Ships and boats, clocks, bird cages, Black dolls, antlers, and masks. Artist Betye Saar, who passed away last month at the age of ninety-nine, was renowned for her assemblage works created with found objects that she gathered in her studio over the course of decades, objects she used to explore social issues of racism, stereotypes, femininity, and spirituality. “I’ve always felt that old objects hold a power,” Saar stated in a 2024 New York Times interview. “They’ve survived, and they have a sense of the previous owner. They have a spirit.” What objects have you collected over the years? Jot down a list of old objects, perhaps the types of everyday items you might find at a garage sale or antique collectibles shop. Then, write a lyric essay with short reflections, experimenting with how to put the objects in play with one another thematically when you consider their spirit and who owned them previously.
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 plane delay, whether of fifteen minutes or five hours, can set off an unexpected series of consequences as travelers often have plans with people awaiting them upon arrival at the other end. It may involve gatherings with family and friends, business meetings, vacation activities, restaurant reservations, show tickets, or connecting flights to catch. This week, write a short story that launches with a character experiencing a short or long flight delay, unfurling a chain reaction that affects an important relationship in their life. You might choose to stay with one character throughout the entirety of the story or cobble together a narrative that weaves together the stories of multiple characters affected by the fallout of the same delayed flight. How do differing characters’ responses reveal something about their personality and priorities?
“Down valley a smoke haze / Three days heat, after five days rain,” writes Gary Snyder in his poem “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” first published in his 1959 collection Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, as the speaker looks out from a mountaintop to describe the scene below before briefly moving on. In the second stanza, more interiority is revealed: “I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities….” Inspired by Snyder’s verse, write a short poem consisting of two five-line stanzas about a memorable mid-August from your life. Start with a few evocative details that paint a picture of the scene, including what this particular moment looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. In your second stanza, allow your mind to wander toward more philosophical or existential musings.
In her 2024 memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, published by Penguin Life, Glynnis MacNicol lists the items in her suitcase when packing to live in Paris for a year and reveals that Joan Didion was a source of inspiration. “In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!— and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity,” writes MacNicol. “As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much.” Write a personal essay anchored by a list of your belongings—whether it be from a suitcase, grocery tote, or any other bag. Consider using certain items as entry points into memories and experiences, using them like pieces of a portrait, each adding another layer to you in that moment.
In the film Obsession, directed by Curry Barker, protagonist and hopeless romantic Bear finds a supernatural toy that grants his wish for his friend Nikki to fall madly in love with him. The consequences of his wish are soon revealed when Nikki becomes terrifyingly attached and devoted to him, and it becomes harder to decipher her true self. Write a short story from the point of view of someone under a love spell. Show the process of your character transforming as they grow deeper in their fixation. You might explore the darker facets of this obsession and loss of autonomy through an internal monologue. How can you incorporate glimpses of reality within a story told behind rose-tinted glasses?
In a recent installment of our Ten Questions series, Maya C. Popa talks about how her palindrome poem “One Way or Another” became the opening poem of her collection If You Love That Lady (Norton, 2026) and the first one she remembers writing for it. “Its back-and-forth, snake-swallowing-its-own-tail quality would end up being emblematic of both those years and my experience assembling the manuscript,” she says. This week, write a palindrome poem in which the last half mirrors the first half. You may choose to adhere strictly to a set of lines, reversing the order halfway through the piece with no alterations, or choose to divert from this structure while keeping the halves of the poem a reflection, be it structural or figurative. How might symmetry serve as an embodiment of your poem’s themes?
“My essay on tigers started with the question of whether Blake, when he wrote ‘The Tyger,’ had ever seen a real tiger,” says Eliot Weinberger in an interview by Srikanth Reddy for the Paris Review’s “Art of the Essay” series. “That got me looking into the mythology and image of the tiger in the West.” Stemming from a deceptively simple question, Weinberger’s celebrated essay “Paper Tigers” investigates the complex history of tiger iconography and fascination with the wild animal. Write an essay that begins with a simple question and draws from a piece of mythos, whether cultural or private, that is present in your life. What associations and symbolisms does your subject conjure for you?
Sophie Kemp’s absurdist novel Paradise Logic (Simon & Schuster, 2025) follows a young woman who seeks everlasting devotion from her boyfriend and embarks on a mission to become the best girlfriend of all time. In an interview published in Columbia University’s the Blue and White, Kemp talks about drawing inspiration from one of Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s books. “The Remains of the Day is about a guy who wants to be the greatest butler of all time,” she says. “And I was like, oh, it’s going to be like that.” Write a short story in which your main character is trying to become the absolute best in their field or pursuit. What insights can this monomania give to your character’s psychology? Is the grandiose fixation noble, deluded, ill-fated, successful, or perhaps somewhere in-between?
