While our daily routine prompts are designed to build classroom culture and check the emotional pulse of the room, this section is engineered for the craft of literary generation. Here, you’ll find concrete entry points designed to provide writer with access introductions to assist them in plunging straight into the mechanics of poetry, fiction, and the personal essay.
Good writing seems rarely to start with abstract themes. For me, at least, it often begins with a title, an overheard snippet of a conversation, an image, a human contradiction, a phrase I find in a story (Zooey having a ginger ale with Jesus in Franny and Zooey), an opening line, a potential scene. These prompts push writers to focus on subtext, structural constraints, and the heft often found in ordinary moments.
A Note for Educators: This archive is a living, breathing work in progress. If you have a prompt that has sparked exceptional, unexpected writing from your students, we would love to hear it. Please reach out to us to suggest additional prompts and help us grow this resource. info@stetmagazine.org
Whether you are a teacher looking to ignite a serious creative unit or a student searching for the seed of your next major piece, we invite you to follow whichever doorway sparks your curiosity. Use these constraints to build something raw, honest, and complex—and when the piece is polished, we hope to see it in our submission queue for stet, the magazine.
start with a title
A Map of My Want
Things We Lost in the Fire (flood, earthquake, war, etc.)
Surprised by Joy
The Alchemy of Poetry
Under the Noise of Worms
Every Minute of Your Life
The History of My Scars
start with a character
• Your character is convinced that he will be fired today
• When your character underlines a word, phrase, or sentence in a book he’s reading, he can’t let his pencil lead come into contact with anything in the printed text.
• Rayne Jennings is a 33-year-old woman who has had several serious romantic relationships in her life. Now, on the verge of marriage to the last of these people, she is sitting down to make a list of the things–tangible and intangible–that she has received from each of her partners. begin your story with the list for Rayne.
• John cleans office buildings in the middle of the night for a living. His wife gets laid off and finds she can’t focus on finding a new job while crammed in their tiny condo. She asks him if she can go to work with him and sit at one of the desks in a client’s office.
• Connor has whooping cough. He has already missed 51 days of 6th grade. He is being homeschooled by Eloise, a brilliant, but odd recent high school graduate who is taking a gap year. Write one chapter from Connor’s perspective, one chapter from the perspective of Eloise.
• Somehow, while sitting in detention for the 12th straight day for excessive tardiness, Charlie Nagins realizes he needs an alarm clock with 365 distinctly different sounds.
start with an idea
• Open a story with a description of the weather and setting
• Write two sentences from the middle of a story about a girl who has decided not to speak for a year. The first sentence must be at least 100 words long. The second sentence must be three words.
• What single thought kept your character awake all night?
• What sound woke your character up from their nap?
• What did your character witness when they were 12 years old that haunts them still?
• What happened that reminds your character of a childhood memory?
start with an opening line
• Accept this about yourself.
• There were never any consequences at St. Alphonsus.
• That was the year my father blamed a blizzard on me.
• This was Allison.
• We are none of us as fragile as we think.
• Loss is the root of my joy.
• The dream I had was this.
• “You didn’t see nothin’.”
• You wake to the sound of…
• Until you are sitting in Mrs. Frost’s 3rd-grade classroom writing the date at the top of your assignment, that it is your 8th birthday
• I told her three times. Three times I told her.
• We didn’t like her from the minute we met her.
• The time was passing like____________. We thought recess would never arrive.
• It was the day I decided to become a different person. I’d had enough.
• Of course it was Eleanor’s idea. But like an idiot, I went along with her again.
• As horrified as I was by what I had done, when I stopped apologizing and finally walked away, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew–as long as I lived–I would never tell a soul. Me and Jake, we were finally even.
• All I could think about on the terrible ride home, was the four-word text message that was becoming a weekly mantra for Sarah. We need to talk.ˆ
• All the stupid things I’ve done for loneliness.
• Sarah was the queen of cutting through downtown buildings on brutal winter days.
• I’m always almost dying.
• We were only sixteen when we made that promise. That’s what I kept telling myself. We were only sixteen.
• How did I not get caught?
• The problem with people is this. They cut me too much slack.
• All I can tell you is that I was there for you. I don’t know where your mother was.
• Your boyfriend’s an idiot.
• I’m telling you I wouldn’t ever do that. Not for all the money in the world.
start with a scene
• You’re on a bike ride and stop at a park for a drink from the water fountain and to rest. A child is there with her mother who is on her cellphone and not paying attention to the child.
• Write a scene from the point of view of a 4th grader who realizes this is not an ordinary day for their teacher. In your response, give the reader a general sense of several other children in the classroom, one student in particular.
• On a family trip, your character stops to fill up at a random gas station off the Ohio Turnpike. In the Quik Mart, they see someone at the store they expected to never see again.