creative writing first paragraph

Writing Prompts

60+ First Line Writing Prompts

Did you know that the opening line of a story is one of the hardest parts of writing a great book? Spark your imagination with these 100+first line writing prompts for all ages! These simple one-liners are the perfect way to get those creative juices flowing and find inspiration for your next big short story or flash fiction .

We have a mix of first-line writing prompts, ranging from fantasy prompts to non-fictional and realistic events. As well as prompts written in the first and third-person view. The one-line writing prompts in this post are a great way to challenge yourself to write something new. In fact, you can even set yourself a challenge to write at least 300 words every day for each of these cool prompts!

60+ Random First Line Writing Prompts

Here are over 60 one-line opening sentences to help you write your next big story:

“Er… I hate this song. Why is it always playing on the radio?”
Every story has a hero and I’m the hero of this one.
Thunder rattled outside, as Emily tossed and turned trying to sleep.
Life wasn’t great at all for Mr Pea. It wasn’t even mildly good.
They keep calling me “special”, but what’s so special about me?
Gavin was always getting the best presents. For once I wish I could be like him.
Balloons popping, confetti dropping and food flying. That’s how Katie spent her birthday each year.
Every night, Peter went out to save the world in his own little way.
If dogs could speak, then Spike would be thanking Chris right now.
Money is everything.
Was it really Jane’s fault?
Every day the same thing keeps happening.
For the first time in her life, Janie felt powerful.
5 AM and still no phone call.
Mom’s always telling me to come straight home.
There’s an old legend that talks about magical fairies living in the forest.
Snow fell, as Clarissa made her way home.
After the accident, Nelson never felt safe again.
Katie’s living the dream up in the hills of Hollywood.
The world seemed like such a big place, until the recent discovery in Antarctica.
“Dear diary, today I learned something about myself…” Katie mumbled to herself.
Blinded by a bright light outside his window, Jake jumped up in horror.
Sitting at his computer, Martin noticed something odd about his favourite computer game.
Rain trembled down the window, as the car radio played in the background.
“Ready or not, here I come!” shouted Millie in the distance.
Once upon a time, there lived a young prince with extraordinary powers.
James had it all, but still, it was not enough.
Her red hair glistened in the sun, as she walked across the car park.
Mel was always haunted by her dreams.
“Shhhh! It’s your turn now” whispered Kelly.
The room was a dump, as Jack frantically searched every corner.
This time daddy brought a strange teddy bear home.
There’s no cure for a beast like me.
People ran inside their homes, as the alarm rang.
Tracking through the woods, Christian found something strange.
Home. What is home anyway?
Legend says that if you breathe in and out ten times in front of a mirror something strange happens.
Tick… tock… tick… tock… time was going so slow.
The pain was too much, he had to leave right now.
Slipping out of reach, she lost it forever.
Money, clothes, food, everything you need for a quick getaway.
In the faraway kingdom of Rainbow Popsicles, everything was sweet, apart from one strange-looking thing.
In the damp streets of Manhattan, there lived a fierce little cat.
Being the ‘odd one out’, the ‘weird’ one wasn’t fun at all.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” Shelly screamed in her sleep.
Some say the number 7 is unlucky, but to me, it wasn’t.
Every Saturday, Joe went to his Grandma’s house, but something was very different this week.
Chores, chores and more chores.
For once I wish I could get my way.
The sun shone brightly on Oakland farm, but not all was bright.
“I got one! I got one!” shrieked Sally, jumping up and down in excitement.
She was everything I wanted to be and more.
The same words over and over again scattered all over the floor.
The scariest creatures lived deep in the forest where no-one ever went.
“Abra Kadabra, turn these ripped trainers into the fastest trainers in the world!” exclaimed Victor.
The desert-like sun burned his skin as he lay scorching in the sand.
The sound of rustling leaves turned George’s heart to stone.
Sunny Slimeville was just a normal town with a funny name.
The phone did not stop ringing all week.
Another tea party, another game.
How’s a country girl like me ever going to survive the big city?
Did you know that not all zombies eat brains?

How To Use These One-Line Writing Prompts

There are a number of ways you can use these first-line writing prompts to inspire your story writing , such as:

Pick one of the opening sentences and free-write for at least 60 seconds. Don’t stop to think, just keep on writing whatever comes to mind!
Don’t keep skipping through all of the prompts above. Challenge yourself and give the ‘hard’ or ‘boring’ ones a go! You never know how they’ll inspire you unless you give them a go.
Feel free to adapt these first-line writing prompts in any way you like. You can change the character names, point of view and any other details you feel like.
Explore your imagination. Don’t be afraid to add more characters, add conflict, add dialogue , add anything you like to really have fun with these prompts!

For more inspiration, check out this list of over 150 story starters . Now go and choose an opening sentence from the above list! And if it inspires you to write something cool, let us know in the comments! You can even publish your story online – Just sign-up to create your free account .

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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27 Creative Writing Examples To Spark Your Imagination

With all the types of creative writing to choose from, it’s hard enough to focus on just one or two of your favorites.

When it comes to writing your own examples, don’t be hard on yourself if you hit a wall.

We’ve all done it.

Sometimes, all you need is a generous supply of well-crafted and inspirational creative writing examples.

Good thing you’re here!

For starters, let’s get clear on what creative writing is.

What Is Creative Writing?

How to start creative writing , 1. novels and novellas, 2. short stories and flash fiction, 3. twitter stories (140 char), 4. poetry or songs/lyrics, 5. scripts for plays, tv shows, and movies, 6. memoirs / autobiographical narratives, 7. speeches, 9. journalism / newspaper articles, 11. last wills and obituaries, 12. dating profiles and wanted ads, 13. greeting cards.

Knowing how to be a creative writer is impossible if you don’t know the purpose of creative writing and all the types of writing included.

As you’ll see from the categories listed further on, the words “creative writing” contain multitudes:

Novels, novellas, short stories, flash fiction, microfiction, and even nanofiction;
Poetry (traditional and free verse);
Screenplays (for theatrical stage performances, TV shows, and movies)
Blog posts and feature articles in newspapers and magazines
Memoirs and Testimonials
Speeches and Essays
And more—including dating profiles, obituaries, and letters to the editor.

Read on to find some helpful examples of many of these types. Make a note of the ones that interest you most.

Once you have some idea of what you want to write, how do you get started?

Allow us to suggest some ideas that have worked for many of our readers and us:

Keep a daily journal to record and play with your ideas as they come;
Set aside a specific chunk of time every day (even 5 minutes) just for writing;
Use a timer to help you stick to your daily writing habit ;
You can also set word count goals, if you find that more motivating than time limits;
Read as much as you can of the kind of content you want to write;
Publish your work (on a blog), and get feedback from others.

Now that you’ve got some ideas on how to begin let’s move on to our list of examples.

Creative Writing Examples

Read through the following examples to get ideas for your own writing. Make a note of anything that stands out for you.

Inspiring novel-writing examples can come from the first paragraph of a well-loved novel (or novella), from the description on the back cover, or from anywhere in the story.

From Circe by Madeline Miller

““Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone.”

From The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“‘I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination…. ”

The shorter your story, the more vital it is for each word to earn its place. Each sentence or phrase should be be necessary to your story’s message and impact.

From “A Consumer’s Guide to Shopping with PTSD” by Katherine Robb

“‘“Do you know what she said to me at the condo meeting?” I say to the salesman. She said, “Listen, the political climate is so terrible right now I think we all have PTSD. You’re just the only one making such a big deal about it.”

“The salesman nods his jowly face and says, “That Brenda sounds like a real b***h.”’

From Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (collection of short stories)

“Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.” (From ‘A Temporary Matter’)

Use the hashtag #VSS to find a generous sampling of short Twitter stories in 140 or fewer characters. Here are a few examples to get you started:

From Chris Stocks on January 3rd, 2022 :

“With the invention of efficient 3D-printable #solar panels & cheap storage batteries, the world was finally able to enjoy the benefits of limitless cheap green energy. Except in the UK. We’re still awaiting the invention of a device to harness the power of light drizzle.” #vss365 (Keyword: solar)

From TinyTalesbyRedsaid1 on January 2nd, 2022 :

“A solar lamp would safely light our shack. But Mom says it’ll lure thieves. I squint at my homework by candlelight, longing for electricity.” #vss #vss365 #solar

If you’re looking for poetry or song-writing inspiration, you’ll find plenty of free examples online—including the two listed here:

From “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

“How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –

To an admiring Bog!

From “Enemy” by Imagine Dragons

“I wake up to the sounds

Of the silence that allows

For my mind to run around

With my ear up to the ground

I’m searching to behold

The stories that are told

When my back is to the world

That was smiling when I turned

Tell you you’re the greatest

But once you turn they hate us….”

If you enjoy writing dialogue and setting a scene, check out the following excerpts from two very different screenplays. Then jot down some notes for a screenplay (or scene) of your own.

From Mean Girls by Tina Fey (Based on the book, Queen Bees and Wannabes” by Rosalind Wiseman

“Karen: ‘So, if you’re from Africa, why are you white?’

“Gretchen: ‘Oh my god, Karen! You can’t just ask people why they’re white!’

“Regina: ‘Cady, could you give us some privacy for, like, one second?’

“Cady: ‘Sure.’

Cady makes eye contact with Janis and Damien as the Plastics confer.

“Regina (breaking huddle): ‘Okay, let me just say that we don’t do this a lot, so you should know that this is, like, a huge deal.’

“Gretchen: ‘We want to invite you to have lunch with us every day for the rest of the week.’

“Cady: ‘Oh, okay…’

“Gretchen: Great. So, we’ll see you tomorrow.’

“Karen: ‘On Tuesdays, we wear pink.’”

#10: From The Matrix by Larry and Andy Wachowski

“NEO: ‘That was you on my computer?’

“NEO: ‘How did you do that?’

“TRINITY: ‘Right now, all I can tell you, is that you are in danger. I brought you here to warn you.’

“NEO: ‘Of what?’

“TRINITY: ‘They’re watching you, Neo.’

“NEO: ‘Who is?’

“TRINITY: ‘Please. Just listen. I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone and why, night after night, you sit at your computer. You’re looking for him.’

“Her body is against his; her lips very close to his ear.

“TRINITY: ‘I know because I was once looking for the same thing, but when he found me he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer.’

“There is a hypnotic quality to her voice and Neo feels the words, like a drug, seeping into him.

“TRINITY: ‘It’s the question that drives us, the question that brought you here. You know the question just as I did.’

“NEO: ‘What is the Matrix?’

Sharing stories from your life can be both cathartic for you and inspiring or instructive (or at least entertaining) for your readers.

From The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

“It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred: the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy. ‘He was on his way home from work—happy, successful, healthy—and then, gone,’ I read in the account of the psychiatric nurse whose husband was killed in a highway accident… ”

From Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt:

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

From Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s by Jennifer Worth:

“Nonnatus House was situated in the heart of the London Docklands… The area was densely-populated and most families had lived there for generations, often not moving more than a street or two away from their birthplace. Family life was lived at close-quarters and children were brought up by a widely-extended family of aunts, grandparents, cousins, and older siblings.

The purpose of most speeches is to inform, inspire, or persuade. Think of the last time you gave a speech of your own. How did you hook your listeners?

From “Is Technology Making Us Smarter or Dumber?” by Rob Clowes (Persuasive)

“It is possible to imagine that human nature, the human intellect, emotions and feelings are completely independent of our technologies; that we are essentially ahistorical beings with one constant human nature that has remained the same throughout history or even pre-history? Sometimes evolutionary psychologists—those who believe human nature was fixed on the Pleistocene Savannah—talk this way. I think this is demonstrably wrong…. “

From “Make Good Art” by Neil Gaiman (Keynote Address for the University of Fine Arts, 2012):

“…First of all: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.”

“This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.”

“If you don’t know it’s impossible it’s easier to do. And because nobody’s done it before, they haven’t made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.”

25 Creative Writing Prompts to Ignite Your Creativity

Creative writing is a vast and dynamic field that offers a platform for individuals to express their ideas, emotions, and stories in an imaginative and original way.

It plays a crucial role in enhancing communication skills, fostering empathy, and also promoting a deep understanding of the human experience. If you’re not sure how to get started, consider these helpful writing prompts – let’s get creative!

The Importance of Creative Writing

In the realm of literature and beyond, creative writing holds a pivotal role. It not only allows for personal expression but also:

fosters critical thinking
enhances vocabulary
improves writing skills
conveys complex ideas and emotions
serves as a therapeutic medium
enhances empathy

From short stories and poetry to novels and screenplays, creative writing spans a wide array of genres and styles, and offers endless opportunities for exploration and expression.

In the professional realm, creative writing skills are highly valued. They can lead to various creative writing jobs in fields like publishing, advertising, journalism, and content creation. For those interested in pursuing higher education in this field, you might want to explore whether a degree in creative writing is worth it .

Understanding Creative Writing Prompts

When it comes to igniting creativity and fostering unique ideas, creative writing prompts play an invaluable role. They provide a starting point, a spark that can lead to a flame of inspiration for writers.

How Prompts Can Ignite Creativity

While creative writing is an exciting field, it can sometimes be challenging to kickstart the creative process. This is where creative writing prompts come into play. These prompts are designed to ignite the imagination and inspire writers to create original and compelling pieces.

They help to overcome writer’s block , encourage experimentation with different styles and genres. So, whether you’re a seasoned writer or a beginner, creative writing prompts can be an invaluable tool to spark creativity and enhance your writing skills.

What are Creative Writing Prompts?

Creative writing prompts are essentially ideas, questions, or topics that are designed to inspire and stimulate the creative writing process. They serve as a catalyst, helping to ignite the writer’s imagination and encourage them to explore new themes, concepts, or perspectives.

These prompts can take a myriad of forms. They might be a single word, a phrase, a sentence, or even an image. Remember, regardless of the format, the goal of a creative writing prompt is to trigger thought and also encourage writers to delve deeper into their creative psyche, producing unique and compelling pieces of writing.

For more understanding of what creative writing entails, read our article on what is creative writing .

Types of Creative Writing Prompts

There are various types of creative writing prompts, each tailored to stimulate different forms of writing, cater to various genres, or inspire certain ideas. For example, you might encounter:

Fiction Writing Prompts : These prompts are designed to inspire stories. They might provide a setting, a character, a conflict, or a plot point to kick-start the writer’s imagination.
Non-Fiction Writing Prompts : These prompts are geared towards non-fiction writing, such as essays, memoirs, or journalistic pieces. They might pose a question, present a topic, or propose a perspective for the writer to explore.
Poetry Writing Prompts : These prompts are tailored for writing poetry. They could suggest a theme, a form, a line, or a poetic device to be used in the poem.
Dialogue Writing Prompts : These prompts focus on conversations and are designed to inspire dialogue-driven pieces. They generally provide a line or a snippet of conversation to act as a starting point.
Story Starter Writing Prompts : These prompts serve as the opening line or the first paragraph of a story. The writer’s task is to continue the narrative from there.

Understanding the different types of creative writing prompts is essential to making the most of them. For example, when you choose the right type of prompt, you target specific writing skills , push boundaries of creativity, and provide the necessary spark to bring your ideas to life.

25 Creative Writing Prompts

Using creative writing prompts is a great way to jumpstart your creativity and get the ideas flowing. Whether you’re a seasoned writer or a beginner, these prompts can help inspire your next piece. Here, we’ve broken down 25 prompts into five categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, dialogue, and story starters.

Fiction Writing Prompts

Fiction allows writers to flex their imaginative muscles. The following prompts can help to stir up new ideas for a unique storyline:

Write a story where the main character finds an old, mysterious letter in the attic.
Imagine a world where animals can talk.
Create a tale where a character discovers they have a superpower.
Write about a character who wakes up in a different era.
Write a story set in a world where money doesn’t exist.

Non-Fiction Writing Prompts

Non-fiction writing can help you explore real-life experiences and lessons. Here are some prompts to get you started:

Write about a time when you faced a significant challenge and how you overcame it.
Describe the most influential person in your life.
Share a moment when you learned a valuable lesson.
Write about an unforgettable trip.
Discuss a current event that has impacted you personally.

Poetry Writing Prompts

Poetry allows for artistic expression through words. These prompts can inspire new verses:

Write a poem about a dream you can’t forget.
Create a sonnet about the changing seasons.
Write about an emotion without naming it directly.
Craft a poem inspired by a piece of art.
Pen a haiku about nature’s power.

Dialogue Writing Prompts

Dialogue writing can help you improve your dialogue creation skills. Try these prompts:

Write a conversation between two people stuck in an elevator.
Describe a heated argument between a character and their best friend.
Create a dialogue where a character reveals a deep secret.
Write an exchange between a detective and a suspect.
Craft a conversation between two people who speak different languages.

Story Starter Writing Prompts

Story starters are great for sparking an idea for a story. Here are some to try:

“When she opened the door, she couldn’t believe her eyes…”
“He’d waited his whole life for this moment, and now…”
“It was a town like no other, because…”
“She was the last person on earth, or so she thought…”
“The letter arrived, marked with a seal she didn’t recognize…”

These creative writing prompts are designed to challenge you and spark your creativity. Remember, the goal is not to create a perfect piece of writing but to ignite your imagination and hone your writing skills. Also, don’t forget, you can always revise and refine your work later .

For more on the art of writing, check out our article on what is creative writing .

Making the Most of Your Creative Writing Prompts

Now that you have a list of creative writing prompts at your disposal, it’s important to understand how to utilize them effectively. The value of a prompt lies not just in the initial idea it provides, but also in how it can be expanded and developed into a full-blown piece of writing.

