To do something at the eleventh hour is to accomplish a task at the last possible moment. The origins of the phrase are unknown, although there is some indication it may come from a Bible parable or simply from the idea of the eleventh hour being close to the twelve o’clock hour at midnight signaling the end of a day. This week write a short story in which your main character manages to pull off a miraculous feat at the eleventh hour. It might be something seemingly mundane—a household chore, a work project, a last-minute gift for a special occasion—that turns out to have wider implications or consequences. Is waiting until it’s almost too late typical of your character or wildly unexpected? What drama is drawn from your character flying by the seat of their pants?
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
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“‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.” The final sentence of Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” is included in a short list of “The Best Last Lines in Books” on Penguin Random House UK’s website, along with selections from a range of books by authors such as Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka, Ira Levin, and Virginia Woolf. Many of these lines are powerfully evocative and open-ended, whether darkly humorous, straight-up horrifying, or daringly hopeful. Jot down a list of your favorite last lines and use one of them as a prompt to provide either the first sentence of a new short story or to inspire a plot. How do the emotions, weight, and mood of this final sentence affect the way you use it in your own piece?
In the title story of Saeed Teebi’s 2022 debut collection, Her First Palestinian (House of Anansi Press), a new romance begins with the main character, Abed, acknowledging what is involved in getting to know another person: “Not long after the first joys of finding each other had settled, Nadia asked me if I would teach her about my country. It was inevitable. The walls of my Toronto apartment were conspicuously covered with Palestinian artifacts, and donation brochures featuring Gazan children were often lying around.” With the story’s title and this opening, Teebi invites the reader to consider and reflect on their own expectations of how this relationship will develop. Write a short story that charts the progression of a relationship, from somewhere near the beginning to somewhere near the end. What character details do you explicitly put into place, and what assumptions do you rely on to create a sense of expectation?
“I cannot help but admire Rooney the storyteller, willing to toe that tricky line between the pleasure-read and philosophy, determined to choose cooperation over cynicism,” writes Jessi Jezewska Stevens in her review of Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), published in 4Columns. In the article, Stevens considers the task of a work of literature that attempts to be both a novel-of-ideas and a realist romance. This week compose a short story that simultaneously explores a philosophical idea close to your heart and chronicles a romantic relationship’s ups and downs. Do your characters discuss large issues with each other in pages of dialogue or through e-mail correspondences, or do they embody the ideas in another way? Are there additional ways you can think of to accomplish portraying both tasks?
Nutter Butter, the peanut butter sandwich cookie that launched in 1969, has recently found itself the topic of internet discussion revolving around videos posted on their TikTok page, which combine the bizarre and psychedelic with the creepy and cryptic. In an interview with the New York Times, a social media manager for the cookie company’s accounts spoke about how social media content performs best when it’s confusing and surreal, remarking: “We were trying to tap into: What is a Nutter Butter’s fever dream?” Write a short story inspired by imagining the fever dream of an object of your choosing—perhaps a favorite snack or household product. How might leaning into the nonsensical open new pathways for your story’s forward momentum?
Earlier this summer, while on a camping trip in Yellowstone National Park with his owners, a two-year-old Siamese cat named Rayne Beau ran off into the Wyoming woods and went missing. After several days of searching the area, the owners returned to their California home devastated only to receive a phone call two months later that the cat had been spotted wandering around three hours north of their home, traversing more than eight hundred miles. Write a short story that imagines the trials and tribulations that a pet might experience embarking on a long journey home. You might decide to use multiple perspectives throughout the narrative, considering the people and terrain the animal encounters along the way.
Why did the chicken cross the road? In Tad Friend’s 2002 New Yorker piece “In Search of the World’s Funniest Joke,” he details the work of Dr. Richard Wiseman, a British psychologist who conducted a global humor study that included an experiment comparing scores for the same joke with different animals inserted in it. “We found that the funniest animal of all is a duck,” said Wiseman. “So science has determined that, if you’re going to tell a talking-animal joke, make it a duck.” Write a short story that involves a duck, whether in a main role, or in a minor appearance. See if you can facilitate the duck’s function as a humorous device: Is its appearance unexpectedly wacky or quirky? Do the human characters respond in a humorous way, or does the hilarity extend from a deadpan atmosphere?
Airport security lines: a place for aesthetically pleasing arrangements of items or high stress rushing? A recent viral social media trend that involves taking photos of meticulously curated TSA bins presents the possibility that there are those who view an airport security line as an influencer opportunity rather than a time-consuming and inconvenient obligation. Write a short story that focuses on a confrontation of opposing viewpoints set in an airport, a locale where people are oftentimes stressed about getting to their flights on time, running into delays, and scrutinizing the plans for their trips. Try incorporating some humor, light or dark, into the situation or tease out an element of suspense.
