15 Writing Prompts That Are the Golden Ticket to Your Writing Career

I’m a daydreamer. I’ll see something interesting, hear something interesting and end up spending the next twenty minutes to several hours creating a world based on what-if and what-could-be’s. That’s one of the reasons why I love writing prompts so much: someone else did the hard work, created an interesting moment to expand upon. Reddit’s r/WritingPrompts subreddit is one of my favorites, and I’m sure it’ll be one of your favorites in no time too. I’ve put together a list of fifteen of my favorite writing prompts from the subreddit, just to tickle your fancy. Click through and read the best responses, maybe …

Hilary Schuhmacher – November 6th, 2017

Book Culture

I’ve put together a list of fifteen of my favorite writing prompts from the subreddit, just to tickle your fancy. Click through and read the best responses, maybe come up with one of your own, who knows.

1. The year is 1910. Adolf Hitler, a struggling artist, has fought off dozens of assasination attemps by well meaning time travelers, but this one is different. This traveller doesn’t want to kill Hitler, he wants to teach him to paint. He pulls off his hood to reveal the frizzy afro of Bob Ross.

This is the overall top post on r/WritingPrompts, and there are a few things this has going for it:

Most everybody hates Hitler.
Most everybody loves Bob Ross.

2. The human lifespan is actually only one day long. To adapt, when we go to sleep each night, our mind sends us one dream deeper, where we wake up alive. When we finally die, the experience of our life flashing before our eyes is really just us waking up in each dreams, one at a time.

Like Inception, except it’s your life and Leo DiCaprio isn’t there because your budget is, well, your budget.

3. You never kill the spiders in your home, you just whisper “today you, tomorrow me” when you set them outside. Now, in your most dire moment, an army of spiders arrives to have your back.

I’m imagining a cross between Lord of the Rings‘ Dead Men of Dunharrow and Harry Potter’s giant spider Aragog. Or Lord of the Rings‘ giant spider Shelob. Or Wild Wild West‘s giant mechanical spider, because why not?

^{Image Via Mr. Movie}

4. All of the “#1 Dad” mugs in the world change to show the actual ranking of Dads suddenly.

And does your dad’s ranking go down every time you ask him for a $20 and he says “ask your mother”?

5. Your daughter has been begging you for a pony, and you told her to write a letter to Santa. On Christmas morning, you find a fire-breathing horse in your front yard, and a package by your front door. Looks like she wrote a letter to Satan, and he delivered.

^{Image via Pokemon}

6. Jesus actually had 14 disciples but their behavior was deemed inappropriate by biblical scholars, so they were removed from the final versions of the Gospels. They are Brad and Chad, the Bro-ciples, and these are their stories.

I’m going to skip past Bro-ciples, which is poetry in itself, and draw your eye to “these are their stories”, which if you didn’t know, is its own exquisite meme.