What it makes
Press once and this story prompt generator returns three prompts. Each one has two parts: a hook, which is the situation, and a twist, which is the sentence that stops the situation from resolving itself.
That second part is the reason this exists. Most writing prompt generators give you a premise and leave you at the hardest moment, which is the moment after the premise, when you realize the interesting thing you were handed can be solved in a page. A hook with a twist attached is already a story shape: someone wants something, something is in the way, and the obstacle is not the obvious one.
You control three things. Genre steers the register and the plausible stakes. Length chooses between a one-line prompt, which is best for a short story or a writing exercise, and a paragraph, which gives you a situation with a cast and a setting already in it. Ingredients are optional chips you can add to force a shape: a secret, a deadline, a stranger, a return, a rule broken, a letter never sent. Pick one or two, not five.
Each of the three prompts re-rolls on its own, so you can keep the one that snagged you and replace the others. Prompts are written with concrete nouns, a clear want and a visible obstacle. They involve adults only, do not feature real or famous people, and contain no sexual content.
How to use it
Three controls, one button, and a habit worth building around it.
- Choose a genre, or don't. Leaving it open produces stranger results, which is sometimes the point of a prompt.
- Pick a length that matches your session. One line for a sprint or an exercise. A paragraph if you want to start a real chapter today.
- Add at most two ingredients. Constraint helps; clutter does not. "A deadline" plus "a return" is a story. All six chips at once is a shopping list.
- Press, and read all three before judging any. The one you dismiss first is often the one you think about on the walk home.
- Re-roll the two you do not want. Keep pressing until one of the three produces an involuntary "what if."
- Change one thing before you start writing. Swap the profession, the city, or the relationship. A prompt you have altered is a prompt you own, and the alteration is usually where your version of the story starts.
- Write for twenty minutes without planning. Prompts are not outlines; they are ignition. If it is still alive at the end of twenty minutes, it is worth an outline. In DreamPress the prompt can go straight in as the premise of a story you keep writing chapter by chapter, with fifteen free credits daily and no card.
The generator is free and needs no account. 6 free runs an hour. Sign up for 20 an hour, or go Pro for no limit. The FAQ explains how it works.
Craft tips
A prompt is not an idea; it is a door. Do not evaluate it on whether it is original. Evaluate it on whether you can see the first scene. If you can see a room, a person and a problem, start writing and let originality arrive during the draft, where it actually lives.
Cast before you plot. Take the prompt and answer one question: who is the worst possible person to be standing here? A translator who needs the job is a different book from a translator who despises the applicant. The premise stays; the novel changes entirely.
Push the twist one turn further. Whatever complication the tool hands you, ask what would make it worse in a way the character cannot solve with money or honesty. Two turns of that question is usually enough to find a second act.
Set a deadline even when the prompt does not. Almost every stalled draft is a story with no clock. Decide, in the first paragraph you write, what changes on Thursday.
Do not stack prompts. Combining three interesting premises produces a story that is about nothing. One premise, taken seriously and pushed for twenty pages, beats three braided in the first chapter.
Keep a file of the ones you did not use. Prompts you rejected in January are often the answer to a structural problem you hit in June. A plain text file of rejected hooks is one of the more useful documents a working writer keeps.
Use prompts to practice, not only to start. Generate a prompt in a genre you never write and give it forty minutes. Writing an unfamiliar register badly for an afternoon teaches you more about your own default habits than a week inside them.
Change the tense or the point of view. The same hook in first-person present is a different story from third-person past. If a prompt feels flat, try it from the point of view of the person it is happening to rather than the person doing it.
Write the ending on a card before you start. Not to obey it, but so you have something to disagree with. A prompt with a provisional ending attached is far more likely to survive past chapter three than one without.