Are you writing a novel set in the present or recent past?
If you need some inspiration for your story, we’ve included 13 contemporary fiction writing prompts for you below. Enjoy!
1. It’s 2021 and a star athlete discovers he has a 10-year-old daughter right before that year’s summer Olympics. Her mother recently died in a tragic car accident, leaving him with full custody – and responsibility for the little girl. How does the athlete deal with taking care of a child while practicing for the Olympics? Will becoming a good father to his daughter cost him the gold medal?
2. A farmer has acres of land and a big family: two sons and three daughters, all aged between 17 and 30. While plowing the land for planting, his tractor gets stuck on a human body. The police then find 7 bodies buried around the land. Is one of the farmer’s kids a serial killer, or is someone trying to set his family up?
3. After not seeing each other for more than 10 years, two high school sweethearts reconnect by chance. The man became a prominent painter, but suffered a critical injury on his dominant hand, and he might never be able to hold a brush again. The woman became a therapist, and the man is one of the patients who has made an appointment.
Both are happily married to other people. Due to their romantic past, the woman refuses to take him on as a patient, but offers to help him as a friend. The temptation becomes too great and they end up in an extramarital affair. What are the consequences of their action? Is their reconnection proof that they are meant to be? Or, were they never meant to be in the first place?
4. A couple in their 40s have been married for over a decade and have no children. Each one of them has been successful in their respective fields, although they often had to spend months apart from each other, living in different countries or going on long business trips. When the wife passes away in a tragic airplane accident, her husband (the protagonist of the story) tries to arrange her funeral – only to discover that her husband and children are already taking care of it.
As the situation unravels, he realizes his wife had been married for over 15 years to another man, and they have 4 children together. The youngest child looks suspiciously like himself, even though they’ve never had any children. How does the man deal with the situation and is he going to fight for his own child, or leave the child with the other family?
5. On vacation in a foreign country, a young woman meets a man on the beach. They have a week long whirlwind romance. At home, she is a bartender at her uncle’s bar. He is a digital nomad and travels around the world. Before leaving, she invites him to visit, fully expecting to never see him again. Only, he is at her door within two weeks.
At first, she is overjoyed of her new romance. Except, he is allergic to dogs and forces her to find him a new temporary home while he is visiting. He is spending her money claiming his payments haven’t gone through. He doesn’t have any plans on leaving. How does the woman deal with the situation? Was she really enamored by him and him by her, or was he simply looking for a new rent-free home?
6. A woman in her mid-30s has finally been able to divorce her abusive husband, but the price she had to pay were her two children, a boy and a girl, as her husband fought and won sole custody. Desperate, the woman kidnaps her own children and they go on the move, moving from city to city, trying to stay ahead of the police and the private investigators sent by her husband.
Finally, they settle in a small town. Things seem to be going well – the locals like the little family and the two kids finally get a sense of normalcy. When the police and private investigators come knocking, does the town easily give them up, or do they fight to keep the family safe?
7. A group of friends, three women and two men, decide to go on a road trip after college graduation. On the way, their car breaks down and they stop at a small nearby community to get help. The community, led by a charismatic leader, takes them in and offers them shelter, food, and board free of charge while their car gets fixed within three weeks. The friends start to integrate more and more into the community, until they realize that all the men in the community are either elderly or very young teenagers, even if the female members vary in all ages.
The community also seems to be following a strange religion with strange initiation rituals, and their leader gets messages directly from the deity they follow. Pretty soon, the leader starts to get messages that the two men are not clean, and that the three women need to be his personal concubines. Their car is still broken. How do the group of friends get out of there?
8. A successful author has a great idea for a novel about a woman who is dealing with grief after losing all her family in an accident. The publisher accepts the proposal and gives her a year to write it. As soon as she writes the beginning of the novel, the author gets writer’s block and gets stuck. She tries to find different means to cope until her own husband and daughter tragically perish in an accident – in the exact same manner as she wrote it in her story.
Before long, she is the primary suspect for the death of her husband and daughter, but she has an airtight alibi – a book signing while the accident took place. She gets released and the investigation is abandoned, but her publisher drops her as a suspect and the public still thinks she is guilty. Soon enough, she starts to receive mysterious gifts and is sure someone is following her. Novel abandoned, the author needs to find a way to prove her own innocence and find the culprit who really murdered her family.
9. A retired detective, in his 60s, lives alone. His wife died 20 years ago, murdered by a serial killer the detective was trying to catch. His daughters never forgave him for putting their family in danger, and do not speak to him anymore. One day, he gets a visit from a young woman claiming to be his long lost granddaughter. She is there to ask for help – the old serial killer is hunting again, and this time, she and her mother seem to be the killer’s primary targets.
10. A woman in her mid-20s starts dating a man in his 30s, and he seems to be her dream man. He takes her out on dates, trips, and even hints at marriage. The only problem? They never seem to spend the whole night together at his place, always at hers, and they never spend more than three days together. One day, she decides to follow him as he leaves her apartment for work.
What kind of secret does she discover? Is the man a secret heir to a billionaire corporate empire? Is the man married with children? Does he have a string of girlfriends in different neighborhoods of the city? What does the woman do with the secret she uncovers?
11. A man in his mid-30’s gets a divorce from his wife after he catches her cheating on him in their own house. He moves out, tries to move on with his job, and hires a lawyer to help him fight for custody of their two small children, a boy and a girl, aged 4 and 6.
One night, he goes to a bar where he is seduced by a seemingly random woman. He takes her back to his apartment. The next day, the woman is gone and the police are at his door. His former wife and her new lover have been brutally murdered, and the shirt he wore the previous night was found on the murder scene. How does the man prove his innocence? And why is he unable to remember what exactly happened the previous night?
12. A freshman in college is desperate to make friends on campus. He tries to hang out with various groups, but none of them pay attention or want to be friends with him. One day, a mysterious guy shows up at his dorm, saying that he is to be his new roommate. The two boys seem to hit it off and become friends.
The roommate seems to know a lot of people on campus. The freshman’s social circle expands, they go to parties, and during a New Year’s Eve party rave in a frat house, the freshman blacks out and loses three days. Next thing he knows; the police are at his door. A girl had been brutally raped and almost killed during the party, and she has mentioned the roommate’s name as the culprit. Only, why is the other side of his room empty, as if the roommate had never even existed?
13. A man sees a woman crying on the steps leading to his building. She has just found out her boyfriend was already in a relationship and living with another woman in an apartment on the fourth floor of the man’s building. The man and the woman seem to have a lot in common – they went to the same school and were even in the same college, they just never seem to have met. The woman just seems to really get the man.
All would be going well, except, the more time passes, the more the man realizes she knows things he has never previously told her, like the names of all of his ex-girlfriend, the precise date his grandmother died, even things he has never told anyone. How does the woman know so much about him? And how come there is no young couple occupying any of the apartments on the fourth floor?