The Poets, the Peddlers, and the People

Would anyone pay if I fully detailed 200 fantasy writing prompts and put them into an e-book? It’d be a cheaper one, $10 at the very most, and it would have five or so examples of where you could go with each prompt.

Anyway, here’s fifty writing prompts. Not exclusively fantasy this time. Some of these have probably been done before, but I’m just throwing out ideas:

1. Water is replaced with lava. Water is only found underground while lava is the most abundant land resource.

2. A love triangle with two people and an object.

3. Gravity is now halved. What happens? (Think sports, transportation, building structure, and anything else.)

4. A war story without a single battle scene.

5. A romance with no physical contact.

6. Any kind of system where megabytes can be currency.

7. Anyone in the world can connect to the Internet with 1 gigabit down and up, 0 latency. What happens?

8. Someone manages to invent a virtual reality ideal girlfriend/boyfriend simulator.

9. Computers have smell input and output accessories. Go.

10. 3D modeling goes real-time, real-life. What you model on the computer instantly appears in real life.

11. The human mind can be programmed just like a computer application.

12. Wind blows upward.

13. Rain is replaced with fire.

14. Write a story about two parents on a school board, trying to do what’s best for their kids.

15. North America and Europe are suddenly connected geographically.

16. Money goes completely digital.

17. A large-scale EMP renders all electronics in the protagonist’s state useless.

18. Your protagonist and several friends corner a young mother and baby in an alleyway with hostile intentions. Explain. Bonus points for using gray versus gray.

19. A new technology lets anything a user thinks of become reality, within reason. Define said reasons and write from there.

20. A governor wants to be reelected, but the public opinion of him is extremely low. How does he go about getting it back up? Bonus points if you don’t identify with his political party (or make a new one).

21. Protagonist discovers a material harder than diamond.

22. Your protagonist dies of old age, is reincarnated, and retains all knowledge from his previous life.

23. A 50-year-old who’s lived on welfare since age 20 decides to turn his/her life around and start a business or something.

24. A well-known CEO decides to leave his business and most of his money to someone else, get plastic surgery and a fake ID, and quietly watch his company from the bottom as a janitor.

25. Everyone’s best talent suddenly becomes many times better, elevating into superpower status.

26. When people die, they become zombies. No exceptions.

27. Code of conduct for real life and the Internet is completely reversed.

28. Someone makes a type of glass that is edible.

29. Smartphones are replaced by watches with all the functionality of a computer.

30. Islam, rather than Christianity, is the world’s most common religion.

31. When angels die, they’re born on your primary planet as normal people. When gods die, they’re born as prodigies in whatever they were the god of.

32. A writer gives away hundreds of ideas and concepts for free, regrets it, then realizes that every idea he gives away forces him to be that much more creative.

33. A sci-fi where people can plug SD cards or flash drives into their brains and access their computers from there. Monitors can be glasses or contact lenses. I’m positive this has been done, but oh well.

34. Write about an indie game developer who gets a huge inheritance from a grandparent and puts it all toward his/her dream game.

35. Write about a gardener who discovers a sentient plant.

36. Write a fantasy with just one single element changed from Earth that makes it fantasy (not alternate history). Bonus points if that one element isn’t magic.

37. Earth’s axis flips.

38. Every celebrity dies of some bizarre illness that only affects celebrities.

39. Everbody except celebrities die of some bizarre illness that only affects people who aren’t famous. Or something.

40. In lieu of climate change, people start riding horses and carriages again. Also because gunpowder is bad for the environment, we go back to swords and crossbows.

41. Owning guns is now illegal in every country in the world, and everyone with guns has to turn them in. Try to be more original than any random political columnist on this one.

42. God starts talking to everyone.

43. A world where the only light source is from people’s heads like those creepy-looking fish things. Also, there’s a gigantic light source at the bottom of the deepest ocean for some reason, but you only see it if you go under.

44. Imperfect pitch is not a thing. People are only capable of talking and singing in perfect pitch.

45. Every person gets to add a word to the dictionary. I think this is potentially the most chaotic idea here.

46. Develop a language for a fantasy race/culture/place where making farting noises with your tongue is a word.

47. A fantasy or sci-fi society that has to use wooden weapons and an explanation as to why.

48. A fantasy where people discover the secret to travel at the speed of light before they discover how to forge iron.

49. A guy invents a religion, gets some followers, gets money, thinks he’s all that, and then his religion turns out to be real.

50. Cloaking technology is leaked to the general public and becomes affordable.