Earlier this month, Science journal published an article detailing findings that linked the death of bats to higher human infant mortality rates. In U.S. counties where bat populations decreased due to a fungal disease called white-nose syndrome, farmers increased their use of pesticides to compensate for the insect population control that bats typically provide, and putting more pesticide into the environment led to increased infant deaths. Write a short story that demonstrates the unfolding of a chain reaction that occurs when the population of one animal in our interconnected ecosystem either significantly increases or decreases the human population. You might experiment with incorporating elements of certain genres, like science fiction, mystery, romance, or even comedy into your story.
“Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them,” writes Caity Weaver in an article published in the New York Times Magazine about the wasteful production of pennies. “A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States…enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man.” Write a short story that imagines a different life for the copper-plated coin, perhaps a universe in which all dormant pennies are suddenly used or an attempt to collect and dispose of them is put into place. What would propel your characters to care about the worth of a penny?
French director and screenwriter Tran Anh Hung’s Oscar-nominated film The Taste of Things, adapted from a 1924 novel by Swiss author Marcel Rouff, opens with a scene that takes place in the ground-floor kitchen of a late-nineteenth-century estate in France. The scene, which lasts for nearly forty minutes and contains little dialogue, consists primarily of shots of a chef and his cooks preparing a sumptuous feast as they maneuver around one another, handling and arranging various ingredients for each dish. The camera zooms in on the pots and pans, and precise sounds of sizzling, sauteing, crackling, rinsing, stirring, bubbling, and steaming are captured. Write a scene or portion of a short story that focuses in on the sounds of a particular room in your setting. When you subtract human voices, does a chronicle of meticulous details emerge?
In the documentary Yintah, directors Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell, and Michael Toledano chronicle how Wet’suwet’en First Nation have been fighting to protect their unceded territory in northern British Columbia for decades, most recently in protests and blockades against pipeline developments. The film spanning more than a decade of conflict captures the spirit of Wet’suwet’en resistance in the face of Canadian government policies and police invasions, and their fight for the survival of the land itself. Write a short story that revolves around a group of people who are beset upon by unjust policies, and explore the values and priorities of each side. How do strengths, weaknesses, advantages, and disadvantages play out?
Is it science fiction or simply the state of advanced, contemporary science? Hiromi Kawakami’s latest novel, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in September and translated from the Japanese by Asa Yoneda, takes place thousands of years in the future when humans are near extinction. Children are created in factories from the cells of animals including cows, dolphins, horses, and mice. Kawakami’s magical realism blends scientific advancements with real-life phenomena such as population aging, as well as the existing technologies of cloning and xenotransplantation. Using an idea or a concept derived from scientific studies or your own research, write a speculative fiction story that builds on existing technology to achieve the fantastic. In your invented future what fundamental issues of ethics, traditions, and mortality arise?
In Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 Booker Prize–winning novel, The English Patient, four main characters—a young Canadian army nurse, an Indian Sikh working as a British military engineer, a thief, and the eponymous patient—find themselves at a bombed-out Italian villa toward the end of World War II. Through a convergence of sections that weave in and out of time, between the past and present, and told through the characters’ various points of view, the story comes into focus. Write a short story that takes place in a vivid locale where a small group of characters has converged. Experiment with telling the story from multiple perspectives, and alternating chronology. In Ondaatje’s novel, the nonlinear storytelling reflects the effects of war trauma—how might time in your story work on a thematic level?
In 1996, scientists created the first clone of a mammal, a sheep named Dolly. Since 2015, a company based in Texas called ViaGen Pets has cloned hundreds of dogs, cats, and horses for tens of thousands of dollars each. Scientists have warned of the ethical issues of cloning—both in the ways in which the process requires the use of multiple animals (an egg donor and a surrogate carrier), and in the precedence it sets for humans. Write a short story in which a cloned animal plays an integral role in a plot twist. Is the animal’s cloned history kept hidden for some reason? What made this animal so exceptional to be cloned? Consider the complexity and emotions involved with your characters’ values and ethics in this decision.
This week, in preparation for the upcoming opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, consider the Olympic creed: “The important thing in life is not the triumph, but the fight; the essential thing is not to have won, but to have fought well.” Write a short story that revolves around a competition of some sort—whether between friends, enemies, strangers, or within a liminal relationship of some kind. Decide between a contest of mental or physical abilities, or a battle of wills. Are there high stakes or is the contest seemingly inconsequential? Does all go as planned or is there a surprising upset? Think about your characters’ respective perspectives on the spirit of competition, and what constitutes as fighting fairly.
Ghosting, the social practice of suddenly cutting off communication without explanation by no longer accepting or responding to calls or messages, is often associated with dating but can also extend to other arenas of interpersonal communication and socializing, such as the interview process for a new job or with friends and family. Write a short story that revolves around two people, one of whom ghosts the other. What are the dynamics of communication that lead up to the ghosting, and what is the fallout? Are excuses made or is hindsight twenty-twenty? Consider how much of each party’s point of view to reveal prior to and after the ghosting.