How to Use Creative Writing Prompts Effectively

Using creative writing prompts effectively requires an open mind and a willingness to explore. Here are some strategies to make the most of your prompts:

Brainstorming: Allow yourself to brainstorm ideas after reading the prompt. Jot down whatever comes to mind without self-judgment or censorship.
Freedom: Give yourself the freedom to interpret the prompt in your own way. Remember, prompts are starting points, not rigid guidelines.
Experimentation: Experiment with different genres, perspectives, and writing styles. A prompt can be turned into a poem, a short story, or even a script for a play.
Consistency: Try to write regularly. Whether you choose to do this daily, weekly, or bi-weekly, consistency can help develop your writing skills.
Reflection: Finally, reflect on the prompt and your writing. Consider what worked, what didn’t, and also what you would like to improve in your next piece.

In addition to this, check out our article on what is creative writing .

Tips to Expand on a Prompt

Expanding on a prompt involves transforming a simple idea into a fully developed narrative. Here are a few tips:

Character Development: Flesh out your characters. Give them backgrounds, motivations, and flaws to make them more relatable and interesting.
Plot Building: Develop a coherent plot. Consider the key events, conflicts, and resolutions that will drive your story forward.
Show, Don’t Tell: Show the reader what’s happening through vivid descriptions and actions rather than simply telling them.
Dialogue: Use dialogue to reveal character traits and advance the plot. Make sure it’s natural and adds value to your story.
Editing: Finally review and revise your work. Look for areas where you can improve clarity, tighten your prose, and also eliminate any inconsistencies or errors.

Editor’s Note : Don’t get rid of old ideas or unfinished works – you never know when looking back over these might spark inspiration or two ideas might mesh to form something cohesive and new!

The Right Prompts Grow Your Skills

By using these strategies, you can take full advantage of creative writing prompts and improve your writing skills. So, whether you’re pursuing a career in creative writing or just looking for a new hobby, these tips can help you unlock your full creative potential.

For more insights on creative writing, check out our articles on creative writing jobs and what you can do with a creative writing degree and how to teach creative writing .

Also, don’t miss our master list of more than 250 journal prompts .

Brooks Manley

Creative Primer is a resource on all things journaling, creativity, and productivity. We’ll help you produce better ideas, get more done, and live a more effective life.

My name is Brooks. I do a ton of journaling, like to think I’m a creative (jury’s out), and spend a lot of time thinking about productivity. I hope these resources and product recommendations serve you well. Reach out if you ever want to chat or let me know about a journal I need to check out!

Here’s my favorite journal for 2024:

Gratitude Journal Prompts Mindfulness Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Anxiety Reflective Journal Prompts Healing Journal Prompts Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Journal Prompts Mental Health Journal Prompts ASMR Journal Prompts Manifestation Journal Prompts Self-Care Journal Prompts Morning Journal Prompts Evening Journal Prompts Self-Improvement Journal Prompts Creative Writing Journal Prompts Dream Journal Prompts Relationship Journal Prompts "What If" Journal Prompts New Year Journal Prompts Shadow Work Journal Prompts Journal Prompts for Overcoming Fear Journal Prompts for Dealing with Loss Journal Prompts for Discerning and Decision Making Travel Journal Prompts Fun Journal Prompts

Is a Degree in Creative Writing Worth it?

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20 Strategies to Write Your Novel’s First Paragraph

I looked at the first paragraphs of more than 1,000 novels to make this list.

The first paragraphs below are the ones that shocked, surprised, and delighted me. The paragraphs that made me want to read the rest of the book, the paragraphs so memorable that I would dream about them.

Writers, learn from these first paragraphs. When you’re revising the first paragraph of your novel, or preparing to start a novel, do yourself a favor and read through every single one of these. They will radically improve the start of your book.

Now, why shouldn’t you focus on first sentences? There are many lists of the best first sentences of novels, and those are great, but for my money, it’s really a paragraph which is the best measure of the start of a book.

What makes a great first paragraph? I chose paragraphs that thought of themselves as paragraphs, not a great first line followed by explanation of that line. I wanted paragraphs that used their space to create a singular effect, and used their structure in a way to draw in the reader.

7 Main Strategies For Your First Paragraph

Create a Mystery (the most important element!)
Describe the Emotional Landscape
Build the Characters
Bring the Energy
Start with an Unusual POV
Dazzle with the Last Sentence
Set up the Theme

13 Minor Strategies

Draw Your World
Structure It Like a Plot
Try Repetition
Shock the Reader
Start with an Idea
Combine Multiple Strategies into an All-Around Great Paragraph
Fire Up the Emotion
Focus on the Name
Establish the Rules of the World
Start the Plot
Start with an Unusual Event
Describe Your Main Character Mysteriously
Use Dialect

If you’re unclear how to accomplish some of these things, look at the 30 examples below. I give numerous examples from famous authors and explain what they’re accomplishing.

By the time you’ve finished reading this, you will be closer to creating a whiz-bang opening that enchants your reader.

1. Create a Mystery

Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me – this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.”

This opening does a marvelous job of creating mystery through uncertainty. There is the mystery of what exactly happened, but there is a second mystery about whether or not what the narrator thinks happened actually happened.

But the biggest tension of this paragraph is whether or not we should trust this narrator. I am not sure if it really did happen. Like Ian McEwan’s Atonement, this is a tension that will run through the whole book.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined with the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.”

Love that this starts with a telephone ringing, and that the person calling is not asking for him. By withholding such information, Auster creates a fantastic mystery. And the rest of the paragraph emphasizes how pivotal this phone call was, and also introduces the notion about the meaning of narrative and story, which the rest of this novel will concentrate on.

Remember that the one and only true rule for the first paragraph is that it has to make the reader want to read the rest of the book. And Auster certainly accomplishes that here.

Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?”

Everyone tells you to seek clarity in your opening, to let the reader know where you’re going to take them.

Murakami blows that advice up. I love how he’s deliberately playing with confusion, so that you know that the narrator is moving inside the elevator, but you have no idea what direction. It’s a feeling of complete lack of control and awareness.

It’s a fantastic mystery to start the novel, and dovetails so nicely with the wonderland of the rest of the book.

2. Describe the Emotional Landscape

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills

“Niki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I — perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past — insisted on an English one. He finally agreed to Niki, thinking it had some vague echo of the East about it.”

Ishiguro is a master of giving information slyly, elliptically, so the reader has to be quick to realize what he’s hinting at. For instance, he doesn’t say outright that this is a mixed marriage, but that single word “paradoxical” shows you that the father must be white, and the woman must be Japanese.

This paragraph shows you a central tension between the husband and wife — they have different views on how to name her, and thus probably on how to raise her — and also offers a mystery: what part of the past does the narrator not want to remember?

This isn’t just information, it’s the emotional landscape. Who is jealous of whom, what power struggles are happening between characters. Within a single paragraph you can sketch out the basic conflicts between your main characters. And that’s often the very best place to start.

Include the emotional landscape in the first paragraph.

Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

“At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will — a year I’d spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.”

Talk about using a character to entice the reader. You just mention “gangster” and everyone is all ears. And the emotional landscape of the son, and of his relationship to his father, is exceptionally clear. Consider how much information is packed into this single paragraph:

You understand the conflict between the son and the father
You get a sense of the father’s personality
His father deeply opposed his son’s last relationship
The narrator has just broken up with a girl
There’s a bit of a mystery on the last line: why does his father have new freedom?

Orient the reader. Don’t play coy. Don’t try to withhold. Compress as much information as you can into the first paragraph.

3. Build the Characters

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace

“For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. `Have you missed me?’ she asks. `I miss you all the time,’ he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.”

This starts with sex, but remember that sex is primarily a way not to excite a reader sexually, but to communicate about the character. And this tells us an enormous amount about the character: divorced, thinks about sex as a problem to be solved, morally kosher with visiting prostitutes, and accepts that fake affection (affection that is paid for) is satisfactory.

I keep reading not for the sex but for the character.

Shirley Jackson, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle”

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could haw been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amonita phalloid the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

This is a great example of a character building opening. If you just want a single strategy for your opening paragraph, you should pick this one. Count the number of things we learn about Mary.

Her fanciful imagination (werewolf?)
Her dislikes
She is very intelligent and self taught (what other kid knows about the deathcup mushroom?)
She is morbid

If you want to keep a reader reading, give them a character they want to follow.

4. Bring the Energy

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!””

Love the energy of this opening. Zing! What a tremendous amount of liveliness and fun!

There’s so much humor in this opening paragraph, a humor that extends throughout the book, so Foer is telling the reader to expect more of the same.

You get the emotional landscape because you realize that he’s missing his father, which ends up being the central search in the entire novel (he must be missing him because he’s inventing inanimate objects to take over his father’s role).

This is the monologue style of opening, where you’re hearing from a first person narrator, much like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s incredible for character building because you get to hear firsthand the narrator go off with all their idiosyncrasies on display.

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive …” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?””

The energy of this opening! It’s equivalent to the Jonathan Safran Foer one in terms of sheer rocketship power. The prose is blasting off into space. If you want to go to a singular goal of an energetic opening, you will certainly capture the attention of the reader.

Despite all the craziness of this opening, it really has a simple strategy: character building. This is the type of character who loves taking drugs, who drives a hundred miles an hour toward Vegas while on drugs, and who doesn’t even realize that he is the one shouting at the imaginary animals (the “voice” is his own).

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“Bombay, which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face, is the hero or heroin of this story, and since I’m the one who’s telling it and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now, because now there’s time enough not to hurry, to light the lamp and open the window to the moon and take a moment to dream of a great and broken city, because when the day starts its business I’ll have to stop, these are nighttime tales that vanish in sunlight, like vampire dust— wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my, and another for the nostrils, and a little something sweet for the mouth, and now we can begin at the beginning with the first time at Rashid’s when I stitched the blue smoke from pipe to blood to eye to I and out into the blue world …”

The energy of this opening paragraph comes from the ongoing speed of this sentence. No period in sight, not here!

When you start like this it’s a bullet out of a gun.

I also love the intimate, colloquial tone of the narrator. So friendly. So conversational. It’s very inviting, which counterbalances the intimidation of the lengthy run-on sentence.

5. Start With an Unusual POV

Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.”

This is a very unusual strategy to open a novel. It grabs the reader by the strange point of view: the plural first person, the “we” and “us.”

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

“I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. Although I drew my last breath long ago and my heart has stopped beating, no one, apart from that vile murderer, knows what’s happened to me. As for that wretch, he felt for my pulse and listened for my breath to be sure I was dead, then kicked me in the midriff, carried me to the edge of the well, raised me up and dropped me below. As I fell, my head, which he had smashed with a stone, broke apart; my face, my forehead and cheeks, were crushed; my bones shattered, and my mouth filled with blood.”

Yes, start your novel with a corpse speaking! This also is a very strange point of view, but it immediately draws you into the storyline. After all, a murder mystery narrated by the murdered victim is fairly original.

6. Dazzle with the Last Sentence

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars .”

That single word “sober” does so much for this paragraph. As if being sober at 11 o’clock in the morning is a kind of accomplishment.

He’s proud of his dress, because of the details he includes, but he’s also kind of pretending to be put together: the reader knows, from the “ought to be” and the “sober,” that he’s barely holding it together, and what he’s showing to others is a facade.

Most of the paragraph is about setting up the details and establishing character. But the last sentence is about what he’s doing — the inciting incident that will fuel the rest of the novel. A good description paragraph that opens a book will always use that last sentence to launch the reader into the action.

After focusing on the very first sentence of your book, you should focus all of your attention on the last sentence of the first paragraph. This is the springboard from which you launch into the rest of your book. It’s the very first break in the book, and thus the first chance readers have to stop reading. Don’t let them.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on 1 January 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgement would not be too heavy upon him. He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like some fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage license (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signaling a right turn he had resolved never to make. He was resigned to it. He was prepared for it. He had flipped a coin and stood staunchly by its conclusions. This was a decided-upon suicide. In fact it was a New Year’s resolution .”

This is a first paragraph that works like a funnel. So many first paragraphs work this way, where most of the first paragraph establishes the scene and the character, and then the last line of the paragraph (or second to last line, in this case), shows you the plot.

This is a good reminder that the end of your first paragraph is just as important as the first sentence of your paragraph. In fact, I could probably put together a killer list of the ends of first paragraphs.

Here is the principle:

Character + Setting —–> Plot

This way the reader wonders what is going on. There is a sense of mystery created. Yet this mystery doesn’t persist for too long. You figure out what the character is doing by the end of the paragraph.

In this case, Alfred is committing suicide. What an opening!

7. Set Up the Theme

Toni Morrison, Jazz

“Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.””

The violence in this paragraph is staggering. I count at least 5 violent acts:

The violence of a cheating husband
The violence of him shooting his mistress
The threatened violence of cutting the face of a corpse
The violence of throwing her out of the church
The violence of setting domestic birds free where they will likely be eaten or die

Do you have a funny book? The first paragraph needs to be funny. Do you have a sad book? Make the first paragraph sad. Here Morrison prepares us for violence.

Don’t try to trick the reader. Tell them what they’re going to get right away.

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

The voice here is incredible. I love how derogatorily he describes earth: unfashionable, backwater, unregarded, insignificant, primitive. And the whole paragraph ends with a joke, which is perfect thematically for the rest of the book.

It’s a hilarious opening, and the rest of the series is just as funny. If your book is funny or scary, let the reader sense that theme right in the first paragraph.

8. Draw Your World

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

“The Madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.”

This is a great example of how to use style to draw a reader in. Half of the sentences are incomplete sentences, as if half-finished sketches of the setting.

It’s vaguely menacing, even though he’s only describing nature and civilization, no people.

But it’s that second line that really gets you: every reader wants to know what that terrible thing is going to be.

Lesson: If you start with a description of a place, give it personality (like menacing and foreboding).

9. Structure It Like a Plot

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in by train from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour; a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower gardens in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.”

I love the last line of this paragraph, and how it aligns so nicely with the very first sentence. This is a technique called bookending, where you unite a paragraph by tying the first sentence to the last sentence.

So the first line talks about murder, and the last line talks about health vanishing. Hale’s very health will be disappearing quite soon if he’s murdered!

10. Try Repetition

T.C. Boyle, Budding Prospects

“I’ve always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I’d known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town.”

Isn’t it lovely to start a novel by mentioning all the things that the narrator quit? It’s like he’s quitting right at the beginning.

But the repetition of this key word gives the paragraph a tight and wonderful shape.

Lesson: Repeat a single word to tie your paragraph together

11. Shock the Reader

Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves

“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often that I should be used to them by now. I’m not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”

What an existential horrorshow! Constant, unrelenting nightmares. I’m terrified yet kind of want to keep reading to figure out the cause of the nightmares.

This opening does two things well: establish a central identity trait of the narrator, and to create a mystery about what is causing these nightmares and why they keep coming.

12. Start with an Idea

Douglas Coupland, Hey Nostradamus

“I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world — spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss, and Mount McKinley — is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins. Even those of us who try to live a good and true life remain as far away from grace as the Hillside Strangler or any demon who ever tried to poison the village well. What happened that morning only confirms this.”

It’s rare to find a universal pronouncement that works well. But note that they only work when you get to the plot soon — this paragraph uses the funnel method where everything in the paragraph is funneling down toward that last sentence, the sentence which opens the action of the novel.

A beginning writer would try to write this paragraph but forget that last line, and it’s the last line which makes the paragraph work.

13. An All-Around Great Paragraph

Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife

“In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers. He puts on his hat, his big-buttoned raincoat, and I wear my lacquered shoes and velvet dress. It is autumn, and I am four years old. The certainy of this process: my grandfather’s hand, the bright hiss of the trolley, the dampness of the morning, the crowded walk up the hill to the citadel park. Always in my grandfather’s breast pocket: The Jungle Book, with its gold-leaf cover and old yellow pages. I am not allowed to hold it, but it will stay open on his knee all afternoon while he recites the passages to me. Even though my grandfather is not wearing his stethoscope or white coat, the lady at the ticket counter in the entrance shed calls him ‘Doctor.'”

This is a very well balanced opening that is hitting on multiple levels.

There’s a mystery: why does he always carry The Jungle Book? And why is this her earliest memory?
You learn about the central relationship in the book: the narrator’s relationship to her grandfather.
There are many sensual details that place you in a scene: the sound of the trolley, the feeling of dampness.

Some openings, like Hunter Thompson, only try to do one thing but do it well. This is an example of the opposite, of an opening packed with information, relationships, details, mystery, and everything else that you would want to orient you to what will happen in this book. It’s not super ambitious, but it’s very hard to do well.

14. Fire up the Emotion

Paul Harding, Enon

“Most men in my family make widows of their wives and orphans of their children. I am the exception. My only child, Kate, was struck and killed by a car while riding her bicycle home from the beach one afternoon in September, a year ago. She was thirteen. My wife, Susan, and I separated soon afterward.”

What a heartbreaking opening. It’s one of the all-time saddest openings to a novel.

And all this paragraph does is summarize what has happened. Most people die before their children, but his child has died on him. And what’s more, because of that death, he’s gotten divorced.

Other writers might start with the accident itself, in a scene, but this is a great arresting way to involve the reader’s sympathies immediately.

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ—and certainly not for Christ, which I’ve heard some zealots claim.”

There are so many emotions in this first paragraph. A boy who was the cause of a mother’s death, and a religious dedication.

15. Focus on the Name

Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa

“Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo — when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New Yrok had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You’ll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzman by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father’s idea too?”

Four repetitions of her name! Plus a list of her nicknames, a discussion of the strange origin of the name, and how her name fit her image.

By focusing on your main character’s name, you’re really starting the novel with character building, making the reader interested in the protagonist.

16. Establish the Rules of your World

P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months and twelve days. If the first reports are to be believed, Joseph Ricardo died as he had lived. The distinction, if one can call it that, of being the last human whose birth was officially recorded, unrelated as it was to any personal virtue or talent, had always been difficult for him to handle. And now he is dead.”

The concept of this novel is that at a certain point, everyone stopped having babies. No women could get pregnant any longer. And so the human race was facing extinction.

But it would be too obvious to start the novel by saying that.

