I personally like to set time limits on them because if a clock is ticking I’m less likely to agonize and second guess myself, but feel free to ignore that part if it throws off  your groove.

Five Minute Prompts

• Write about someone being afraid of a common thing
• Write about someone being unafraid of a scary thing
• Write the most flowery, rich sentence you possibly can. (This helps me just to get it out of my system so I don’t throw too many adjectives in my stories.)
• List words and phrases that indicate that romance is on the way

Ten Minute Prompts

• Dialog with a sleep-talker
• Write an action-filled scene using only dialog (This was haaard for me! But ultimately pretty fun.)
• Write only the first and last paragraph of a story. (I actually stole this prompt from my college writing teacher, Elizabeth Poliner. It’s kind of nice to play around with beginnings and endings without worrying about an actual plot.)
• Description of a place through a blind person’s POV

Fifteen Minute Prompts

• A villain reflecting on something they love
• A fight scene where the main character is unfamiliar with the only weapon available.
• Dialog – 2 people trying to communicate with no common language
• Dialog – an argument where only one party realizes they are fighting.

Twenty Minute Prompts

• Open a book randomly, write a story beginning with the first complete sentence on the page
• Rewrite the same conversation in all four seasons (5 minutes per season)
• Dialog – 3 distinct voices, no tags allowed. (Yeah, I know you can’t play the ‘no tags’ card too often in the real world, but the exercise really helps me hone in on what makes a pattern of speech distinctive.)
• Description of the same weather by two different people.

So, yeah! Have at it. 🙂 Drop me a comment if the prompt doesn’t make sense, or if you found a cool way to alter it to make it more challenging. Also, I can totally post more of these if people find them helpful, so let me know if this is something you’d like to see again.

Happy writing!