideas revolving around political power and the ways in which communities may break or come together in response. Allow yourself the freedom to circle obliquely around emotions you may feel confused about, and to depart from traditional epistolary form in using fragments and diaristic vignettes.
Recent and unusual, “fish out of water” animal sightings include a coyote swimming through the San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz Island, and a rare Galápagos albatross flying high up above the Pacific off the central coast of California, likely having traveled over three thousand miles beyond its typical range. This week write a short story about a character who takes off on a journey of vast distances, possibly one filled with potential risks and unknown factors. Will you reveal your character’s motivations right off the bat, gradually, only in the final moments of the narrative, or at all? You might decide to experiment with writing sections of the story from different points of view and shifting from more zoomed-out descriptive passages to moments of interior monologue.
X. J. Kennedy, prolific and award-winning poet who died at the age of ninety-six on February 1, was known for verses which often incorporated rhyming couplets and light humor. The title poem from his debut 1961 collection, Nude Descending a Staircase, is based on Marcel Duchamp’s painting of the same name and is made up of three short stanzas, beginning with: “Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, / a gold of lemon, root and rind, / she sifts in sunlight down the stairs / with nothing on. Nor on her mind.” Taking inspiration from this style, select a few works by a favorite artist—whether paintings, sculptures, films, or music—and compose a series of short poems that make use of end rhymes, and perhaps traditional forms of an ode, ballad, elegy, or sonnet. How might deploying a surprising twist of humor inject the poems with a sense of playful energy?
Advertisements have been ubiquitous from the days of town criers and hand-painted signage, to radio spots and television commercials, and the digital billboards of the twenty-first century. Think back to a memorable ad from your childhood and write a lyrical essay inspired by the words and imagery found within it. How does the slogan resonate with a particular time in your life and your desires at that age? You might include snippets of phrases to consider how those words can take on new meanings when separated from their original context.
“The nice thing about writing fiction is that we can put our characters through things we’d never be brave—or foolhardy—enough to do,” writes Larissa Pham in a recent essay published on Literary Hub about how her debut novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), was inspired by writing about a subject that scared her. “Through our writing, we leap into the unknown.” This week consider some of your greatest fears, anything from creepy crawlies to the loss of loved ones to melodramatic betrayal. Write a short story that revolves around one of these fears, concocting an arc that fluctuates between moments of slow, modulated actions and descriptions of higher tensions. Do you find yourself inclined to take the story to intense extremes or to end things on a simmer?
In “Object Loss,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), Sharon Olds touches upon the emotions brought up from objects that were formerly tied to a romantic partner—a clock, a chair, a table. These physical items exemplify the metaphysicality of human connection. “As I add to the stash which will go to him,” writes Olds, “I feel as if I’m falling away / from family—as of each ponderous / object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were / the scenery of the play now closing, / lengthy run it had.” Jot down a list of objects that you’ve held on to from people you’ve loved in the past. Compose a poem that incorporates several of those items, taking care to describe their physical attributes. What sentiments did they evoke while in the act of parting, and after?
“A strange thing happens when a monument enters a museum: it becomes a lot less sure of itself,” writes Alex Kitnick in a 4Columns review about the MONUMENTS exhibition currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “Separated from their pedestals, museum monuments look lost, wandering, missing their lift.” Taking inspiration from this exhibition, which decontextualizes toppled Confederate memorial statues, pick out a statue or memorial that you find striking. Write an essay about the original intentions of the monument and then think about what it would mean to take it out of its physical and historical context. How does this act connect to your personal experiences?
Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl (Hogarth, 2025), follows the life of a young artist living in Berlin, who grapples with the history and contemporary racial tensions of both the country in which she resides, and her cultural identity as a Muslim woman and the daughter of Afghan refugees. In an interview for the Creative Independent, Aber talks about exploring her relationship to shame and desire through writing the novel, and how desire can be an antidote to shame but also come with a feeling of shame. “To want something is inherently embarrassing and risky,” says Aber. Write a short story with a character who has a deeply buried or previously uninterrogated feeling of shame. What are the roots of this shame? Is it tied to national, global, or cultural expectations?
Ilya Kaminsky begins his poem “Psalm for the Slightly Tilted,” which was published this week in the New Yorker, with the lines: “This is not / a good year. / But it has / witnesses.” In this first month of the new year, compose a poem that begins with “This is a ____ year,” or perhaps “This is not a ____ year.” In Kaminsky’s poem, he explores protest, revolution, and resistance, deploying imagery of things that are slightly askew: a question mark, bent spoons, off-rhythm chants, and people leaning and lopsided. Think of how you would characterize the year based on these first weeks, considering what’s happening in your own life, and in political and global events. What sort of imagery might characterize the sentiments or mood of this month?
In a recent interview with George Saunders by David Marchese for the New York Times Magazine, the author, whose novel Vigil is forthcoming from Random House this month, talks about examining the concept of death and the afterlife. “Death is the moment when somebody comes and says: You know those three things that you’ve always thought of? They’re not true. You’re not permanent, you’re not the most important thing and you’re not separate,” says Saunders. “I think about it a lot, but I find it a joyful thing, because it’s just a reality check.” Spend some time thinking about what Saunders refers to as a “trio of delusions”—that is, the delusions of one’s permanence, self-importance, and separateness. Jot down any memories or anecdotes in which you recall seeing one or more of these delusions play out. Write an essay that considers how it is that these might actually be fallacies, and why it is that we hold onto these concepts.