Instead, it’s much better to approach it obliquely, by talking about death rather than birth. Specifically, by talking about the death of the last person born. Because really, this novel is about facing the death of humanity.

17. Start Your Plot

William Giraldi, Busy Monsters

“Stunned by love and some would say stupid from too much sex, I decided I had to drive down South to kill a man. Gilliam and I were about to be married and her ex-beau of four years, Marvin Gluck — Virginia state trooper, boots and all — was heaving his psychosis our way, sending bow-tied packages, soilsome letters, and text messages to the bestial effect of, If you marry that baboon I’ll end all our lives.”

We have a mission: he’s going to kill somebody.

We have a set of relationships: An angry ex-boyfriend, an engaged couple.

We have some personalities: A crazy state trooper and an equally crazy narrator who thinks he’s going to kill the trooper.

This is how you start the plot of your novel right away.

18. Start With An Unusual Event

Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen

“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse — Rema’s purse — she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong.”

What happens when your wife has been “replaced” by someone who looks exactly like her, speaks exactly like her, and acts exactly like her?

Has she really been replaced, or is the narrator suffering some kind of psychotic break?

It’s not only a mystery, it’s also a very odd event. Who imagines their significant other has been replaced by an imposter?

19. Describe the Main Character Mysteriously

Philippe Claudel, The Investigation

“When the investigator left the train station, a fine rain mingled with melting snow greeted him. He was a small, slightly round fellow with thinning hair, and nothing about him, neither his clothes nor his expression, was remarkable. Anyone obliged to describe him — as part of a novel, for example, or in a criminal proceeding or judiciary testimony — would surely have found it difficult to give a detailed portrait of the man. The Investigator was, in a way, a disappearing person, no sooner seen than forgotten. His aspect was as insubstantial as fog, dreams, or an expelled breath, and in this he resembled billions of human beings.”

Now this is an anti-description paragraph, where Claudel is creating mystery by refusing to describe his main character. This only works because so many other books start by describing their main character and he’s playing against type.

By choosing a lack of details, rather than the exceptional details, he makes you wonder about this strangely commonplace man.

Han Kang, The Vegetarian

“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way. To be frank, the first time I met her I wasn’t even attracted to her. Middling height; bobbed hair neither long nor short; jaundiced, sickly-looking skin; somewhat prominent cheekbones; her timid, sallow aspect told me all I needed to know. As she came up to the table where I was waiting, I couldn’t help but notice her shoes—the plainest black shoes imaginable. And that walk of hers—neither fast nor slow, striding nor mincing.”

Another character who is described as “unremarkable,” middling height, plain shoes, unremarkable walk. Almost everything about her is nondescript, which somehow makes being a vegetarian a surprising thing!

20. Use Dialect

Philipp Meyer, The Son

“It was prophesied I would live to see one hundred and having achieved that age I see no reason to doubt it. I am not dying a Christian though my scalp is intact and if there is an eternal hunting ground, that is where I am headed. That or the river Styx. My opinion at this moment is my life has been far too short: the good I could do if given another year on my feet. Instead I am strapped to this bed, fouling myself like an infant.”

Can you hear the old-timey slang? The swinging rhythms and inverted syntax of a grumpy old man from the 1800s?

When you give your character a particular way of speaking, it almost doesn’t matter what they’re talking about.

You are drawing the reader into the novel by the sound of a particular voice, and that voice is giving them loads of information about the person telling them this story.

25 comments

Fantastic article! Thank you for all of these suggestions. Although I write children’s picture books, I find these ideas useful. Beryl

You stole my reply completely. Including picture books.

This page is brilliant. The examples and your parsing them as to why and how they work… great choices and astute points. I’m going to my WIP novel’s first page to rev it up. Thank you.

Hi John! What a great idea for an article, and you obviously put a lot of work into it. I enjoyed it!

Well, you just saved my life. Thanx.

Excellent. Thanks Again. I am modifying my manuscript based on this and some of your other advice.

Great help! God bless you.

I so appreciate how thorough your posts are. I, too, am going back over the first paragraphs (there’s a false start, so I have two firsts) and taking a close look at those last lines!

I find your suggestions and advice given here truly priceless. I am a writer/ poet and have over a dozen published books of fiction, poetry and in the genre of rational spirituality. Whenever I can afford to, I wud love to hire such a profound writing professional. Thank you . Truly impressed. Vijay Narain-Shankar. Writer.

Last year during the month of November I produced “the novel” in its ragged, staggering 60k word mess. This month I will do the editing and I thank you for this article to start me off.

What a great article – and nice choice of books. this was fascinating, and will keep my author mind thinking for a while.

Really useful stuff John, thanks much, your writings are a wonderful resource. You might want to correct what I hope is a typo. ‘Heroine’ has an ‘e’ on the end. My bad if that was deliberate by Thayil. You could just leave it there – reminds me of Roddy Doyle’s ‘The Commitments’. But I’m not going to let my pedantry stop me from absorbing all of this (and the ‘how not to start’ post) over several readings. More power to your elbow.

Hi Dan, thanks for the kind note. So that is not a typo! It’s a book about drug use, and they actually mean the drug heroin. A little wordplay.

Excellent article. To read several times! I am only on my second reading.

Loved this. Very useful. Have to adjust a little somewhere to take advantage of your wisdom. Thanks.

‘Lolita’ has an amazing opening that can be put under the ‘Focus on the Name’ category.

Yes, great point!

““Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

Hey! Thanks for the article, it was extremely useful. I am currently working on my “Personal Project” and needed a way to start my product, so to start writing a novel. It’s a book about our corrupt society, responsibility, abuse of power, etc. Anyway thank you for writing this article in such detail, it actually motivated me to start writing.

I was surprised my opening paragraph embraced many of your suggestions. Except the last line. That is now changed, and has provided substantial attention grabbing emotion. Thank you so much !

I guess I am a ‘meats and potatoes’ wanna be writer. Meaning no disrespect, these opening paragraphs are like modern art; the beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Are they interesting, yes. But they are long winded, lacking focus. Now, “Call me Ishmael” is a great opening line, or, ‘The impostor borrowed the name of Neville Manchin, an actual professor of American literature at Portland State and soon-to-be doctoral student at Stanford.’ (Camino Island, John Grisham). Again, just my opinion.

A DAY LIKE TODAY just always starts differently, doesn’t it? There’s those mornings when you wake up when you notice even the most subtle of changes. And usually on those days, something huge happens. You could wake up at an earlier time than usual, even by just a few minutes, and find out that you’ll meet your soulmate today. Alternatively, you could notice that you’ll need to stay a little longer after work today, and find out that the world is being crushed by an immortal deity. Even I noticed something different; upon waking up this morning, after coming up with the idea of writing about this very, very true story, everything’s been so different. See, even the tiniest things could be signs something’s…off about the morning you wake up, the tiniest things being foretellings of the things to come. Even for someone as boring and unpredictable as Kiyoshi Saito.

How’s this opening paragraph? Any suggestions? Did I do good? I’m kind of a young writer. I’ve been writing for several years but I’m still learning.

Great start! I can tell from the first two sentences that something HUGE happened on the “today” in your story. I think you can tease that again in your closing line and juxtapose that big moment with the ordinariness of your protagonist, Kiyoshi. You kind of do that here in the last two sentences, but I think you could benefit from being more direct about it. As for the rest of your paragraph, I’m wondering WHY something big happens on the days when we notice something different. Is it the noticing that impacts future events, or is it the change itself that foreshadows it, even if it’s not noticed. Not something you necessarily need to answer, those are just my first thoughts as I read. I think you could trim and tighten some sentences up, but you have an intriguing start, and I hope the rest of the story pays off with revelations that make the mysterious coincidence you’ve pointed out worthy of the opening.

This “Mission” had great value for me. I keep sneaking up on a novel and have a great deal of it written in the form of scene cards. But I’ve rewritten the opening chapter at least a dozen times, so these first paragraphs were of great interest. I tried to read each one with an eye on whether I would want to read the book – and why – before reading your comments. Sometimes I saved your comments in my notes in hopes they will help me stop rewriting the first chapter. Again, thank you for what you do!

Three out of five examples were first person. Can we not write lazily in first person and tell a story??

John, I’ve decided you are an excellent teacher. I’m preparing a programme for my U3A Wagga Wagga, Australia, writing group – grey haired oldies with a love of language. This term we are concentrating on writing a superb first paragraph. Thank you so much for generously sharing your knowledge. I’ll use some of your strategies and tips plus those of Kate Grenville and Patti Miller – you are in esteemed company. Love your work!

Every writer NEEDS this book.

It’s a guide to writing the pivotal moments of your novel.

Whether writing your book or revising it, this will be the most helpful book you’ll ever buy.

How to Write Your First Paragraph

Image: the hands of a young woman solving a Pyraminx, a pyramid-shaped Rubik's Cube-style puzzle.

Today’s post is excerpted from the book The Linchpin Writer: Crafting Your Novel’s Key Moments by John Matthew Fox ( @bookfox ).

The first paragraph of a book is quite possibly not only the most important impression a reader will get of your book, it’s also the gateway for you to figure out where to start telling your story. And if you can identify the right place to start, you’re far ahead of the curve.

I went through my bookshelves and read the first paragraph of over a thousand books. This actually takes less time than you would think, and I would highly encourage you to do it with your own bookshelf. After all, most books have three paragraphs per page, so if you read a 333-page novel, you have read about 1,000 paragraphs. I mean, if you really want to become an expert at something (and first paragraphs are an excellent thing to excel at), then why not study a wheelbarrow’s worth of the best examples?

I wanted to do several things:

Find similarities between books. Did a number of books employ a similar strategy for the first paragraph?
See whether there are any ways you shouldn’t start a book.
Learn powerful strategies for book openings.

I don’t like studying first sentences of books—a sentence really doesn’t give the reader enough information or the writer enough room. And besides, you’ve probably seen a thousand articles about famous first lines, and they all quote the same twenty, and you think, Yeah, yeah, I know I’m not Fitzgerald or Hemingway, and this doesn’t help me write my book .

But a paragraph! Oh, a paragraph will give you enough direction to write your book, and your reader enough of a first impression to know whether they are excited to read more.

So to learn how to pull off the linchpin moment of a first paragraph, we’re going to dive into the four critical components of first paragraphs:

Characterization
Energy/tone
Emotional bedrock

If you’ve got those four, there is a near bulletproof chance you have a splendid first paragraph, one that will make your readers yearn for more.

Remember Jonathan Safran Foer? He burst onto the scene as a 23-year-old wunderkind, publishing his first book to breathless praise and a lucrative advance. But what stuck with me was the way he talked about how he found his first paragraph. He was describing his process for writing Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close , his second novel, and every day before he started writing, he’d read everything he had written up to that point. As he progressed further and further into the novel, this became more difficult. Sometimes he spent over an hour or two or three reading and editing previous writing before he got to the point where he wrote new material.

And he discovered that when he read the beginning of his book, the prose didn’t pop. He didn’t find the energy until he got to this paragraph, ten pages in:

What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “ Ce n’étais pas moi !”

So what did Foer do? He deleted the first ten pages of his manuscript. They were all just flotsam and jetsam, and they prepared Foer to write the actual first paragraph of his book, but they weren’t the first paragraph itself. Foer’s actual first paragraph was pretty deep into the book, but he was ruthless with his writing and killed his precious early words.

What does a first paragraph like this do well? First of all, it reveals the essential human relationship at the heart of the book. Oskar misses his father, who died on 9/11 in the Twin Towers, which is why Oskar wants to invent a teakettle that reads in his father’s voice. If you haven’t read the book, you don’t realize that connection, but Foer is already preparing you emotionally for the heartsickness this boy harbors for his dead father. This is the emotional bedrock of the book.

Also, the paragraph sets the tone and energy for this book. This paragraph zings! It’s got all the high-wire tension of an electrical line, just sizzling and crackling with voltage. Try reading it out loud. It fairly begs to be read quickly and after nine cups of coffee (which might be how Foer wrote it!).

Pay attention to the punctuation. The abundance of question marks fuels the energy—the first two sentences are questions, which accelerate the reader toward the answer.

And there are also two exclamation marks toward the end. What’s more, when Foer does calm down enough to end a sentence with a mundane period, that sentence is more winding than an Alpine road.

Lastly, the paragraph accomplishes a tremendous amount of characterization. We can tell this is a precocious child. Precocious because he’s cracking jokes in French and musing about sentient teakettles, and a child because he’s making fart jokes. So we have a wonderful mix of high and low culture, which is a fair approximation of Oskar’s personality. Just on the basis of this paragraph alone, I could talk to a lineup of kids and pick Oskar out.

In a very different vein, let’s look at Anne Enright’s opening to The Gathering :

I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me—this thing that may not have taken place. I don’t even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.

Now, many writers start their books with a mystery. But Enright starts with two mysteries!

First, the mystery of what happened in her grandmother’s house long ago, and, second, the mystery about whether it did or did not happen. The narrator seems confused. In fact, she states her uncertainty twice, just to make sure the reader gets it.

Also, right from the beginning, Enright starts to give away the mystery. Enright calls this event a “crime of the flesh,” which both withholds information (we don’t know exactly what happened), but also gives us good guesses about its sexual nature. Beginning writers often believe that creating mystery means withholding 90% of the information and giving the reader 10%; while the opposite is true: you should give away 90% and only withhold 10%.

Don’t underestimate the amount of characterization happening in this first paragraph. This is an exceptionally careful narrator. She’s worried about the hurt in the bones that this story might cause others. She wants to write it down, but hasn’t actually done so out of worry. She believes this event has happened, but also worries that it didn’t. This is not an impulsive character but an exceptionally thoughtful, slow-to-act character who moves methodically and prudently.

For a third example, let’s put Raymond Chandler under a microscope by checking out the first paragraph of The Big Sleep :

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

What’s the most important word in this paragraph? The word that does more to convey this narrator’s personality than anything else? I would argue it’s “sober.” As if being sober at eleven o’clock in the morning is an accomplishment.

Also, because he describes his clothing in such great detail, we know he’s proud to be well dressed. But why is he proud? Because just like the “sober” line, he’s excited that he’s not in rags or naked. He has a low bar for success.

In the hands of a lesser writer, the book would go into Philip Marlowe’s backstory to establish a point in time when he was in rags and drunk. But Chandler wisely starts the story at a point right when he’s put together, and his amazement and pride at being halfway presentable communicates Marlowe’s typical status. This is compression at its finest—always look for ways to accomplish more in a shorter space.

Now if I would buttonhole this first paragraph into a category, it would be “Description.” I usually tell writers to avoid descriptive openings, especially when they’re describing the natural environment. But this description succeeds for two reasons. First, it’s the description of a person, not the weather or a place. Second, and more importantly, the last sentence opens up the main action of the book: “I was calling on four million dollars.”

He’s making a house call for a rich client. This is the action of the first chapter, and it’s going to start the mystery of the book. Essentially, a good description paragraph that opens a book will always use the last sentence to launch the reader into the action. A good rule of thumb is look squint eyed at any paragraph that is 100 percent description. Use the last sentence as a bridge to get away from mere description and tease the reader with impending action.

Think about it: the last sentence of your first paragraph is the springboard from which you launch into the rest of your book. It’s the very first break in the book, and thus the first chance readers have to stop reading. Don’t let them.

What’s the emotional bedrock of this paragraph? It’s his conflict with himself. Remember there are three levels of conflict that every book needs:

Conflict with others
Conflict with the world (a big-picture issue like poverty or injustice)
Conflict with oneself

With Marlowe, his conflict with others is the cases he’s trying to solve, the conflict with the world is his quest for justice, and his conflict with himself is overcoming his self-destructive alcoholism. So the emotional bedrock is that the reader sympathizes with a hero who isn’t perfect. We like flawed protagonists. So right from this first paragraph, our emotions tilt toward this guy.

Thankfully, the strategies for your first paragraph are uniform across all genres. Yes, Chandler’s writing a crime novel, but no matter what you’re writing, you can learn from him. If you look at any well-written romance, mystery, literary, YA, sci-fi, fantasy, crime, thriller, historical, or horror novel, you can mine those first paragraphs to find techniques for your own books, even if you’re writing in a vastly different genre.

Learn from everything. Yes, everything . I’ve found that even genres looked down upon, like erotica or fan fiction, can teach a serious writer about pleasuring the reader and fulfilling reader expectations. Don’t be snobby—be a vacuum.

John Matthew Fox helps authors write better fiction. He is the founder of Bookfox , where he creates online courses for writers. He is also the author of The Linchpin Writer: Crafting Your Novel’s Key Moments , and I Will Shout Your Name (Press 53). After earning a creative writing MA from New York University and MFA from the University of Southern California, he taught writing at the university level for a decade before devoting himself full time to Bookfox, which has been noted by The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Writer’s Digest, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Huffington Post. His writing has also appeared in the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. Currently, he lives in Orange County, California.

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WOW!!! This is so helpful john…. thank you. And btw…. your book just came in the mail. I can’t wait to get into it

Great, glad it was helpful, and happy reading!

Great first paragraph on your article about “First Paragraphs!” I kept reading. Then as you explained the 4 critical components you’d unearthed in your research, I sat up straight and tall, thinking that this John Matthew Fox is truly on to something. How often I’ve found myself rewriting, skipping over, then backspacing and starting over, and over, all to write that great opening paragraph that will catapult the reader to keep reading. Well, you did that with this article, didn’t you? You drew this reader along, all the way to the emotional bedrock, or 3 levels of conflict found in great opening paragraphs. Thank you for an elucidating read. I will be putting your research to work. Great job by the way. I also plan to buy your book.

Hi Janine, Very glad I could help out!

And hope you enjoy the book as well.

Very helpful, thank you.

Loved this! Thanks so much!

Please clarify: Is the first paragraph in the introduction or the first actual chapter? Or should I consider both of those first paragraphs equally important?

