35 Never Fail Writing Prompts
By David Macpherson


1. A young man comes home to find his mother in bed with is best friend. Write a story
starting there.
2. An anemic vampire works the night shift at a barber’s shop shaving melancholy
werewolves.
3. A young man awakens to find his left leg surgically removed.
4. Jesus wept. Write a story explaining why.
5. A young man downs his fifth whisky only to discover he is floating 4 inches above the bar
stool.
6. A woman leaves her husband for no reason that she can think of.
7. All the cats in the neighborhood grow spikes.
8. A one legged young man who floats four inches about the ground and who feels betrayed
by his mother and best friend finds out that many struggling writer are creating stories about
him.
9. Jesus wept. He was cutting onions. Write a story about the salad he was making.
10. A levitating man with one leg strokes the pelt of a cat with sharp spikes, his palm bleeding,
and thinks dark thoughts.
11. A highway patrolman insists on singing the Miranda warning whenever he makes an arrest.
12. A woman who left her husband for no reason takes a job as a rodeo clown.
13. All the characters from your last ten stories are put into a cattle car and taken to a secret
location in Romania.
14. A CEO of a large corporation gives each one of his employees two thousand, three hundred
and forty five dollars.
15. Queen Victoria goes to a drag bar, and fits right in.
16. A floating one legged man and a lost woman who once was a rodeo clown meet in the
fifteenth prompt of a writer’s exercise and begin a hazardous relationship.
17. A Duke of Milan is exiled to an island with his young daughter where he learns dark arts,
which enable him to shipwreck his nefarious brother and exact revenge.
18. Compose a story about a writer who steals all his prompts from Shakespeare.
19. A CEO, who gave away all his money to his employees, is brutally killed by two people he
didn’t know, a one legged man and woman with a face smeared with clown make-up.
20. Jesus buys a large box of Kleenex. Go from there.
21. An older man dates only men who have performed as Caliban in the play The Tempest.
22. An author of writer’s prompts receives threatening phone calls by two voices claiming they
are his children.
23. A sprite named Ariel teaches an angry young man how to take his power to float in the
air and turn it into flight. Not simple flying, mind you, but the flight of a predator bird
swooping down for the kill.
24. Things fall apart. The center is where the story can begin.
25. There is a knock on the door. The rain begins to pour. The lightening illuminates the
darkened room.
26.
27.
28. Help me. Please. This is no story. Don’t make me give you the idea. Just help me. Please.

29. Jesus does not weep. Dry as a desert, that one.
30.
31. A couple, covered in someone else’s blood, takes a stolen Ford Fusion and heads off to
anywhere, but a sunset.
32.
33. We are such stuff that schlock is made of, and our little lives are rounded by a rewrite.

34.
35.


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David is a writer living in Central Massachusetts with his wife Heather and son George.