The subject of Cover-Up, a documentary directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, is Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist for the past fifty years who first gained fame when covering the My Lai massacre and exposing U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. The film’s footage blends interviews with the journalist and materials from his archives revealing Hersh’s tenacious sense of purpose, as well as controversies from his writing career. Together, this creates a complex portrait of journalistic integrity and responsibility, and of the role of a free press amid corrupt government politics. Write a short story that imagines an investigative journalist who is attempting to cover—or uncover—a controversial scandal. What components of your character’s personal background contribute to the urgency of their pursuit? Does their commitment to serve the public good come at a cost in other areas of their personal life?
“i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to / anymore, maybe my gut— // maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.” In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good, a poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier this month, the speaker contemplates a struggle between science and faith. Good won a 2020 prize from the Academy of American Poets for the poem, and guest judge Rajiv Mohabir spoke about what resonates with him in a recent Newsweek article: “What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left? The poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality.” Write a poem that is situated between the opposing tensions of wonder and brutality. Is there a point at which definition and description are overwhelming?
In 2024, Pete Wells wrote an essay about moving on from his position of twelve years as the chief restaurant critic for the New York Times, recounting how the demands of eating for his job took a toll on his body, and how colleagues in his profession often experience issues with their health. “We avoid mentioning weight the way actors avoid saying ‘Macbeth,’” writes Wells. “Partly, we do this out of politeness. Mostly, though, we all know that we’re standing on the rim of an endlessly deep hole and that if we look down we might fall in.” This week write a personal essay that examines your own relationship with food and dining out. Perhaps there’s a change you’d like to make or you’ve recently discovered a new sense of contentment with your habits of consumption. What are some memorable meals, good or bad?
One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, has been lauded by many film critics for managing to blend tones of absurdist comedy with a moving depiction of familial bonds and an examination of larger themes around revolution, fascism, and contemporary politics. Taking inspiration from this mixture of registers and tones, write a short story that revolves around a consequential aspect of current world events, whether real or imagined. Allow yourself the freedom to bestow your characters with zany personality traits and idiosyncrasies, and to veer off into the cartoonish and absurd. How might incorporating some questionable details into the world of your story imbue it with a feeling of realism?
Catchy lyrics are often the reason popular songs get stuck in our heads, although sometimes the lyrics take on a life of their own. John Cougar Mellencamp’s 1982 hit song “Jack & Diane,” a “little ditty” about a young American couple, includes the line, “Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee-Freez,” a striking description of a scene that has inspired multiple comedic covers of the song in which the chili dog phrase is repeated over and over. Jot down a list of phrases from songs that have gotten stuck in your head, perhaps because of a certain oddness or seemingly nonsensical nature paired with evocative imagery. Write a poem that begins with the lyric, allowing associations and context from the song to mingle with what your personal memories bring to the words.
“I notice a weird thing about Zoom: In order to give people the impression that you’re making eye contact, you have to look not at them but at the camera lens,” writes Anne Fadiman in her essay “Screen Share,” which appears in her collection Frog: And Other Essays, forthcoming in February from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Their images are lower down. If you look at them, you won’t look as if you’re looking at them.” In the essay, Fadiman recounts shifting from teaching in-person classes to learning a new technology during the pandemic, as well as the social and practical challenges she and her students faced. Write a personal essay about your relationship to a specific technology, whether it be smartphones, apps, navigation systems, chatbots, or streaming media. What is revealed by the technology you choose to use when it comes to your values and relationships?
In Maria Stepanova’s novel The Disappearing Act, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, forthcoming in February from New Directions, the narrator, like the author, is a writer navigating the challenges of living in exile after her home country invades a neighboring state. Ambiguity or the absence of identity is prevalent throughout the novel—the protagonist, cities, and countries are never explicitly named. “The foreign city where M now lived was full of people fleeing from both countries, and those who’d been attacked by her own compatriots regarded their former neighbors with horror and suspicion, as if life before the war had ceased to have any meaning,” writes Stepanova. Compose a short story that makes use of this type of anonymity to create a narrative that circles around themes of alienation, disappearance, escape, and loneliness. In the world of your story, how does this anonymity serve the journey that your character is embarking on?
Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, currently on view at Dia Beacon in New York’s Hudson Valley, is the first U.S. retrospective covering the Taiwanese conceptual artist’s performance works. Each of his projects, which last an entire year, pushes at the boundaries between life and art: 365 days spent locked in a wooden cage, or living on the streets of New York City, or punching in on a time clock every hour on the hour in his studio, or tethering himself with a rope to another artist. “My art is doing time, so it’s not different from doing life or doing art, or doing time. No matter whether I stay in ‘art-time’ or ‘life-time,’ I am passing time,” Hsieh said in a 2019 interview for the Believer. How is the passing of time connected to your sense of observation as a poet? Write a poem that reflects the distinctions or similarities between your “art-time” and “life-time.”
Do you want to spend time eating in a place that’s been called a “fully immersive postmodern design hellscape-themed dining experience?” Over the years, despite the eclectic interior decor, ambience, and absurdly lengthy menu that has been written about by bewildered yet admiring journalists, the Cheesecake Factory has become a top-ranked casual restaurant chain and a cult favorite amongst celebrities. Think about the interior of a place that you have strong opinions about. Maybe it’s a room in a grandparents’ house from long ago, a particular restaurant, library, or a favorite bookstore. Write a personal essay that describes in detail the various architectural and interior design elements at play. Examine your personal memories in connection to your aesthetic responses to the site to make your descriptions as vivid as possible.