To take a step further my “inciting incident” is a brief dialogue included in my Part One. The book is broken into three sections each section addresses distinctive themes.

I suppose if you have a prologue, the first paragraph would be there. But an introduction wouldn’t count.

But when I wrote this, I was considering the actual first chapter’s first paragraph.

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70 Opening Paragraph Examples to Kickstart Your Story

Starting a fiction story is no small task. It's often said that the beginning is the most important part of any tale. Yet crafting that perfect opening paragraph or sentence can sometimes feel elusive, even to the most seasoned writers. It's a delicate balance, introducing a new world and its inhabitants in a way that is both engaging for readers and true to the narrative that follows.

To assist with this, we have created 70 opening paragraph examples. Here, you'll find starting paragraphs for fiction genres including fantasy, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction, thriller and suspense, and western. Each example offers a potential pathway into a narrative, providing a foundation that you can build upon to craft your own unique tale.

Please note that this material is copyrighted by ServiceScape and is designed to be used for writing inspiration. We encourage you to use our ideas as fertile ground to grow your own unique stories. Should you find one of our example opening paragraphs to be the perfect launchpad for your next tale, there's no need to credit us — although we'd certainly appreciate it. A simple link to ServiceScape is enough.

One caveat: Please do not publish our example opening paragraphs as-is, in their entirety without attribution. This is not the intended use.

As you explore the various ways to start a story, we hope you find the inspiration you're seeking. Happy writing!

The sky tore open with a roar, signaling the arrival of beings of light in the medieval world of Elarion. These warriors, with their electrifying presence, brought with them the promise of change, merging realms and forging unexpected alliances in a world that had known only traditional bounds until now.
Thalia stood amidst figures draped in twilight hues, ready for the celestial conference — a gathering rooted in ancient magic, where dreams and fears intermingled. She was a young delegate with old eyes, prepared to share and receive wisdom in dialects forgotten by time. It was a meeting of minds, of secrets whispered in the canvas of the night, inviting the brave to witness and listen.
"Curiosity, they often told me, is a dangerous thing, Cray," the wind seemed to whisper as young Cray ventured deeper into the realms of his dreams, far beyond the reality known to the villagers. Guided by whispers and the glow of moon-soaked stones, he found himself approaching the ancient door that stood at the world's end — the gateway to mysteries untold.
Lord Draven sat alone in his study, poring over ancient texts. The castle that housed generations stood tall, but as he thought about his impulsive heir, Callum, the walls seemed to close in on him. The long lineage of wisdom seemed threatened, and as twilight descended, Draven wondered if his legacy would find a respectful steward in the young man or face ruin.
Young Onar lay in bed, lost in dreams fueled by the elders' tales of golden trees and wandering islands in an endless sea. His deep blue eyes saw more in the dream realm than in the waking world — mermaids singing in distant waters, seashells whispering secrets. He awoke with a determination to unravel the mysteries that danced on the edges of his dreams.
With a heavy heart, Ser Delan meandered through the courtyard littered with memories of a happier time. It had only been hours since the dreadful news reached him — the northern lands had fallen. Anger, sorrow, and a whisper of hope fought within him as he grappled with the shocking turn of events, trying to formulate a pledge of vengeance amidst the ruins of his homeland.
In the heart of the untouched forest, the Stoneborn were awakening — elemental beings birthed from the earth itself. Somewhere nearby, a deer raised its head, sensing the shift in the world's equilibrium. It was a quiet yet profound change, a rebirth dictated by an ancient pact forged to preserve the balance between man and nature.
Beatrice walked with determination, her senses alive to the magical pulses of the city that breathed around her. Lanterns glowing softly guided her through streets rich with secrets and untold stories, whispering to her of alliances to be forged in the heart of the night. It was a path laden with promises, each step bringing her closer to the unseen spirits eager to connect.
In the silent streets of the sleeping town, a celestial creature roamed — a rare sight, with feathers that bore the depth of night skies and eyes that held galaxies. To a watching cat, this being was an enigma, a creature of starlight and cosmic dreams, and to those who would witness its path, a promise of stories spun from the grand tapestries of the cosmos.
Meriel felt a hand on her shoulder, breaking her trance. She found herself amidst the villagers under the glow of twin moons, watching figures in maroon cloaks emerge from the forest. An initiation — the Breaking — was underway, and the deep voice that spoke next hinted that her life was about to take a turn: "Fate, untethered, seeks the brave."
Sam Berringer hurried down Harrowville's main street, an unsettling energy urging him forward. The children, the elderly — everyone felt it, a prelude to catastrophe. As the sun arched toward the west, he couldn't shake off the fear gnawing at him, a fear of the irreversible change that would come with the sunset.
Alma stood frozen in front of her peculiar house — the one that leaned to one side just a little too much. It had whispered secrets to her in the still of the night for as long as she could remember. But today, as she approached it, it seemed almost like it was trying to scream something terrible, something dark.
Young Thomas Kale found himself tracing back to the early moments of his morning, before the sky had clouded over with a foreboding atmosphere that seeped into Lakeshire's streets. His mind raced through recent memories, trying to pinpoint when exactly the world had tilted from comforting familiarity into chaotic, swirling danger.
Lestra moved briskly through the rooms, the heavy history of New Orleans surrounding her in whispers of past and present mingling uncomfortably. The old home was more alive today, more demanding. She paused, realizing the house wasn't just a repository of long-buried family secrets; it had become a character in the unfolding drama, urging her to unearth truths tied to the land's very soil.
Ashton Creed stared at the grotesque shapes taking over his once beautiful garden. The weird, twisted faces emerging from the petals were unlike anything he had ever seen. With a sudden chill, he realized this wasn't just an anomaly; it was a horrifying invitation to a reality he had never anticipated, where the natural order of things was breaking down.
Eleanora wandered the forbidden areas of Eldridge, a place cloaked in tales and whispered fears. As she ventured deeper, the unspoken rules that kept others at bay seemed insignificant, a foolish barrier between her and the truth. The quiet bravery blossoming within her spurred her on, ready to pull back the curtain and expose whatever darkness lurked there, waiting.
Gregory found himself in a world where rain carried the smell of decay, a stark departure from the town he knew just yesterday. The change was grotesque, impossible, and yet it was happening right before his eyes. A sense of duty overcame him, a resolve to trace this terror to its source, though every step forward felt like a step into the unknown.
The world blurred at the edges as Martha Cray found herself unable to discern reality from illusion. Every step forward felt like a journey into the unknown, questions multiplying with each heartbeat. Yet deep within her, a fire burned, a desire to untangle the knot of confusion and fear that wound tighter with every passing moment.
Ember Hollow was engulfed in an all-consuming obsession that masked itself as love. As the residents succumbed to overpowering desires, it was as if a dark spell had been cast over the town. The air crackled with passion and danger, a looming darkness turned love grotesque, threatening to transform affection into a force voracious and uncontrollable.
Reverend David Amery stood silent in the chapel, holding a child that seemed to be both a beacon of hope and a harbinger of doom. He felt a chilling premonition, an unraveling future where heavenly battles between good and evil threatened to spill into their world, centered around this innocent being cradled in his arms. The burden of what to do next weighed heavily on him, every choice carrying a shadow of peril.
The gunshot echoed, a stark interruption in the early morning quiet. Inspector Devereux turned sharply, heart pounding in his chest, knowing that a life might have just been irrevocably altered. In the square, faces emerged from windows, all drawn to the sudden burst of violence that intruded upon their morning routines.
Inspector Ainsley stood rooted to the spot, the whispers of a secret echoing in the halls of the great London institution that had stood for centuries. A whispered rumor about a lost artifact that was believed to be a mere myth. The inspector's mind raced, filled with questions — who had taken it, why now, and what dark secrets would it unveil?
Dublin seemed like a different city in Kilroy's childhood memories. As a child, the streets had been wider, the sky bluer, and dreams bigger. Now as Detective Kilroy stood there, a surreal feeling engulfed her, as if she was meeting an old friend after many years. The city whispered old secrets in her ears, luring her into a maze of past and present.
Oxford was a place of academic rigour and tradition, unchanged in many ways since its foundation. Yet, for Professor Thurgood, the landscape had altered subtly overnight. The walls seemed to speak of something sinister, a dark underbelly that was gradually coming to the surface, promising to change the university and its inhabitants forever.
Los Angeles lay sprawled under a sun that seared unkindly, a city of extremes where dreams either blossomed wildly or withered mercilessly. Detective Hale breathed in the acrid air, feeling it resonate with the city's pulse of desperation and unspoken desires. It was a place of contrasts, and something in the atmosphere that day spoke of changes on the horizon, of simmering tensions reaching a boiling point.
"You know, I used to be someone else," Vanessa murmured to herself as she navigated through a world of wealth and detached smiles. Her voice carried a weight of sadness, a longing for simpler times before deceit and hidden agendas became her daily currency. As she uttered those words, it was as if she was preparing herself, steeling herself for the path that lay before her, a path paved with secrets, betrayals, and perhaps, a chance for redemption.
The siren wailed urgently, breaking the deep silence of the night as Detective Rawlins sped through the city streets, the grim reflection of neon lights flashing across his stern face. His heartbeat echoed in his ears, a frantic drum heralding a plunge into the chaotic underbelly of a city burdened with secrets and sins that were about to spill into the harsh light of day.
A scream reverberated through the cold streets of Boston, where history met modernity at every corner. Detective O'Sullivan raced toward the source, his mind filled with dreadful possibilities. The city seemed to hold its breath, awaiting the revelation of a mystery that promised to expose the sins of the present intertwined deeply with echoes of the past.
Jack Tracer could still hear the optimistic words of his younger self as he looked out over the roads stretching into the horizon, a beacon of endless possibilities. But the roads were different now, marked with signs of conflict and betrayal. Tracer knew that the vibrant pulse of America he had once felt had transformed into something more sinister, pulling him into a vortex of dark secrets that lay hidden in the depths of human souls.
In Mississippi, a courtroom buzzed with tense energy, a microcosm of a world teetering between justice and corruption. Elias Harper stood there, a young lawyer on the cusp of unraveling a tangled web woven from power and greed, grounded by a steadfast belief in justice. As he looked around, he knew that the path that awaited him was fraught with moral dilemmas and truths that could shake the foundations of the society he was a part of.
Maeve Delaney sprinted between the rows of grapevines, her heart pounding in time with her swift footsteps. The phone call had come at the worst possible moment, a harbinger of change right as she had begun to find peace amidst the ancestral vines.
It was amidst the laughter and swirling aromas of the bustling room that Jamison's gaze locked with that of a stranger—a stranger who somehow seemed familiar. Every fiber of his being urged him to find out who she was, to unearth the secret stories that lived within her alluring gaze.
Lady Daphne found herself lost in the echoing halls of grandeur, a relic from a past age thrust into the modern whirlwind of the London season. As she maneuvered gracefully through the lively corridors, whispers of her hidden, youthful liaisons with a past love reverberated in her heart, a secret key to understanding her present self.
The morning embraced Loretta with a kiss of warm sun as she stepped out into the post-reconstruction Georgia. She bore in her veins the dreams and aspirations of generations, and today was a testament to the unfettered spirit of resilience and change that echoed through the mighty oaks dotting the landscape.
Elara wandered the quaint streets of the seaside town, a place where the cobblestone paths narrated stories of countless lives intertwined in a rich tapestry of human experiences. Each step she took was guided by an unwavering empathy, an open heart ready to receive the myriad currents of romance that flowed through the town's veins.
"I've always felt somewhat apart from all this," Miss Elspeth Harrington mused aloud, her sharp eyes dissecting the kaleidoscope of romantic entanglements that painted her village in vibrant hues of emotion. Despite her rationality, a quiet hope whispered within her, suggesting the possibility of a connection that was truly her own.
John found himself on the North Carolina shore with no memory of how he arrived. The waves gently lapped at his feet, as if trying to soothe the raw, unyielding pain that enveloped him, reminding him of the love lost and the void it left behind—a gaping wound that yearned for healing and redemption.
"Why am I here?" Olive asked herself as she ventured into the realm of love, a landscape fraught with uncertainty and juxtaposed realities. Her cynicism danced with hopeful romanticism, promising adventures that defied the logic she held so dear, yet irresistibly pulling her into a whirlpool of the extraordinary and the mundane.
As Miss Amelia Cavendish sat in the meticulously arranged parlor of the Fairbrook estate, memories of secret meetings in the dawn's early light flooded back, shaking the foundations of her meticulously built world. Hidden desires, once locked away, surged forward, compelling her to question the stringent rules of society that confined her.
In a bustling café bathed in golden afternoon hues, Elara found herself at a pivotal crossroads in her life—a divergence between the predictable and the unknown. Each patron carried stories untold, lives unfolding in synchronous harmony, setting the stage for encounters both ephemeral and potentially life-altering as she navigated the modern world of digitalized romances and fleeting connections.

Science fiction

"What did it say?" Elira rushed towards the eldest, her heart beating in harmony with the grand hall's pulsating rhythm. Each person here was a walking library, with minds rich in lifetime-cultivated knowledge, and it was in this cacophony of wisdom and curiosity that young apprentice Elira was about to dive deeper than ever before.
Dr. Kael's breath caught as he lifted the prism, galaxies swirling within it, whispering the secrets of the universe. In the solitude of the Intergalactic Archive, surrounded by ancient relics of knowledge, Kael faced a mystery that beckoned him into a complex dance with the celestial unknown.
Xan couldn't shake the vision from last night, the luminescent plants weaving tales of distant worlds through their ethereal glow. In the comet's subterranean tunnels, where Xan tended to his garden, he was beginning to unlock the secret language of the cosmos, and today, the plants seemed to be urging him on a journey unlike any before.
Aria Sandoval felt the pulse of a thousand worlds bearing down on her as she orchestrated the symphony of diplomacy that held the United Interstellar Communities together. With every gesture and word chosen with meticulous care, she was a conductor for peace, wielding strategy and empathy in equal measures.
The lost era summoned him, acting as a beacon from a time when harmony and light graced the world. As Professor Mallick gazed through his newly invented tool, glimpses of the distant past unveiled themselves, pulling him into an obsession with understanding the beauty that once was.
Taelia felt the ancient song resonate in her bones, a harmony forged from the whispers of the trees and the gentle murmurs of the river. As she ventured deeper into the forest towards the old world-tree Yorlin, the young seeker grasped at the tendrils of knowledge flowing through the interconnected dance of life unfolding before her.
Dr. Lin stood at the threshold of the physical and the abstract, lost in the fluid dance of geometric patterns and swirling equations. This was the underlying narrative of the universe, a mathematical tapestry waiting to unravel its greatest secrets under Lin's eager gaze.
"This isn't real," Detective Calder muttered, stepping through the shattered boundaries between the real and the surreal. In a world fractured into countless realities, each case became a mind-bending journey into human consciousness, a labyrinth where dreams held more weight than reality.
The city whispered stories to Ansel as he wandered its living streets, where buildings breathed and paths pulsed with life. Every element shared secrets, weaving tales of wonder from sunlight and leaf whispers, kindling the young boy's sense of fascination and urging him to look deeper, to see the magic in the everyday.
"Ready?" The virtual landscape stretched infinitely before Alias, a realm forged from codes and streams of data. With each digital spell cast, she unraveled the virtual world's closely guarded secrets, a hacker embarking on quests filled with hidden knowledge, and mysteries waiting to be unearthed.