The Swimmer, a group exhibition of around one hundred works by dozens of artists at the Flag Art Foundation in New York City, is inspired by John Cheever’s short story of the same name, published in the New Yorker in 1964, in which his protagonist ventures to return home by swimming across his affluent neighbors’ backyard pools on a summer day. Curator Jonathan Rider selected and arranged the artworks to reflect the story’s themes of idealism, identity, class, failure and loss, and the instability of time and reality. This week write a short story that incorporates a swimming pool in some way. Whether an integral part of the plot or seen somewhere in the periphery, spend a bit of time describing its visual imagery, colors, light, and texture. Does it feel static or dynamic, vacant or crowded? Are there multiple interpretations for what functions the pool could serve?
In the new horror film The Exorcism directed and cowritten by Joshua John Miller, Russell Crowe plays an actor who stars as a priest in a horror film, one that largely resembles the 1973 classic film The Exorcist, whose young priest was played by Miller’s father. This week take a page from this jumble of connections and nested narratives, and write a short story that contains within it another short story. The nested story could be something one of your characters is writing, or perhaps a story one of your characters comes across in a book. Decide whether to include some or all of the text of the nested story inside your larger story. You may want to play around with oppositional genres, such as humor and tragedy, or make use of similar plot points for an eerie effect.
In a 2012 interview for the Guardian, Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai explained his predilection for writing extremely long sentences that manage to endure for dozens of pages: “This characteristic, very classical, short sentence—at the end with a dot—this is artificial, this is only a custom, this is perhaps helpful for the reader, but for only one reason, that the readers in the last few thousand years have learned that a short sentence is easier to understand.” For Krasznahorkai, the long sentence extends beyond the desire to reflect the natural continuousness of human speech, but to also express the speaker’s existential drive, a seemingly overwhelming desire to communicate, to be empowered to say their piece. Write a short story that consists of a single sentence, using any punctuation you’d like but saving the period until the very end. How does this constraint affect your story’s themes?
In an interview published in Salon, Rosemary Mosco, author of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird (Workman Publishing, 2021), reflects on the historical connections between pigeons and people, and recounts a process of domestication, obsolescence, and abandonment. “The city pigeons around us…were domesticated by humans a really long time ago,” says Mosco. “They were really bred to be good at living near us. And then, we forgot, and now they keep hanging around us. And we’re like, ‘why are they here?’” Write a short story that involves an encounter or situation with a domesticated animal, whether a pet, livestock, or one wandering the streets. Think about the wild ancestors of this animal, and how they’ve become entwined with humans and civilization. How might you connect philosophical ideas around domestication with other larger themes of your story?
Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, forthcoming in July from Bloomsbury, is narrated by Asya, one half of a young couple setting out to build a new life together in a foreign city. While they solidify friendships, search for an apartment, and accommodate visiting relatives, Asya begins a documentary project. Each of the novel’s vignette titles reference anthropological concepts: Notions of Loyalty, Child-Rearing, Native Tongue, Courtship, Gift Exchange, Division of Labor, Principles of Kinship, and Forms of Enchantment. As Asya reflects on anthropological distance and lenses, these headings raise questions about the conventions, expectations, and routines that constitute a life. What makes a life legible—and to whom? Write a short story with subheadings providing insight or an alternative perspective on scenes. How might they produce additional layers of complexity and ambiguity?
The 2023 thriller film Fair Play, written and directed by Chloe Domont, follows the lives of a young, newly engaged couple, Luke and Emily, who are colleagues working as analysts in the cutthroat world of high finance in New York. The film focuses on the progression of their relationship, which has been kept hidden from their hedge fund office, and the bitter disintegration of their happiness after a promotion that was initially rumored to go to Luke is unexpectedly bestowed upon Emily, which situates him as a subordinate to his wife within a misogynistic workplace. Write a short story that revolves around an occurrence that catalyzes a shift in the power dynamic between two main characters who have a close relationship. What are the initial responses, and does the transformation happen suddenly or gradually? Are there gender, generational, or other cultural issues that play a role?
In Stephen King’s 1983 novel, Pet Sematary, a doctor moves into a remote house in Maine with his wife, two young children, and their pet cat, and learns from a neighbor about an ancient burial ground nearby cursed by a malevolent spirit which gave it power to reanimate those buried there. This is put to the test first by the family cat, and then by members of the family who die throughout the course of King’s horror story. While each formerly dead being is returned to the land of the living, they don’t come back quite the same. Write a story in which a creature or person returns from the dead, either in actuality or under circumstances in which their reappearance feels as if they are “back from the dead.” What familiar traits remain the same and what is disconcertingly different? Is their return ultimately for the better or the worse?
While the American proverb “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” may be one you’ve heard time and again, often in reference to the idea that whoever raises or vocalizes a criticism the loudest will be appeased, there is a Japanese saying that translates to “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down,” which points to the positives of conformity in order to maintain a productive and humble society. It can also refer to putting someone who has become too successful back down in their place. Write a story in which your main character diverges from a group of people, and sticks their neck out, so to speak. Perhaps they vocalize a contrary perspective, protest something they feel is unjust, or simply present themselves in an unconventional manner. What are the consequences? Does your story lean toward one proverbial lesson or the other, or does the conclusion demonstrate more ambiguity?