“I am waiting / for the meek to be blessed / and inherit the earth / without taxes / and I am waiting / for forests and animals / to reclaim the earth as theirs,” writes the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his poem “I Am Waiting,” which appears in his 1958 collection A Coney Island of the Mind. The speaker presents a long, meandering list of things they are waiting for, many of which are related to social, cultural, and political change and reveal a snapshot of activist concerns of the time. “I am waiting / for a way to be devised / to destroy all nationalisms / without killing anybody.” Write a poem that lists what you are awaiting, perhaps reflecting on current issues, both national and international. You may even want to reference characters from your favorite works of literature, as Ferlinghetti does with Tom Sawyer, Aphrodite, and others.
In “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors,” a recent article published in the New York Times, Benjamin Wallace writes about philosophy scholars who have found themselves high in demand in the burgeoning field of AI ethics and this growing trend of hiring philosophers with AI training. “One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other,” writes Wallace. “A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions...of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness).” Write a personal essay that explores your own ideas about the potential benefits and detriments of the increasing presence of artificial intelligence in all aspects of life. What ethical or moral issues come to mind when you reflect on how we should interact with AI?
In the animated Pixar film Hoppers, directed by Daniel Chong, college student and nature lover Mabel Tanaka transfers her consciousness into a robotic beaver to uncover mysteries within the animal kingdom. With the ability to understand and communicate with animals, she discovers the realities of the food chain and learns about the interconnectedness of natural ecosystems, and what happens when that delicate balance is disrupted. Write a short story that revolves around an unexpected incident or occurrence that presents your main character with a newfound realization about how the human world is inextricably connected to the nonhuman animal kingdom. You might incorporate a sci-fi element that allows your protagonist profound insight into how animals think and relate to one another, and to human beings.
Often taboos are associated with societal issues around relationships, death, food, and religious customs, but there are less consequential social norms that deem specific styles and fashion decisions verboten. One of the latest being debated—wearing socks with sandals, a look that has been considered tacky in the past but has been appearing regularly in high fashion. This week, think of a few stylistic choices that are personal no-nos or that simply seem illogical to you, such as pairing certain colors and patterns, or bringing back old trends. Compose a humorous poem that reflects on your predilections and aversions when it comes to personal style, considering how you align or rebel against convention. How can you experiment with language around color and texture, sound and rhythm, to create verse that marries humor and lyricism?
In the film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, a science teacher is sent aboard an interstellar spacecraft to investigate a star that may hold the key to fight off a celestial parasite damaging the sun and threatening mass extinction on Earth. As the sole survivor of the three-man crew, he must attempt a “Hail Mary,” a last-ditch effort to save humanity. Think about a time in your past when you attempted a Hail Mary, whether in a sporting game, in an interpersonal relationship, or in the context of a relatively mundane task. Write a personal essay that tells the story before, during, and after your efforts. At what point did you decide that there was nothing left to lose, and that the only solution was to throw caution to the wind with a long shot?
Scientific studies on vision have demonstrated that rates of myopia, or shortsightedness, have been rising, to the extent that within the next twenty-five years, half of the population of the world will be myopic. While there are genetic reasons for this, a recent article published in BBC Science Focus magazine reports that environmental factors are playing a part, including people spending less time outdoors in the sun with diverse, visually rich stimulation, and more time indoors staring at screens and digital devices close-up and surrounded by “straight lines and monochrome walls.” Write a short story that takes place somewhere along this spectrum of technology affecting human evolution. Are there characteristics besides eyesight that are worsening?
“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is / he’s a beast of prey,” writes D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 poem “The Mosquito Knows,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. “But after all / he only takes his bellyful, / he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.” In this five-line verse, Lawrence presents a pithy portrait of an insect and then points the mirror at human behavior, the mosquito becoming a more sympathetic figure when pitted against human greed. Compose a series of miniscule poems that each revolve around an insect. Explore different facets of the bug, including how they might be irritating or harmful to people, and the ways in which their lives contrast surprisingly with human tendencies.
In an interview published in the Paris Review’s summer 2026 issue for their “Art of Fiction” series, Jeremy Tiang speaks to Yan Lianke, noting that throughout the course of their conversations, the author would “slip into the third person, as if describing himself as a character in his fiction, or sometimes into the second person, as if addressing his past self.” This week, write a personal essay about the city, town, or region where you grew up and your experiences there. Experiment with slipping between different points of view while still retaining your personal perspective. You might decide to start in the first person, and then address your past self in the second, before zooming further out into third person, or toggle multiple times between narrative points-of-view as befits the sense of distance you desire.