Thriller and suspense

Mitch Rapp's heart pounded in his chest as he stepped into the desolate place that barely clung to hope. Every step was both a discovery and a threat, guided only by skills forged in unseen battlefields. The small town stretched before him, its troubles hiding behind forlorn structures. Mitch was ready to unearth every one of them.
Lily paused, the too-bright day casting deep shadows that clashed with the smiles of the overly joyous people around her. The uneasy feeling grew with each step, fueled by a deep-seated intuition that recognized the deceit permeating the air, masked by pristine houses and manicured lawns. The apparent perfection held a secret, and she was determined to unravel it.
The only sound disturbing the silent, fog-swathed morning was Thomas Elster's footsteps. As he ventured deeper into the obscured streets, memories from past mornings crowded in, each one revealing a hidden cruelty, a secret kept in daylight's shadow. Each step forward was a step back in time, preparing him to reveal yet another tale hidden in the cracks of daily life.
Below the rush of Cyan's breath and pounding heart lay a city struggling under the weight of corruption. Each leap across the rooftops became a statement, a rebellion against the darkness festering below. Every painful inhalation was a testament to her determination to cleanse the place, regardless of the personal cost.
Eli Doyle was a shadow in a crowd of substance, moving with a purpose only he understood, with every heartbeat echoing concealed danger and impending action. The vibrant city beat rhythmically around him, unaware of the perilous dance about to unfold as Eli maneuvered closer to the epicenter of chaos.
"You wouldn't believe the stories these trees could tell," David Hunter whispered to himself, moving deliberately through the whispering forest. Each step forward was accompanied by the soft chorus of leaves sharing tales of a nation in distress, a world on the verge of chaos. David was a solitary figure in a living, breathing repository of secrets, ready to stand against the shadows threatening to engulf everything.
In the heart of the operations room, Admiral Sarah Jennings surveyed the geopolitical landscape displayed on digital maps. The world resembled a chessboard of shifting alliances and burgeoning rivalries. Sarah stood firm, a beacon of resolve, prepared to steer her nation through the tumultuous waters that lay ahead.
In a room heavy with the weight of history, Professor Adrian Kane felt a pull towards the ancient texts that promised hidden truths. The boundary between science and mysticism blurred as he delved deeper, ready to uncover knowledge that might alter the very fabric of human understanding.
Darkness fell, casting the city into a world of shadow and mystery where Jaden found himself an unwilling hero. A silent battle raged in the hidden corners of the night, a conflict of good against evil that beckoned him, drawing him deeper into its ancient, cosmic pulse.
The message pierced the tranquility of Alex's Sunday morning with cold, sharp words slicing through the screen and shattering the illusion that held his life together. Suddenly, he found himself on the brink, facing shadows from his past that threatened to engulf the life he had so carefully built, revealing dark secrets eager to flood into the light.
As Jedediah trod upon the undisturbed soil, the grandeur of the landscape lay before him, a tapestry woven from golden grasses and deep crimson canyons. Yet, a deeper purpose fueled his steps: a secret nestled in the heart of the untamed land, ancient and waiting to be unraveled.
In the heart of the Texas plains, whispers of change caught on the wind traveled from person to person, stitching a thread of fragile hope across weary hearts. As evening descended, stretching shadows across the land, it became a visual echo of the hopes and dreams nestled in the souls of the toiling populace, each one harboring a tender wish nourished by the day's end.
Amid the wild frontier, a group of unlikely companions formed — a lawman hardened by time, a naïve young cowhand, a native steeped in wisdom, and a madam with eyes that bore untold stories. Though their paths were distinct, they began to entwine, pulled together by the strings of a fate yet unrevealed.
Under an unyielding sky, a determined band pushed forth, each step echoing with hopes and dreams yet unfulfilled. Driven by a shared vision of what lay beyond the horizon, the beating of hooves against the earth marked their united rhythm, a heartbeat of collective ambition and raw, unyielding determination.
From above, a lone vulture surveyed the ever-changing narratives below, a dance of tiny figures drawn on the vast canvas of the earth. A sense of mounting tension permeated the air, hinting at unfolding dramas, with lives on the verge of collision in the ruthless theater of survival.
As darkness embraced the world, a group of weary souls gathered around a flickering campfire, the moon casting a silent witness to their shared solitude. Among them, a figure stood poised, embodying a resolve forged from the day's labor, eyes fixed on the dark expanse, ready to guide them through the uncertainties that awaited with the dawn.
In a land that demanded sacrifice, dreams forged from resilience blossomed stubbornly. Individuals from different walks of life united, driven by a shared longing for warmth and community, building bonds stronger than the harsh conditions of the frontier, their collective will inscribing a narrative of hope upon the unforgiving canvas.
The wild lands bore silent testimony to the lives that ventured through its expanses, a vibrant backdrop awaiting new stories to grace its surface. It held both potential and peril, a vast stage ready to play host to tales of courage, loss, and unexpected bonds forged in adversity.
Pastor Grey stood contemplating the essence of the frontier, a realm that sculpted both brutality and kindness from those who dared to call it home. Guided by deep-seated conviction, he embraced his mission to foster a community that thrived in harmony with the untamed spirit breathing life into the west.
Ember Creek vibrated with the tenuous dance between hope and despair, a pulsating rhythm guiding the lives of its denizens. At its helm, Sheriff Hannah Callahan bore witness to the simmering pot of dreams and secrets, her vigilant presence a grounding force in a place teetering on the precipice of change, nurturing the spark of potential residing in every heart.

Header image by michaklootwijk .

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Last updated on Feb 14, 2023

10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You’ll Love)

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery".

About Rebecca van Laer

Rebecca van Laer is a writer, editor, and the author of two books, including the novella How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work has been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, Breadcrumbs, and TriQuarterly.

A lot falls under the term ‘creative writing’: poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is , it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at examples that demonstrate the sheer range of styles and genres under its vast umbrella.

To that end, we’ve collected a non-exhaustive list of works across multiple formats that have inspired the writers here at Reedsy. With 20 different works to explore, we hope they will inspire you, too.

People have been writing creatively for almost as long as we have been able to hold pens. Just think of long-form epic poems like The Odyssey or, later, the Cantar de Mio Cid — some of the earliest recorded writings of their kind.

Poetry is also a great place to start if you want to dip your own pen into the inkwell of creative writing. It can be as short or long as you want (you don’t have to write an epic of Homeric proportions), encourages you to build your observation skills, and often speaks from a single point of view .

Here are a few examples:

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The ruins of pillars and walls with the broken statue of a man in the center set against a bright blue sky.

This classic poem by Romantic poet Percy Shelley (also known as Mary Shelley’s husband) is all about legacy. What do we leave behind? How will we be remembered? The great king Ozymandias built himself a massive statue, proclaiming his might, but the irony is that his statue doesn’t survive the ravages of time. By framing this poem as told to him by a “traveller from an antique land,” Shelley effectively turns this into a story. Along with the careful use of juxtaposition to create irony, this poem accomplishes a lot in just a few lines.

“Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux

A direction. An object. My love, it needs a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening. I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

Poetry is cherished for its ability to evoke strong emotions from the reader using very few words which is exactly what Dorianne Laux does in “ Trying to Raise the Dead .” With vivid imagery that underscores the painful yearning of the narrator, she transports us to a private nighttime scene as the narrator sneaks away from a party to pray to someone they’ve lost. We ache for their loss and how badly they want their lost loved one to acknowledge them in some way. It’s truly a masterclass on how writing can be used to portray emotions.

If you find yourself inspired to try out some poetry — and maybe even get it published — check out these poetry layouts that can elevate your verse!

Song Lyrics

Poetry’s closely related cousin, song lyrics are another great way to flex your creative writing muscles. You not only have to find the perfect rhyme scheme but also match it to the rhythm of the music. This can be a great challenge for an experienced poet or the musically inclined.

To see how music can add something extra to your poetry, check out these two examples:

“Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Metaphors are commonplace in almost every kind of creative writing, but will often take center stage in shorter works like poetry and songs. At the slightest mention, they invite the listener to bring their emotional or cultural experience to the piece, allowing the writer to express more with fewer words while also giving it a deeper meaning. If a whole song is couched in metaphor, you might even be able to find multiple meanings to it, like in Leonard Cohen’s “ Hallelujah .” While Cohen’s Biblical references create a song that, on the surface, seems like it’s about a struggle with religion, the ambiguity of the lyrics has allowed it to be seen as a song about a complicated romantic relationship.

“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark

You can think of song lyrics as poetry set to music. They manage to do many of the same things their literary counterparts do — including tugging on your heartstrings. Death Cab for Cutie’s incredibly popular indie rock ballad is about the singer’s deep devotion to his lover. While some might find the song a bit too dark and macabre, its melancholy tune and poignant lyrics remind us that love can endure beyond death.

Plays and Screenplays

From the short form of poetry, we move into the world of drama — also known as the play. This form is as old as the poem, stretching back to the works of ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles, who adapted the myths of their day into dramatic form. The stage play (and the more modern screenplay) gives the words on the page a literal human voice, bringing life to a story and its characters entirely through dialogue.

Interested to see what that looks like? Take a look at these examples:

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”

Arthur Miller acts as a bridge between the classic and the new, creating 20th century tragedies that take place in living rooms and backyard instead of royal courts, so we had to include his breakout hit on this list. Set in the backyard of an all-American family in the summer of 1946, this tragedy manages to communicate family tensions in an unimaginable scale, building up to an intense climax reminiscent of classical drama.

💡 Read more about Arthur Miller and classical influences in our breakdown of Freytag’s pyramid .

“Everything is Fine” by Michael Schur ( The Good Place )

“Well, then this system sucks. What...one in a million gets to live in paradise and everyone else is tortured for eternity? Come on! I mean, I wasn't freaking Gandhi, but I was okay. I was a medium person. I should get to spend eternity in a medium place! Like Cincinnati. Everyone who wasn't perfect but wasn't terrible should get to spend eternity in Cincinnati.”

A screenplay, especially a TV pilot, is like a mini-play, but with the extra job of convincing an audience that they want to watch a hundred more episodes of the show. Blending moral philosophy with comedy, The Good Place is a fun hang-out show set in the afterlife that asks some big questions about what it means to be good.

It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an incredibly imperfect woman from Arizona who wakes up in ‘The Good Place’ and realizes that there’s been a cosmic mixup. Determined not to lose her place in paradise, she recruits her “soulmate,” a former ethics professor, to teach her philosophy with the hope that she can learn to be a good person and keep up her charade of being an upstanding citizen. The pilot does a superb job of setting up the stakes, the story, and the characters, while smuggling in deep philosophical ideas.

Personal essays

Our first foray into nonfiction on this list is the personal essay. As its name suggests, these stories are in some way autobiographical — concerned with the author’s life and experiences. But don’t be fooled by the realistic component. These essays can take any shape or form, from comics to diary entries to recipes and anything else you can imagine. Typically zeroing in on a single issue, they allow you to explore your life and prove that the personal can be universal.

Here are a couple of fantastic examples:

“On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years” by Min Jin Lee (Literary Hub)

There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing.

This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel . Like all good writing, it is intensely focused on personal emotional details. While grounded in the specifics of the author's personal journey, it embodies an experience that is absolutely universal: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success.

“A Cyclist on the English Landscape” by Roff Smith (New York Times)

These images, though, aren’t meant to be about me. They’re meant to represent a cyclist on the landscape, anybody — you, perhaps.

Roff Smith’s gorgeous photo essay for the NYT is a testament to the power of creatively combining visuals with text. Here, photographs of Smith atop a bike are far from simply ornamental. They’re integral to the ruminative mood of the essay, as essential as the writing. Though Smith places his work at the crosscurrents of various aesthetic influences (such as the painter Edward Hopper), what stands out the most in this taciturn, thoughtful piece of writing is his use of the second person to address the reader directly. Suddenly, the writer steps out of the body of the essay and makes eye contact with the reader. The reader is now part of the story as a second character, finally entering the picture.

Short Fiction

The short story is the happy medium of fiction writing. These bite-sized narratives can be devoured in a single sitting and still leave you reeling. Sometimes viewed as a stepping stone to novel writing, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Short story writing is an art all its own. The limited length means every word counts and there’s no better way to see that than with these two examples:

“An MFA Story” by Paul Dalla Rosa (Electric Literature)

At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, "I wrote this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu." It wasn’t an aside or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything.

Creative Writing Examples | Photograph of New York City street.

This short story is a delightfully metafictional tale about the struggles of being a writer in New York. From paying the bills to facing criticism in a writing workshop and envying more productive writers, Paul Dalla Rosa’s story is a clever satire of the tribulations involved in the writing profession, and all the contradictions embodied by systemic creativity (as famously laid out in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era ). What’s more, this story is an excellent example of something that often happens in creative writing: a writer casting light on the private thoughts or moments of doubt we don’t admit to or openly talk about.

“Flowering Walrus” by Scott Skinner (Reedsy)

I tell him they’d been there a month at least, and he looks concerned. He has my tongue on a tissue paper and is gripping its sides with his pointer and thumb. My tongue has never spent much time outside of my mouth, and I imagine it as a walrus basking in the rays of the dental light. My walrus is not well.

A winner of Reedsy’s weekly Prompts writing contest, ‘ Flowering Walrus ’ is a story that balances the trivial and the serious well. In the pauses between its excellent, natural dialogue , the story manages to scatter the fear and sadness of bad medical news, as the protagonist hides his worries from his wife and daughter. Rich in subtext, these silences grow and resonate with the readers.

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Perhaps the thing that first comes to mind when talking about creative writing, novels are a form of fiction that many people know and love but writers sometimes find intimidating. The good news is that novels are nothing but one word put after another, like any other piece of writing, but expanded and put into a flowing narrative. Piece of cake, right?

To get an idea of the format’s breadth of scope, take a look at these two (very different) satirical novels:

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality — all simply store workers.

Creative Writing Examples | Book cover of Convenience Store Woman

Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store employee, finds comfort and happiness in the strict, uneventful routine of the shop’s daily operations. A funny, satirical, but simultaneously unnerving examination of the social structures we take for granted, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is deeply original and lingers with the reader long after they’ve put it down.

Erasure by Percival Everett

The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.

Erasure is a truly accomplished satire of the publishing industry’s tendency to essentialize African American authors and their writing. Everett’s protagonist is a writer whose work doesn’t fit with what publishers expect from him — work that describes the “African American experience” — so he writes a parody novel about life in the ghetto. The publishers go crazy for it and, to the protagonist’s horror, it becomes the next big thing. This sophisticated novel is both ironic and tender, leaving its readers with much food for thought.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is pretty broad: it applies to anything that does not claim to be fictional (although the rise of autofiction has definitely blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction). It encompasses everything from personal essays and memoirs to humor writing, and they range in length from blog posts to full-length books. The defining characteristic of this massive genre is that it takes the world or the author’s experience and turns it into a narrative that a reader can follow along with.

Here, we want to focus on novel-length works that dig deep into their respective topics. While very different, these two examples truly show the breadth and depth of possibility of creative nonfiction:

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.

Writer Jesmyn Ward recounts the deaths of five men from her rural Mississippi community in as many years. In her award-winning memoir , she delves into the lives of the friends and family she lost and tries to find some sense among the tragedy. Working backwards across five years, she questions why this had to happen over and over again, and slowly unveils the long history of racism and poverty that rules rural Black communities. Moving and emotionally raw, Men We Reaped is an indictment of a cruel system and the story of a woman's grief and rage as she tries to navigate it.

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

He believed that wine could reshape someone’s life. That’s why he preferred buying bottles to splurging on sweaters. Sweaters were things. Bottles of wine, said Morgan, “are ways that my humanity will be changed.”

In this work of immersive journalism , Bianca Bosker leaves behind her life as a tech journalist to explore the world of wine. Becoming a “cork dork” takes her everywhere from New York’s most refined restaurants to science labs while she learns what it takes to be a sommelier and a true wine obsessive. This funny and entertaining trip through the past and present of wine-making and tasting is sure to leave you better informed and wishing you, too, could leave your life behind for one devoted to wine.

Illustrated Narratives (Comics, graphic novels)

Once relegated to the “funny pages”, the past forty years of comics history have proven it to be a serious medium. Comics have transformed from the early days of Jack Kirby’s superheroes into a medium where almost every genre is represented. Humorous one-shots in the Sunday papers stand alongside illustrated memoirs, horror, fantasy, and just about anything else you can imagine. This type of visual storytelling lets the writer and artist get creative with perspective, tone, and so much more. For two very different, though equally entertaining, examples, check these out:

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure."

A Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. A little blond boy Calvin makes multiple silly faces in school photos. In the last panel, his father says, "That's our son. *Sigh*" His mother then says, "The pictures will remind of more than we want to remember."

This beloved comic strip follows Calvin, a rambunctious six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend, Hobbes. They get into all kinds of hijinks at school and at home, and muse on the world in the way only a six-year-old and an anthropomorphic tiger can. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, Calvin & Hobbes ’ popularity persists as much for its whimsy as its use of humor to comment on life, childhood, adulthood, and everything in between.

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."

Comics aren't just the realm of superheroes and one-joke strips, as Alan Moore proves in this serialized graphic novel released between 1989 and 1998. A meticulously researched alternative history of Victorian London’s Ripper killings, this macabre story pulls no punches. Fact and fiction blend into a world where the Royal Family is involved in a dark conspiracy and Freemasons lurk on the sidelines. It’s a surreal mad-cap adventure that’s unsettling in the best way possible.

Video Games and RPGs

Probably the least expected entry on this list, we thought that video games and RPGs also deserved a mention — and some well-earned recognition for the intricate storytelling that goes into creating them.

Essentially gamified adventure stories, without attention to plot, characters, and a narrative arc, these games would lose a lot of their charm, so let’s look at two examples where the creative writing really shines through:

80 Days by inkle studios

"It was a triumph of invention over nature, and will almost certainly disappear into the dust once more in the next fifty years."

Named Time Magazine ’s game of the year in 2014, this narrative adventure is based on Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. The player is cast as the novel’s narrator, Passpartout, and tasked with circumnavigating the globe in service of their employer, Phileas Fogg. Set in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the game uses its globe-trotting to comment on the colonialist fantasies inherent in the original novel and its time period. On a storytelling level, the choose-your-own-adventure style means no two players’ journeys will be the same. This innovative approach to a classic novel shows the potential of video games as a storytelling medium, truly making the player part of the story.

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

"If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is."

This video game casts the player as 17-year-old Edith Finch. Returning to her family’s home on an island in the Pacific northwest, Edith explores the vast house and tries to figure out why she’s the only one of her family left alive. The story of each family member is revealed as you make your way through the house, slowly unpacking the tragic fate of the Finches. Eerie and immersive, this first-person exploration game uses the medium to tell a series of truly unique tales.

Fun and breezy on the surface, humor is often recognized as one of the trickiest forms of creative writing. After all, while you can see the artistic value in a piece of prose that you don’t necessarily enjoy, if a joke isn’t funny, you could say that it’s objectively failed.

With that said, it’s far from an impossible task, and many have succeeded in bringing smiles to their readers’ faces through their writing. Here are two examples:

‘How You Hope Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job to Them’ by Mike Lacher (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

“Is it true you don’t have desks?” your grandmother will ask. You will nod again and crack open a can of Country Time Lemonade. “My stars,” she will say, “it must be so wonderful to not have a traditional office and instead share a bistro-esque coworking space.”

An open plan office seen from a bird's eye view. There are multiple strands of Edison lights hanging from the ceiling. At long light wooden tables multiple people sit working at computers, many of them wearing headphones.

Satire and parody make up a whole subgenre of creative writing, and websites like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Onion consistently hit the mark with their parodies of magazine publishing and news media. This particular example finds humor in the divide between traditional family expectations and contemporary, ‘trendy’ work cultures. Playing on the inherent silliness of today’s tech-forward middle-class jobs, this witty piece imagines a scenario where the writer’s family fully understands what they do — and are enthralled to hear more. “‘Now is it true,’ your uncle will whisper, ‘that you’ve got a potential investment from one of the founders of I Can Haz Cheezburger?’”

‘Not a Foodie’ by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Electric Literature)

I’m not a foodie, I never have been, and I know, in my heart, I never will be.

Highlighting what she sees as an unbearable social obsession with food , in this comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell takes a hilarious stand against the importance of food. From the writer’s courageous thesis (“I think there are more exciting things to talk about, and focus on in life, than what’s for dinner”) to the amusing appearance of family members and the narrator’s partner, ‘Not a Foodie’ demonstrates that even a seemingly mundane pet peeve can be approached creatively — and even reveal something profound about life.

We hope this list inspires you with your own writing. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be that there is no limit to what you can write about or how you can write about it.

In the next part of this guide, we'll drill down into the fascinating world of creative nonfiction.

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105 Creative Writing Prompts to Try Out

General Education

The most common advice out there for being a writer is, "if you want to write, write." While this is true (and good advice), it's not always that easy, particularly if you're not writing regularly.

Whether you're looking for help getting started on your next project, or just want to spend 20 minutes being creative, writing prompts are great ways to rev up your imagination. Read on for our list of over 100 creative writing prompts!

feature image credit: r. nial bradshaw /Flickr

10 Short Writing Prompts

If you're looking for a quick boost to get yourself going, these 10 short writing prompts will do the trick.

#1 : Write a scene starting with a regular family ritual that goes awry.

#2 : Describe exactly what you see/smell/hear/etc, right now. Include objects, people, and anything else in your immediate environment.

#3 : Suggest eight possible ways to get a ping pong ball out of a vertical pipe.

#4 : A shoe falls out of the sky. Justify why.

#5 : If your brain were a tangible, physical place, what would it be like?

#6 : Begin your writing with the phrase, "The stage was set."

#7 : You have been asked to write a history of "The Summer of [this past year]." Your publisher wants a table of contents. What events will you submit?

#8 : Write a sympathetic story from the point of view of the "bad guy." (Think fractured fairy tales like Wicked or The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! , although the story doesn't have to be a fairy tale.)

#9 : Look at everyday objects in a new way and write about the stories one of these objects contains.

#10 : One person meets a stranger on a mode of transportation. Write the story that ensues.

11 Writing Prompts for Kids

Any of these prompts can be used by writers of any age, but we chose the following 11 prompts as ones that would be particularly fun for kids to write about. (Most of them I used myself as a young writer, so I can vouch for their working!)

#1 : Include something falling in your writing.

#2 : Write a short poem (or story) with the title, "We don't know when it will be fixed."

#3 : Write from the perspective of someone of a different gender than you.

#4 : Write a dumb internet quiz.

#5 : Finish this thought: "A perfect day in my imagination begins like this:"

#6 : Write a character's inner monologue (what they are thinking as they go about their day).

#7 : Think of a character. Write a paragraph each about:

An important childhood experience that character had.
The character's living situation.
Two hobbies or things the character likes to do.
The room where the character sleeps.
An ambition of the character.
Two physical characteristics of the character.
What happens when a second person and this character meet.
Two important defining personal traits of this character.

#8 : Start a story with a quote from a song.

#9 : Begin a story with, "It was the summer of ______ when ______"

#10 : Pretend everyday objects have no names. Think about what you would name them based on what they do, what you can use them for, and what they look like.

#11 : Start a story with the phrases "My grandparents are/were," "My parents are/were," or "My mother/father/parent is/was."

15 Cool Writing Prompts

#1 : List five issues that you're passionate about. Write about them from the opposite point of view (or from the perspective of a character with the opposite point of view).

#2 : Walk around and write down a phrase you hear (or read). Make a story out of it.

#3 : Write using no adjectives or adverbs.

#4 : Write a character's inner dialogue between different aspects of a character's self (rather than an inner monologue).

#5 : Write a true story from your past that involves light or darkness in some way.

#6 : "Saying goodbye awakens us to the true nature of things." Write something in which someone has to say goodbye and has a realization.

#7 : Begin by writing the end of the story.

#8 : Write a recipe for an intangible thing.

#9 : Write a horror story about an ordinary situation (e.g., buying groceries, going to the bank, listening to music).

#10 : Write a story from within a bubble.

#11 : Write down 2-3 short character descriptions and then write the characters in conversation with one another.

#12 : Write a story in second person.

#13 : Write a story that keeps contradicting itself.

#14 : Write about a character with at least three big problems.

#15 : Write something that takes place on a Friday, the 13th (of any month).

15 Funny Writing Prompts

#1 : Write a story which starts with someone eating a pickle and potato sandwich.

#2 : Write a short script where the plot has to do with evil dolls trying to take over something.

#3 : Write about writers' block.

#4 : List five election issues that would be ridiculous to includes as part of your election platform (e.g. outlawing mechanical pencils and clicky pens, mandating every person over the age of 30 must own an emergency last rites kit). Choose one of the ridiculous issues and write a speech in favor of it.

#5 : Write a children's story that is insanely inappropriate but can't use graphic language, curses, or violence.

#6 : List five careers. Write about someone with one of those careers who wants to quit it.

#7 : Write down a list of murder methods. Choose one at random from the list to use in a story.

#8 : Write a romance story in which the hero must have a last name corresponding with a physical characteristic (e.g. Jacques Hairyback or Flora Dimple).

#9 : Come up with 10 different ways to:

order a pizza
congratulate someone on a job well done
return to the store something that's broken

#10 : Search for "random Renaissance painting" (or any other inspirational image search text you can think of) on any online internet image search engine. Picking one image, write half a page each of:

Statements about this image (e.g. "I meant bring me the BREAD of John the Baptist").
Questions about this image (e.g. "How many of those cherubs look like their necks are broken?").
Explanations of this image (e.g. "The painter ran out of blue paint halfway through and had to improvise for the color of the sky").
Commands said by people in this image or about this image (e.g. "Stop telling me to smile!" or "Bring me some gasoline!").

#11 : Write starting with a word that sounds like "chute" (e.g. "chute," "shoot," "shooed").

#12 : Write about a character named X "The [article of clothing]" Y (e.g. Julie "The Yellow Darted Skirt" Whyte) or simply referred to by their clothing (e.g. "the man in the brown suit" or "the woman in black").

#13 : Write down a paragraph each describing two wildly different settings. Write a story involving both settings.

#14 : Think of a fictional holiday based around some natural event (e.g. the Earth being at its farthest point from the sun, in memory of a volcanic eruption, that time a cloud looked like a rabbit riding a bicycle). Write about how this holiday is celebrated.

#15 : Write a "Just-So" type story about a fictional creature (e.g. "how the dragon got its firebreath" or "how the mudkip got its cheek gills").

54 Other Writing Prompt Ideas

#1 : Borrow a character from some other form of media (or create your own). Write from that character's perspective.

#2 : Write for and against a non-consequential controversy (e.g., salt vs. pepper, Mac vs. PC, best kind of door).

#3 : Choose an ancestor or a person from the past to write about or to.

#4 : Write a pirate story with a twist.

#5 : Have a character talk about another character and their feelings about that other character.

#6 : Pick a season and think about an event in your life that occurred in that season. Write a creative nonfiction piece about that event and that season.

#7 : Think of something very complicated and long. Write a page about it using short sentences.

#8 : Write a story as a dream.

#9 : Describe around a food without ever directly naming it.

#10 : Write a monologue (one character, talking to the audience/reader) (*not* an inner monologue).

#11 : Begin a story with the phrase, "It only took five seconds to..."

#12 : List five strong emotions. Choosing one, write about a character experiencing that emotion, but only use the character's actions to convey how they are feeling (no outright statements).

#13 : Write a chapter of the memoir of your life.

#14 : Look through the (physical) things you're currently carrying with you or wearing. Write about the memories or emotions tied with each of them.

#15 : Go be in nature. Write drawing your story from your surroundings (both physical, social, and mental/emotional).

#16 : Write from the perspective of a bubble (or bubble-like creature).

#17 : A person is jogging along an asphalt road. Write a story.

#18 : Title your story (or poem, or play, etc) "Anti-_____". Fill in the blank and write the story.

#19 : Write something that must include an animal, a mineral, and a vegetable.

#20 : Begin your writing with the phrase, "6 weeks later..."

#21 : List 5-10 office jobs. Pick one of them and describe a person working in that job as if you were a commentator on an Olympic sporting event.

#22 : Practice your poetic imagery: overwrite a description of a character's breakfast routine.

#23 : Write about a character (or group of characters) trying to convince another character to try something they're scared of.

#24 : Keep an eye out in your environment for examples of greengrocer's apostrophes and rogue quotation marks. Pick an example and write about what the misplaced punctuation implies (e.g., we have the "best" meat or we have the best "meat" ).

#25 : Fill in the blank with the first word that comes to mind: "_______ Riot!" Write a newspaper-style article describing the events that that took place.

#26 : Write from the point of view of your most-loved possession. What does it think of you?

#27 : Think of five common sayings (e.g., "An apple a day keeps the doctor away"). Write a horror story whose plot is one of those common sayings.

#28 : Write a scene in which two characters are finally hashing out a long-standing misunderstanding or disagreement.

#29 : You start receiving text messages from an unknown number. Tell the story of what happens next.

#30 : Write one character bragging to another about the story behind their new tattoo.

#31 : Superheroes save the world...but they also leave a lot of destruction in their wake. Write about a normal person in a superhero's world.

#32 : Sometimes, family is who we are related to; sometimes, family is a group of people we gather around ourselves. Write a story about (some of) a character's found family and relatives meeting for the first time.

#33 : Write a story that begins in the middle of the plot's action ( en media res ).

#34 : Everyone says you can never have too much of a good thing. Write a story where that isn't true.

#35 : What do ghosts do when they're not creating mischief? Write about the secret lives of ghosts.

#36 : Every year, you dread the last week of April. Write a story about why.

#37 : Write a story about what it would be like to have an animal sidekick in real life.

#38 : Heists don't just have to be black-clad thieves stealing into vaults to steal rare art or money. Write about a group of people (adults or children) who commit a heist for something of seemingly little monetary value.

#39 : "Life is like a chooseable-path adventure, except you don't get to see what would have happened if you chose differently." Think of a choice you've made and write about a world where you made a different choice.

#40 : Write a story about a secret room.

#41 : You find a message in a bottle with very specific directions. Write a story about the adventure you embark upon.

#42 : "You'll always be okay as long as you know where your _______ is." Fill in the blank and write a story (either fictional or from your life) illustrating this statement.

#43 : Forcing people into prolonged proximity can change and deepen relationships. Write about characters on a road trip together.

#44 : In music, sonata form includes three main parts: exposition, development, and recapitulation. Write a short story that follows this format.

#45 : Begin writing with a character saying, "I'm afraid this simply can't wait."

#46 : Write a story with a happy ending (either happily-ever-after or happy-for-now).

#47 : Write about a character before and after a tragedy in that character's life.

#48 : Choose an object or concept you encounter in everyday life (e.g. tables, the feeling of hot or cold, oxygen) and write an infomercial about it.

#49 : "Life is a series of quests, whether important or mundane." Write about a quest you've gone on (or would like to go on, or will have to go on).

#50 : List 10 different ways to learn. Choose one (or more) and write a story where a character learns something using that one (or more) method.

#51 : You've been called to the principal's office for bad behavior. You know what you did. Explain and justify yourself.

#52 : A character discovers their sibling owns a cursed object. Write about what happens next.

#53 : Write a character description by writing a list of items that would be on a scavenger hunt about them.

#54 : The slogan for a product or service you're advertising is, "Kid-tested, _____." Fill in the blank and write the copy for a radio or podcast advertisement for your product.

How to Use Creative Writing Prompts

There's no wrong way to use a creative writing prompt (unless it's to harass and hurt someone)—the point of them is to get you writing and your imagination flowing.

To help you get the most out of these writing prompts, however, we've come up with the six tips below. Try them out!

#1: DON'T Limit Yourself to Prose

Unless you're writing for a particular assignment, there's no reason everything you write in response to a writing prompt has to be prose fiction . Instead of writing your response to a prompt as a story, try writing a poem, nonfiction essay, play, screenplay, or some other format entirely.

#2: DON'T Edit as You Write

The purposes of writing prompts is to get you writing, typos and weird grammar and all. Editing comes later, once you've finished writing and have some space from it to come back to what you wrote.

It's OK to fix things that will make it difficult to read what you've written (e.g., a weird autocorrect that changes the meaning of a sentence), but don't worry too much about typos or perfect grammar when you're writing; those are easy enough to fix in edits . You also can always insert asterisks or a short note as you're writing to remind yourself to go back to fix something (for instance, if as you're writing it seems like you want to move around the order of your paragraphs or insert something earlier).

#3: DO Interpret the Prompt Broadly

The point of using a writing prompt is not to write something that best exemplifies the prompt, but something that sparks your own creativity. Again, unless you're writing in response to an assignment with specific directions, feel free to interpret writing prompts as broadly or as narrowly as you want.

For instance, if your prompt is to write a story that begins with "The stage was set," you could write about anything from someone preparing to put a plan into motion to a literal theatre stage constructed out of pieces of old sets (or something else entirely).

If you're using a writing prompt, it doesn't have to be the first sentence of your story or poem, either; you can also use the prompt as a goal to work towards in your writing.

#4: DO Try Switching Up Your Writing Methods

If it's a possibility for you, see if you write differently in different media. Do you write the same kind of stories by hand as you would typing at a computer? What about if you dictate a story and then transcribe it? Or text it to a friend? Varying the method you use to write can affect the stories you're able to tell.

For example, you may find that it's easier for you to tell stories about your life to a voice recorder than to try to write out a personal essay. Or maybe you have trouble writing poetry, but can easily text yourself or a friend a poem. You might even find you like a writing method you've not tried before better than what you've been doing!

#5: DO Mix and Match Prompt Ideas

If you need more inspiration, feel free to combine multiple prompts (but don't overwhelm yourself with too much to write about).

You can also try switching genres from what might be suggested in the prompt. For instance, try writing a prompt that seems funny in a serious and sad way, or finding the humor in something that otherwise seems humorless. The categories we've organized the prompts into are by no means limiters on what you're allowed to write about.

#6: DO Try to Write Regularly

The more regularly you write, the easier it will be to write (with or without writing prompts).

For some people, this means writing daily; for others, it means setting aside time to write each weekend or each month. Set yourself an achievable goal (write 2x a week, write 1000 words a month) and stick to it. You can always start small and then ramp your wordcount or frequency up.

If you do better when you have something outside yourself prompting to write, you may also want to try something like morning pages , which encourages you to write at least 750 words every day, in any format (story, diary entry, social media postings, etc).

What's Next?

Thinking about attending college or grad school for creative writing? Our articles on whether or not you should major in creative writing and the best creative writing programs are there for you! Plus, if you're a high schooler, you should check out these top writing contests .

Creative writing doesn't necessarily have to be fiction. Check out these three examples of narrative writing and our tips for how to write your own narrative stories and essays .

Just as writing prompts can help give form to amorphous creative energy, using specific writing structures or devices can be great starting points for your next story. Read through our discussion of the top 20 poetic devices to know and see if you can work at least one new one into your next writing session.

Still looking for more writing ideas? Try repurposing our 100+ easy drawing ideas for characters, settings, or plot points in your writing.

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Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master's degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel in high school.

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What Is Creative Writing? (Ultimate Guide + 20 Examples)

Creative writing begins with a blank page and the courage to fill it with the stories only you can tell.

I face this intimidating blank page daily–and I have for the better part of 20+ years.

In this guide, you’ll learn all the ins and outs of creative writing with tons of examples.

What Is Creative Writing (Long Description)?

Creative Writing is the art of using words to express ideas and emotions in imaginative ways. It encompasses various forms including novels, poetry, and plays, focusing on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes.

Bright, colorful creative writer's desk with notebook and typewriter -- What Is Creative Writing

Table of Contents

Let’s expand on that definition a bit.

Creative writing is an art form that transcends traditional literature boundaries.

It includes professional, journalistic, academic, and technical writing. This type of writing emphasizes narrative craft, character development, and literary tropes. It also explores poetry and poetics traditions.

In essence, creative writing lets you express ideas and emotions uniquely and imaginatively.

It’s about the freedom to invent worlds, characters, and stories. These creations evoke a spectrum of emotions in readers.

Creative writing covers fiction, poetry, and everything in between.

It allows writers to express inner thoughts and feelings. Often, it reflects human experiences through a fabricated lens.

Types of Creative Writing

There are many types of creative writing that we need to explain.

Some of the most common types:

Short stories
Screenplays
Flash fiction
Creative Nonfiction

Short Stories (The Brief Escape)

Short stories are like narrative treasures.

They are compact but impactful, telling a full story within a limited word count. These tales often focus on a single character or a crucial moment.

Short stories are known for their brevity.

They deliver emotion and insight in a concise yet powerful package. This format is ideal for exploring diverse genres, themes, and characters. It leaves a lasting impression on readers.

Example: Emma discovers an old photo of her smiling grandmother. It’s a rarity. Through flashbacks, Emma learns about her grandmother’s wartime love story. She comes to understand her grandmother’s resilience and the value of joy.

Novels (The Long Journey)

Novels are extensive explorations of character, plot, and setting.

They span thousands of words, giving writers the space to create entire worlds. Novels can weave complex stories across various themes and timelines.

The length of a novel allows for deep narrative and character development.

Readers get an immersive experience.

Example: Across the Divide tells of two siblings separated in childhood. They grow up in different cultures. Their reunion highlights the strength of family bonds, despite distance and differences.

Poetry (The Soul’s Language)

Poetry expresses ideas and emotions through rhythm, sound, and word beauty.

It distills emotions and thoughts into verses. Poetry often uses metaphors, similes, and figurative language to reach the reader’s heart and mind.

Poetry ranges from structured forms, like sonnets, to free verse.

The latter breaks away from traditional formats for more expressive thought.

Example: Whispers of Dawn is a poem collection capturing morning’s quiet moments. “First Light” personifies dawn as a painter. It brings colors of hope and renewal to the world.

Plays (The Dramatic Dialogue)

Plays are meant for performance. They bring characters and conflicts to life through dialogue and action.