The comedy horror television series Widow’s Bay begins with the mayor of a small New England island town attempting to boost tourism and presenting the locale in a positive light to a visiting reporter of a major newspaper outlet. Despite the mayor’s efforts to detract attention from the town’s history of unusual occurrences, corroborating local residents’ warnings that the island is cursed and haunted, an arrival of thick fog brings present danger and terror that cannot be ignored. Write a short story that revolves around a group of people whose competing interests are illuminated when an outsider enters the picture. First, spend some time establishing the nuances of your characters’ relationships: Are there rivalries or unresolved conflicts from the past? How does the outsider create a disruption in your characters’ routines and expectations?
“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free. // (America never was America to me.)” Written in 1935, Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” begins with a stanza of lines that seems to wish for a bygone era of the country, with its ideas of pioneering and freedom, but follows with a line in parentheticals that clarifies and redefines that notion of America from the speaker’s point of view. The poem’s next two stanzas follow this form with lines in parentheticals, the last one stating: “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” This week, compose a poem that begins with the title of Hughes’s poem as your first line. Throughout your poem, use parentheticals to illuminate how some of your own ideas and experiences stand in tension with the country’s founding ideals.
In “The Tally,” an essay by Anne Enright recently published in the New Yorker, the author thinks back on a childhood memory in which her mother returned to a grocery store to settle the difference because she had been undercharged for a Christmas turkey. Enright explores her feelings of indignation at her family’s morality in the face of “corporate interest” and “predatory capitalism,” but then concludes that “integrity is also a way to hold the self together” and that “honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.” Write a personal essay that reflects on how your own stances around honesty and integrity have been shaped by how you were raised and what your family valued. How has your point of view on honesty evolved over the years, whether maintaining consistency or broadening to a more open-minded flexibility?
As climate collapse transforms our experiences of the natural world, researchers are sounding the alarm that smells and scents will become extinct alongside changes in plant biodioversity, weather-related phenomena, and the evolution of the world’s landscapes of man-made structures. According to a recent article in Smithsonian magazine, scientists warn that not only will the changing climate have a reduced “scentscape,” but that human beings may gradually experience diminished abilities to smell, due to the harmful effects of pollution. Write a short story that takes place in a universe where smells have largely disappeared from everyday life. What sort of adaptations have been created to compensate for this sensory loss? Will memories, which are strongly associated with smell, function in different ways?
In an interview for the Poetry Society of America, Diane Seuss talks to Jennifer Franklin about how she writes with a keen awareness of the body as a site of both immense precarity and radical agency. When considering the role of structure in poetry, Seuss draws a parallel between the literary form and human form, how language can be compressed and lead through the formal constraints of a poetic form in the same way the human body can act as an impediment and a guide. “We write with all of ourselves,” she says, “at our best.” Write a poem that uses the structure of a poetic form to reflect on the nature of the body. Explore how the lyrical imagination pushes against structure, like the body “compresses the soul,” as Seuss describes. How does the inclusion of the body anchor your writing, and how might you play within these confines?
In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.
At the start of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, a hybrid-genre book merging biography with fiction, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, the first-person narrator finds a silver lining to her friend’s cat going missing, noting that the drama “was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all.” The narrator goes on to express her frustration while studying who Stein was as a writer and a person. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops,” writes Levy. Select a writer or artist whose personality, mythology, and life story pique your interest, and write a short story that revolves around a character who is working on a project about your chosen person. Consider how the subject’s real biography might play with parallels in your fictionalized character’s life and world.
Jane Kenyon’s poem “Three Songs at the End of Summer” features three portraits of late summer, each evoking its own distinct sounds, moods, and atmosphere. The first section of the poem begins with “a second crop of hay” and “five gleaming crows,” continues through the sights and sounds of summer camp, and ends with a couplet that gestures to autumn: “Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; / water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.” The second section consists of two three-line stanzas infused with the sound of cicadas, and in the final section, Kenyon explicitly reaches back in time to the speaker’s childhood and the scent of a damp dirt road on a foggy morning. Taking inspiration from this structure, write a three-part poem that explores a few resonant memories of the end of summer—fleeting images and sounds and smells of various activities. Experiment with sections of varying lengths to create dramatic effect.
When asked in an interview published on Creative Independent whether there is a common thread throughout the works that he’s translated from various languages, Max Lawton mentions that there is usually “an element of transgression, whether that’s on the level of language or on the level of content” and that “shocking movies, transgressive music, loud music, not as a form of real rebellion, just mischievousness” are what brought him into art. Taking inspiration from this prioritization of transgression and mischief, write a personal essay that uses language in a shocking way or recounts something shocking in its content. Allow yourself to experiment with syntax in a way you’ve never tried before, or to write about a memory you’ve never dared to touch. How can you strike a balance between a playful sense of mischief and an intense subject matter?