This format uniquely explores human relationships and societal issues.

Playwrights face the challenge of conveying setting, emotion, and plot through dialogue and directions.

Example: Echoes of Tomorrow is set in a dystopian future. Memories can be bought and sold. It follows siblings on a quest to retrieve their stolen memories. They learn the cost of living in a world where the past has a price.

Screenplays (Cinema’s Blueprint)

Screenplays outline narratives for films and TV shows.

They require an understanding of visual storytelling, pacing, and dialogue. Screenplays must fit film production constraints.

Example: The Last Light is a screenplay for a sci-fi film. Humanity’s survivors on a dying Earth seek a new planet. The story focuses on spacecraft Argo’s crew as they face mission challenges and internal dynamics.

Memoirs (The Personal Journey)

Memoirs provide insight into an author’s life, focusing on personal experiences and emotional journeys.

They differ from autobiographies by concentrating on specific themes or events.

Memoirs invite readers into the author’s world.

They share lessons learned and hardships overcome.

Example: Under the Mango Tree is a memoir by Maria Gomez. It shares her childhood memories in rural Colombia. The mango tree in their yard symbolizes home, growth, and nostalgia. Maria reflects on her journey to a new life in America.

Flash Fiction (The Quick Twist)

Flash fiction tells stories in under 1,000 words.

It’s about crafting compelling narratives concisely. Each word in flash fiction must count, often leading to a twist.

This format captures life’s vivid moments, delivering quick, impactful insights.

Example: The Last Message features an astronaut’s final Earth message as her spacecraft drifts away. In 500 words, it explores isolation, hope, and the desire to connect against all odds.

Creative Nonfiction (The Factual Tale)

Creative nonfiction combines factual accuracy with creative storytelling.

This genre covers real events, people, and places with a twist. It uses descriptive language and narrative arcs to make true stories engaging.

Creative nonfiction includes biographies, essays, and travelogues.

Example: Echoes of Everest follows the author’s Mount Everest climb. It mixes factual details with personal reflections and the history of past climbers. The narrative captures the climb’s beauty and challenges, offering an immersive experience.

Fantasy (The World Beyond)

Fantasy transports readers to magical and mythical worlds.

It explores themes like good vs. evil and heroism in unreal settings. Fantasy requires careful world-building to create believable yet fantastic realms.

Example: The Crystal of Azmar tells of a young girl destined to save her world from darkness. She learns she’s the last sorceress in a forgotten lineage. Her journey involves mastering powers, forming alliances, and uncovering ancient kingdom myths.

Science Fiction (The Future Imagined)

Science fiction delves into futuristic and scientific themes.

It questions the impact of advancements on society and individuals.

Science fiction ranges from speculative to hard sci-fi, focusing on plausible futures.

Example: When the Stars Whisper is set in a future where humanity communicates with distant galaxies. It centers on a scientist who finds an alien message. This discovery prompts a deep look at humanity’s universe role and interstellar communication.

Watch this great video that explores the question, “What is creative writing?” and “How to get started?”:

What Are the 5 Cs of Creative Writing?

The 5 Cs of creative writing are fundamental pillars.

They guide writers to produce compelling and impactful work. These principles—Clarity, Coherence, Conciseness, Creativity, and Consistency—help craft stories that engage and entertain.

They also resonate deeply with readers. Let’s explore each of these critical components.

Clarity makes your writing understandable and accessible.

It involves choosing the right words and constructing clear sentences. Your narrative should be easy to follow.

In creative writing, clarity means conveying complex ideas in a digestible and enjoyable way.

Coherence ensures your writing flows logically.

It’s crucial for maintaining the reader’s interest. Characters should develop believably, and plots should progress logically. This makes the narrative feel cohesive.

Conciseness

Conciseness is about expressing ideas succinctly.

It’s being economical with words and avoiding redundancy. This principle helps maintain pace and tension, engaging readers throughout the story.

Creativity is the heart of creative writing.

It allows writers to invent new worlds and create memorable characters. Creativity involves originality and imagination. It’s seeing the world in unique ways and sharing that vision.

Consistency

Consistency maintains a uniform tone, style, and voice.

It means being faithful to the world you’ve created. Characters should act true to their development. This builds trust with readers, making your story immersive and believable.

Is Creative Writing Easy?

Creative writing is both rewarding and challenging.

Crafting stories from your imagination involves more than just words on a page. It requires discipline and a deep understanding of language and narrative structure.

Exploring complex characters and themes is also key.

Refining and revising your work is crucial for developing your voice.

The ease of creative writing varies. Some find the freedom of expression liberating.

Others struggle with writer’s block or plot development challenges. However, practice and feedback make creative writing more fulfilling.

What Does a Creative Writer Do?

A creative writer weaves narratives that entertain, enlighten, and inspire.

Writers explore both the world they create and the emotions they wish to evoke. Their tasks are diverse, involving more than just writing.

Creative writers develop ideas, research, and plan their stories.

They create characters and outline plots with attention to detail. Drafting and revising their work is a significant part of their process. They strive for the 5 Cs of compelling writing.

Writers engage with the literary community, seeking feedback and participating in workshops.

They may navigate the publishing world with agents and editors.

Creative writers are storytellers, craftsmen, and artists. They bring narratives to life, enriching our lives and expanding our imaginations.

How to Get Started With Creative Writing?

Embarking on a creative writing journey can feel like standing at the edge of a vast and mysterious forest.

The path is not always clear, but the adventure is calling.

Here’s how to take your first steps into the world of creative writing:

Find a time of day when your mind is most alert and creative.
Create a comfortable writing space free from distractions.
Use prompts to spark your imagination. They can be as simple as a word, a phrase, or an image.
Try writing for 15-20 minutes on a prompt without editing yourself. Let the ideas flow freely.
Reading is fuel for your writing. Explore various genres and styles.
Pay attention to how your favorite authors construct their sentences, develop characters, and build their worlds.
Don’t pressure yourself to write a novel right away. Begin with short stories or poems.
Small projects can help you hone your skills and boost your confidence.
Look for writing groups in your area or online. These communities offer support, feedback, and motivation.
Participating in workshops or classes can also provide valuable insights into your writing.
Understand that your first draft is just the beginning. Revising your work is where the real magic happens.
Be open to feedback and willing to rework your pieces.
Carry a notebook or digital recorder to jot down ideas, observations, and snippets of conversations.
These notes can be gold mines for future writing projects.

Final Thoughts: What Is Creative Writing?

Creative writing is an invitation to explore the unknown, to give voice to the silenced, and to celebrate the human spirit in all its forms.

Check out these creative writing tools (that I highly recommend):

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Sqribble (eBook maker)

Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

Short story tips: 10 hacks to improve your creative writing.

Jerz > Writing > General Creative Writing Tips [ Poetry | Fiction ]

Writing short stories means beginning as close to the climax as possible — everything else is a distraction. A novel can take a more meandering path, but should still start with a scene that sets the tone for the whole book.

A short story conserves characters and scenes, typically by focusing on just one conflict , and drives towards a sudden, unexpected revelation. Go easy on the exposition and talky backstory — your reader doesn’t need to know everything that you know about your characters.

Get Started : Emergency Tips
Write a Catchy First Paragraph
Develop Your Characters
Choose a Point of View
Write Meaningful Dialogue
Use Setting and Context
Set up the Plot
Create Conflict and Tension
Build to a Crisis or a Climax
Deliver a Resolution

1. Get Started: Emergency Tips

Do you have a short story assignment due tomorrow morning ? The rest of this document covers longer-term strategies, but if you are in a pinch, these emergency tips should help. Good luck!

When the story begins , what morally significant action has your protagonist taken towards that goal ? (Your protagonist should already have made a conscious choice, good or bad, that drives the rest of the story.)
What obstacles must the protagonist overcome in order to reach the goal? (Simply having a rival is not that interesting. Yes, Harry Potter defeats Voldemort, but first he has to mature into a leader with the moral clarity and teamwork skills necessary to defeat Voldemort. A short story can’t possibly tackle that kind of character development, but a character who faces internal obstacles and must negotiate messy moral trade-offs is more dramatically interesting than the hero in the white hat who has to use the right weapon to defeat the villain in the black hat.)
What unexpected consequences — directly related to the protagonist’s goal-oriented actions — ramp up the emotional energy of the story? (Will the unexpected consequences force your protagonist to make yet another choice, leading to still more consequences? How does your protagonist change over the course of the story?)

Omit travel scenes. (Save words. “Later, at the office…”)
Omit scenes where character A tells character B exactly what we just saw happening to character A. (Omit redundancy. Focus on advancing your story. “As I filled Slim in on what I had just seen in the saloon, he dropped his show of apathy and his fingers clutched at his revolver.”)
Facial expressions of a first-person narrator. (Narrators in stories aren’t looking at video being live-streamed from a floating drone that follows them around everywhere, so they can’t report “A smile lit my face” or “My eyes darkened.” See Writing Dialogue .)
At the climax , what morally significant choice does your protagonist make? (Your reader should care about the protagonist’s decision, and ideally shouldn’t see it coming.)

An effective short story (or poem ) does not simply record or express the author’s feelings; rather, it generates feelings in the reader. (See “ Show, Don’t (Just) Tell .”)

Drawing on your own real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a “personal essay” topic. But simply listing the emotions you experienced (“It was exciting,” “I’ll never forget how heart-broken I felt,” “I miss her so much I’ll never the same without her”) is not the same thing as generating emotions for your readers to experience.

For those of you who are looking for more long-term writing strategies , here are some additional ideas.

Keep a notebook. To R. V. Cassill, notebooks are “incubators,” a place to begin with overheard conversation, expressive phrases, images, ideas, and interpretations on the world around you.
Write on a regular, daily basis. Sit down and compose sentences for a couple of hours every day — even if you don’t feel like it.
Collect stories from everyone you meet. Keep the amazing, the unusual, the strange, the irrational stories you hear and use them for your own purposes. Study them for the underlying meaning and apply them to your understanding of the human condition.

Read, Read, Read

Read a LOT of Chekhov. Then re-read it. Read Raymond Carver, Earnest Hemingway, Alice Munro, and Tobias Wolff. If you don’t have time to read all of these authors, stick to Chekhov. He will teach you more than any writing teacher or workshop ever could. -Allyson Goldin, UWEC Asst. Professor of Creative Writing

2. Write a Catchy First Paragraph

In today’s fast-moving world, the first sentence of your narrative should catch your reader’s attention with the unusual, the unexpected, an action, or a conflict . Begin with tension and immediacy. Remember that short stories need to start close to their end.

	I heard my neighbor through the wall.
Dry. Nothing sparks the reader’s imagination.
	The neighbor behind us practiced scream therapy in his shower almost every day.
Catches the reader’s attention. Who is this guy who goes in his shower every day and screams? Why does he do that? What, exactly, “scream therapy”? Let’s keep reading…
	The first time I heard him, I stood in the bathroom listening at our shared wall for ten minutes, debating the wisdom of calling the police. It was very different from living in the duplex over middle-aged Mr. and Mrs. Brown and their two young sons in Duluth.
The rest of the paragraph introduces and an internal conflict as the protagonist debates a course of action and introduces an intriguing contrast of past and present setting.

“It is important to understand the basic elements of fiction writing before you consider how to put everything together. This process is comparable to producing something delectable in the kitchen–any ingredient that you put into your bowl of dough impacts your finished loaf of bread. To create a perfect loaf, you must balance ingredients baked for the correct amount of time and enhanced with the right polishing glaze.” -Laurel Yourke

3. Developing Characters

Your job, as a writer of short fiction–whatever your beliefs–is to put complex personalities on stage and let them strut and fret their brief hour. Perhaps the sound and fury they make will signify something that has more than passing value–that will, in Chekhov’s words, “make [man] see what he is like.” – Rick Demarnus

In order to develop a living, breathing, multi-faceted character, it is important to know way more about the character than you will ever use in the story . Here is a partial list of character details to help you get started.

Name Age Job Ethnicity Appearance Residence Pets Religion Hobbies Single or married? Children? Temperament Favorite color Friends Favorite foods Drinking patterns Phobias Faults Something hated? Secrets? Strong memories? Any illnesses? Nervous gestures? Sleep patterns

Imagining all these details will help you get to know your character, but your reader probably won’t need to know much more than the most important things in four areas :

Appearance. Gives your reader a visual understanding of the character.
Action. Show the reader what kind of person your character is, by describing actions rather than simply listing adjectives.
Speech. Develop the character as a person — don’t merely have your character announce important plot details.
Thought. Bring the reader into your character’s mind, to show them your character’s unexpressed memories, fears, and hopes.

For example, let’s say I want to develop a college student persona for a short story that I am writing. What do I know about her?

Her name is Jen, short for Jennifer Mary Johnson . She is 21 years old . She is a fair-skinned Norwegian with blue eyes , long, curly red hair , and is 5 feet 6 inches tall . Contrary to the stereotype about redheads, she is actually easygoing and rather shy . She loves cats and has two of them named Bailey and Allie. She is a technical writing major with a minor in biology. Jen plays the piano and is an amateur photographer . She lives in the dorms at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She eats pizza every day for lunch and loves Red Rose tea . She cracks her knuckles when she is nervous. Her mother just committed suicide.

4. Choose a Point of View

Point of view is the narration of the story from the perspective of first, second, or third person . As a writer, you need to determine who is going to tell the story and how much information is available for the narrator to reveal in the short story. The narrator can be directly involved in the action subjectively, or the narrator might only report the action objectively.

	I saw a tear roll down his cheek. I had never seen my father cry before. I looked away while he brushed the offending cheek with his hand.
This is a good choice for beginning writers because it is the easiest to write. (But if your viewpoint character is too much like you, a first-person story might end up being a too-transparent exercise in wish-fulfillment, or score-settling.)

	You laughed loudly at the antics of the clown. You clapped your hands with joy.
(See also Jerz on .)

	He ran to the big yellow loader sitting on the other side of the gravel pit shack.
Your narrator might take sides in the conflict you present, might be as transparent as possible, or might advocate a position that you want your reader to challenge (this is the “unreliable narrator” strategy).

Yourke on point of view:

First Person. “Unites narrator and reader through a series of secrets” when they enter one character’s perceptions. However, it can “lead to telling ” and limits readers connections to other characters in the short story.
Second Person. “Puts readers within the actual scene so that readers confront possibilities directly.” However, it is important to place your characters “in a tangible environment” so you don’t “omit the details readers need for clarity.”
Third Person Omniscient. Allows you to explore all of the characters’ thoughts and motivations. Transitions are extremely important as you move from character to character.
Third Person Limited. “Offers the intimacy of one character’s perceptions.” However, the writer must “deal with character absence from particular scenes.”

5. Write Meaningful Dialogue

Make your readers hear the pauses between the sentences. Let them see characters lean forward, fidget with their cuticles, avert their eyes, uncross their legs . – Jerome Stern

Dialogue is what your characters say to each other (or to themselves).

Each speaker gets his/her own paragraph , and the paragraph includes whatever you wish to say about what the character is doing when speaking. (See: “ Quotation Marks: Using Them in Dialogue “.)

	Where are you going?” John cracked his knuckles while he looked at the floor. “To the racetrack.” Mary edged toward the door, keeping her eyes on John’s bent head. “Not again,” John stood up, flexing his fingers. “We are already maxed out on our credit cards.”
The above paragraph is confusing, because it is not clear when one speech stops and the other starts.

	“Where are you going?” John asked nervously. “To the racetrack,” Mary said, trying to figure out whether John was too upset to let her get away with it this time. “Not again,” said John, wondering how they would make that month’s rent. “We are already maxed out on our credit cards.”
The second example is mechanically correct, since it uses a separate paragraph to present each speaker’s turn advancing the conversation. But the narrative material between the direct quotes is mostly useless.

Write Meaningful Dialogue Labels

“John asked nervously” is an example of “telling.” The author could write “John asked very nervously” or “John asked so nervously that his voice was shaking,” and it still wouldn’t make the story any more effective.

How can the author convey John’s state of mind, without coming right out and telling the reader about it? By inference. That is, mention a detail that conjures up in the reader’s mind the image of a nervous person.


Any of the above would work.

	John sat up and took a deep breath, knowing that his confrontation with Mary had to come now, or it would never come at all. “Wh– where are you going?” he stammered haltingly, staring vulnerably at the tattered Thomas the Tank Engine slippers Mary had given him so many years ago, in happier times.
Beware — a little detail goes a long way. Why would your reader bother to engage with the story, if the author carefully explains what each and every line means?

6. Use Setting and Context

Setting moves readers most when it contributes to an organic whole. So close your eyes and picture your characters within desert, jungle, or suburb–whichever setting shaped them. Imagining this helps balance location and characterization. Right from the start, view your characters inhabiting a distinct place. – – Laurel Yourke

Setting includes the time, location, context, and atmosphere where the plot takes place.

Remember to combine setting with characterization and plot .
Include enough detail to let your readers picture the scene but only details that actually add something to the story. (For example, do not describe Mary locking the front door, walking across the yard, opening the garage door, putting air in her bicycle tires, getting on her bicycle–none of these details matter except that she rode out of the driveway without looking down the street.)
Use two or more senses in your descriptions of setting.

Our sojourn in the desert was an educational contrast with its parched heat, dust storms, and cloudless blue sky filled with the blinding hot sun. The rare thunderstorm was a cause for celebration as the dry cement tunnels of the aqueducts filled rapidly with rushing water. Great rivers of sand flowed around and through the metropolitan inroads of man’s progress in the greater Phoenix area, forcefully moved aside for concrete and steel structures. Palm trees hovered over our heads and saguaro cactuses saluted us with their thorny arms.

7. Set Up the Plot

Plot is what happens, the storyline, the action. Jerome Stern says it is how you set up the situation, where the turning points of the story are, and what the characters do at the end of the story.

A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. – Janet Burroway

Understanding these story elements for developing actions and their end results will help you plot your next short story.

Explosion or “Hook.” A thrilling, gripping, stirring event or problem that grabs the reader’s attention right away.
Conflict. A character versus the internal self or an external something or someone.
Exposition. Background information required for seeing the characters in context.
Complication. One or more problems that keep a character from their intended goal.
Transition. Image, symbol, dialogue, that joins paragraphs and scenes together.
Flashback. Remembering something that happened before the short story takes place.
Climax. When the rising action of the story reaches the peak.
Falling Action. Releasing the action of the story after the climax.
Resolution. When the internal or external conflict is resolved.

Brainstorming. If you are having trouble deciding on a plot, try brainstorming. Suppose you have a protagonist whose husband comes home one day and says he doesn’t love her any more and he is leaving. What are actions that can result from this situation?

She becomes a workaholic.
Their children are unhappy.
Their children want to live with their dad.
She moves to another city.
She gets a new job.
They sell the house.
She meets a psychiatrist and falls in love.
He comes back and she accepts him.
He comes back and she doesn’t accept him.
She commits suicide.
He commits suicide.
She moves in with her parents.

The next step is to select one action from the list and brainstorm another list from that particular action.

8. Create Conflict and Tension

Conflict is the fundamental element of fiction, fundamental because in literature only trouble is interesting. It takes trouble to turn the great themes of life into a story: birth, love, sex, work, and death. – Janet Burroway

Conflict produces tension that makes the story begin. Tension is created by opposition between the character or characters and internal or external forces or conditions. By balancing the opposing forces of the conflict, you keep readers glued to the pages wondering how the story will end.

Possible Conflicts Include:

The protagonist against another individual
The protagonist against nature (or technology)
The protagonist against society
The protagonist against God
The protagonist against himself or herself.

Yourke’s Conflict Checklist

Mystery. Explain just enough to tease readers. Never give everything away.
Empowerment. Give both sides options.
Progression. Keep intensifying the number and type of obstacles the protagonist faces.
Causality. Hold fictional characters more accountable than real people. Characters who make mistakes frequently pay, and, at least in fiction, commendable folks often reap rewards.
Surprise. Provide sufficient complexity to prevent readers predicting events too far in advance.
Empathy. Encourage reader identification with characters and scenarios that pleasantly or (unpleasantly) resonate with their own sweet dreams (or night sweats).
Insight. Reveal something about human nature.
Universality. Present a struggle that most readers find meaningful, even if the details of that struggle reflect a unique place and time.
High Stakes. Convince readers that the outcome matters because someone they care about could lose something precious. Trivial clashes often produce trivial fiction.

9. Build to a Crisis or Climax

This is the turning point of the story –the most exciting or dramatic moment.

The crisis may be a recognition, a decision, or a resolution. The character understands what hasn’t been seen before, or realizes what must be done, or finally decides to do it. It’s when the worm turns. Timing is crucial. If the crisis occurs too early, readers will expect still another turning point. If it occurs too late, readers will get impatient–the character will seem rather thick.- Jerome Stern

Jane Burroway says that the crisis “must always be presented as a scene. It is “the moment” the reader has been waiting for. In Cinderella’s case, “the payoff is when the slipper fits.”

While a good story needs a crisis, a random event such as a car crash or a sudden illness is simply an emergency –unless it somehow involves a conflict that makes the reader care about the characters (see: “ Crisis vs. Conflict “).

10. Find a Resolution

The solution to the conflict . In short fiction, it is difficult to provide a complete resolution and you often need to just show that characters are beginning to change in some way or starting to see things differently.

Yourke examines some of the options for ending a story.

Open. Readers determine the meaning. Brendan’s eyes looked away from the priest and up to the mountains.
Resolved. Clear-cut outcome. While John watched in despair, Helen loaded up the car with her belongings and drove away.
They were driving their 1964 Chevrolet Impala down the highway while the wind blew through their hair.
Her father drove up in a new 1964 Chevrolet Impala, a replacement for the one that burned up.
Monologue. Character comments. I wish Tom could have known Sister Dalbec’s prickly guidance before the dust devils of Sin City battered his soul.
Dialogue. Characters converse.
Literal Image. Setting or aspect of setting resolves the plot. The aqueducts were empty now and the sun was shining once more.
Symbolic Image. Details represent a meaning beyond the literal one. Looking up at the sky, I saw a cloud cross the shimmering blue sky above us as we stood in the morning heat of Sin City.

Got Writer’s Block?

The Writer’s Block Comprehensive Web site that offers solutions to beating writer’s block such as various exercises (not necessarily physical), advice from prolific writers, and how to know if you really have writer’s block.

Overcoming Writer’s Block Precise, short list of ways to start writing again.

Learn through Schooling Some online colleges and universities offer creative writing courses. Look for ones that offer creative writing courses that cover the plot and structure of short stories.

Regular access to an instructor who is a published author, and a peer group that is motivated to read your drafts, might just be the extra motivation you need to develop your own skills.
If you are counting on the credits transferring to help you complete an academic program, check with your university registrar.

Dec. 2002 — submitted by Kathy Kennedy, UWEC Senior (for Jerz’s Advanced Technical Writing class) Jan 2003 — edited by Jamie Dalbesio, UWEC Senior (for an independent study project with Jerz) May 2003 — edited by Jerz and posted at Seton Hill University Jan 2007 — ongoing edits by Jerz May 2008 — reformatted Sep 2010 — tweaked Writer’s Block section Mar 2011 — reformatted and further tweaked Jun 2017 — minor editing. Are “Keds” still a recognizable brand of kids shoes? Feb 2019 — Removed “Keds” reference, beefed up the “bad” shoes example; tweaked formatting.

Show, Don’t (Just) Tell Don’t just tell me your brother is funny… show me what he says and does, and let me decide whether I want to laugh. To convince your readers, show , don’t just tell them what you want them to know. There. I’ve just told you something. Pretty boring, huh? Now, let me show you…
Short Stories: Developing Ideas for Short Fiction A short story is tight — there is no room for long exposition, there are no subplots to explore, and by the end of the story there should be no loose ends to tie up. End right at the climax, so that the reader has to imagine how a life-changing event will affect the protagonist.
Creative Writing Forum Have a story you’d like to share? Looking for feedback? Feel free to post in this creative writing forum.
Technical Writing: What is It? Technical writing is the presentation of information that helps the reader solve a particular problem. Scientific and technical communicators write, design, and/or edit proposals, reports, instruction manuals, web pages, lab reports, newsletters, and many other kinds of professional documents.
Usability Testing: 8 Quick Tips for Designing Tests If you already have a prototype and you want to conduct a usability test, and you’re eager to learn how to make the most of your opportunity to learn from your users, then this document is for you. Keep…
Quotations: Integrating them in MLA-Style Papers The MLA-style in-text citation is a highly compressed format, designed to preserve the smooth flow of your own ideas (without letting the outside material take over your whole paper). A proper MLA inline citation uses just the author’s last name and the page number (or line number), separated by a space (not a comma).
Titles for Web Pages: In-Context and Out-of-Context Most writers know the value of an informative title, but many beginning web authors don’t know that each web page needs two kinds of titles. The in-context (IC) title always sits at the top of a page, with the rest…
Active and Passive Verbs Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. * The subject of an active sentence performs the action of the verb: “I throw the ball.” * The subject of a passive sentence is still the main character of the sentence, but something else performs the action: “The ball is thrown by me.”
Blurbs: Writing Previews of Web Pages On the Web, blurbs are compressed summaries of what the user will find on the other end of a hyperlink. Good blurbs don’t harangue (“Click here!”) or tease (“Learn ten great tips!”). You’re reading a blurb now. If it helps you decide whether to click the link, it’s done its job.
MLA Style: Step-By-Step Instructions for Formatting MLA Papers Need to write a paper in MLA format? This step-by-step includes images showing how to use MS-Word to create the title block, page layout, and works cited list.
Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips People decide to read or trash e-mails in seconds. From the subject line to the closing, offer a focused, scannable message that puts your reader’s needs first.

Archived discussion of “Short Stories: 10 Tips for Creative Writers”

853 thoughts on “ Short Story Tips: 10 Hacks to Improve Your Creative Writing ”

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gorgeous gorgeous girls struggle to write short stories

bro what LMAOOOO

Wow. This was super helpful. I’m a writer myself and this was all very fun to read for me.

This really helped, Thank you

Thanks so much for this very informative article! It was exactly what I looking for today. These hacks will definitely help me to become a more creative writer online. Thanks for sharing :)

This is really helpful

i want to make an story

Could someone answer what was they made them a memorable?

Great job on theses tips. These will be with me for generations.

wow i love this

fishman is here to go fishing yeah yeah

Yes this is pretty cool, cool

Such helpful tips. Thank you.

ok yall, I need help with a school assignment.I have to write a story abouth anything and I don’t know how to start, can someone tell me how to start a story.

IDK, right here on this page I’ve put my “emergency tips,” which is the best advice I have to offer.

You have to come up yourself with what it is your protagonist wants and all the other details. One theory is “write what you know,” so that if you are a cancer survivor or grew up in a military family or you spend time around horses or at steel mills or playing basketball, then it makes sense to write a story that includes the details you already know.

Great writers steal. Find a story that you like, and mix it up to make it your own.

Pls help me I’m about to write a book the title “school day “help me with some content an stories. Thanks

i can tell you how to

Daniel thanks for insightful tips

hey anybody interested? to make a movie on me

Professional have to do that, plus you aren’t famous and nobody can reallly make a documentary on someone who hasn’t even shown their face on here

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So amazed by the info and help of this site. Well done to you all and thank you for furthering my knowledge of writing! Thank you again and great work!

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Some great tips and advice here. I’ve been reading several websites about advancing ones creative writing career. Some blogs, websites and forum’s offer very different views on self-publishing. I’ve noticed websites and publishers with authority in the industry, strongly argue that a serious writer should not enter into self-publishing. This can be damaging and seen as vanity. What are your views on this? Thanks!!

Thank you so much! These tips are awesome. I’m planning on writing a short book and this cleared up a lot of what I needed.

I am happy. It’s Give me good information and tips about how to write a short stories.

Based on how many times I had to say, “OMG, that’s so truuuue!”, this one’s a really great article. Worth the read!

I am a compassionate interested person wanting to engage in writing i have always had this itch if you like to write stories from the early twenties in my life this itch to write has always been there about stories that the average person can relate to and therefore become an interested reader , however , i am now at a point in my life that i am in a position to put more time into learning the craft of writing stories that have a mixture of fiction and fact and that i may also write a memoir because that is the one thing i know will be interesting . Kind regards Mark

Quite helpful ideas. The site is shown on html though, is it right? Creative writing techniques are helpful ways to write, but more important thing is to acquire a writing habit.

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Very educative Thanks

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this is ssoo cool le epic le epic

hey, hope everyone is copacetic. have been trying to improve my writing but still don’t see any improvement in my struggle, is there anyone who help me to overcome my this issue, hope you people will help me because most of you have experience. keen to write as good story writter and also interested in writing novels but suffering from writing. help me

I am elated that I have come across this.

way of navegating around. The concept of a short story is that something goes wrong and the character must fix it, even if it is a Utopian world. There has to be something that goes wrong or has been wrong the entire time. Examples of this is that the authority that everyone trustic began putting random people in prison. Another would be that everyone relies on th main character for protection becuase he or she has a special ability but the main character doesnt know how to use this ability.

oh great. it’s NAVIGATING, by the way.

I make typographical errors, too.

I am mark thank you

Gave me a really good help …… thanks a lot

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thanks so much! its verry help full.

I have a love story which is inspired every people like any age in human life but skill is concurrence and disburse with sparrow and peacock animals situation and also crow life…… I just want to know the right concern person email ID to send the story details and further I suggest a song like tital song & stage show song, said song.

Thanks & regards Dhananjay bathe

now this is epic

Thank you Kanye very cool

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hey who are u cool?

this is so very cool i cannot believe it

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Mary became a workaholic which made her.children unhappy.so they went to live with their dad. Then Mary moves to another city and got a new job. Her ex-husband and Mary agreed to sell their old house. Mary then met a psychiatrist and fell in love with him. But then her ex-husband came back to her and she accepted him back- at first – but then rejected him.

So she committed suicide. Then her ex-husband commited suicide. Her parents buried her corpse in the basement.

I dont think this form of the making a character really helps. First off, people dont like characters who are strong and can do anything, they like characters that have weaknesses that slow them down such as being blind or not being able to walk. They idea must be something that uses this weakness. The character must also be or become more capable of doing things towards the end. Such as if they couldnt see, they would develop a way of navegating around. The concept of a short story is that something goes wrong and the character must fix it, even if it is a Utopian world. There has to be something that goes wrong or has been wrong the entire time. Examples of this is that the authority that everyone trustic began putting random people in prison. Another would be that everyone relies on th main character for protection becuase he or she has a special ability but the main character doesnt know how to use this ability.

Hope this helps anyone that is still confused!

Re #7: 1. Your quote by Burroway should be Janet Burroway not Jane. Fact-checking us vital. 2. Story elemrnts for developing actions and their end results should be Exposition, not explosion. As it stands this is false and misleading information that will trip many unsuspecting/new writers up.

Thanks for noting the typo — I fixed it. I am not sure that exposition is, by its nature, very hooking, so I’m leaving that as is.

I really like and value this page, I my self a middle school-er found it helpful w/ saying that i already new all the tips, but alas it was still a great reminder. Also remember to keep you sentence, punctuation and dialog varied. This will help keep the reader interested

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Just about to create a short story and it has been a while, great advice to get me back in the mood.

Would love to write short stories but just can’t get myself started. Needing an affordable directed course with assignments and deadlines and tutorial comment feedback. OU looks good but WAY beyond my means. Have plenty of ideas and have read copiously (and still am). This site particularly helpful, thank you. Ray

It is all quite informative.

Filled with error Syed.

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With creative writing, as with any kind of writing, your reader is your most important consideration. You need to know and understand whom you’re writing for if you’re to do a good job of keeping them interested. Thanks for sharing a great post.

I think you should think about what your characters very well and not try to change things about them.

I have my english term exam tmrw and these tips have givn me a good idea of short story writing~though I m good at writing but short story was not my speciality… So, thanx for these excellent tips… You r jst gr8!!!

A good writeup. Love it.

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Great! Thanks so much! This will help me in my Creative Writing class I am taking this summer!

Terrible advice

To what, exactly, are you referring Tyler?

Dennis you’re the writer now?

I did assign the topic and format to a student in my technical writing class, I served as the student’s client, and I have been updating and maintaining this document since 2002.

Noice? Ohhh Marilyn

Really helpful

Elated??? Look at # 7 haha shd commits duicide but moves back with parents lol Also re resolution lol. Conflict is resolve not resolved lol. These are jyst drongos copying and plagiarising other peoples’ work and not getting it right.

It was informative and educating.

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RT @Chris_Oldham: Need a hand polishing up your short story? Try these emergency tips! https://t.co/5XrFzKU5rH #amwriting https://t.co/Dgfb…

Need a hand polishing up your short story? Try these emergency tips! https://t.co/5XrFzKU5rH #amwriting https://t.co/DgfbrqAotX

10 ways to improve your short stories. https://t.co/UJMpkku02Y #writing #amwriting #shortstory

cannot read so much but i think its good for the ones who have so much time to read.

The blank page is not taunting me any more, thank you. PS have you ever read Amanda McKittrick Ros – the greatest worst writer who ever lived? I think she should be added to every creative writing curriculum.

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You spelt a couple of words wrong mate

It’s possible. If you spotted any errors, I’d welcome specific notes. Which words?

Ur dumb Rohan

lien delicieux >> Short Story Tips: 10 Ways to Improve Your Creative Writing https://t.co/YAOYCeD4xJ

RT @carolinezoids: Looking for #shortStory tips, I found this great article by @DennisJerz: 10 ways to improve your #creativeWriting: https…

Looking for #shortStory tips, I found this great article by @DennisJerz: 10 ways to improve your #creativeWriting: https://t.co/uzNG1NrfVC

RT @Dream_Craziness: Short Story Tips: 10 Ways to Improve Your Creative Writing | Jerz’s Literacy Weblog https://t.co/QgVX3gUEZL #writingtip

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The meaning of the Minsk agreement

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51 Super Story Starter Sentences » JournalBuddies.com
51 Super Story Starter Sentences. Story Starter Sentences to Ignite Your Mind— We've made it easy for you to start your next story. You see, we put together a wonderfully fun and creative list of 51 story starter sentences. Hopefully, these ideas will give you the inspiration you need to get started on your next creative writing project.
150+ Story Starters: Creative Opening Lines (+Free Generator)
When you start writing a story, you need to have a hook. A hook can be a character or a plot device. It can also be a setting, something like "A young man came into a bar with a horse." or a setting like "It was the summer of 1969, and there were no cell phones." The first sentence of a story is often the hook.
101 Sentence Prompts to Spark Your Creative Writing
Sentence Prompts. 1. The Beginning of Adventure: "The ice cream truck's jingle was suddenly drowned out by the roar of thunder, changing the course of the little girl's day." 2. A Mysterious Morning: "He woke up with icy fingers clutching his shoulder, only to find an empty room." 3.
First Line Generator: 101 Sentences To Get You Started Writing
Fantasy First Line Generator. When you're writing your next page-turning fantasy novel, a good first line can get the creative ideas flowing. Use these as a springboard, even if you end up changing the first line in your final draft. 19. This world was never meant to survive her. 20. As far as she was concerned, he was a typical teenager with ...
60+ First Line Writing Prompts
Spark your imagination with these 100+first line writing prompts for all ages! These simple one-liners are the perfect way to get those creative juices flowing and find inspiration for your next big short story or flash fiction. We have a mix of first-line writing prompts, ranging from fantasy prompts to non-fictional and realistic events. As ...
27 Creative Writing Examples
Read through the following examples to get ideas for your own writing. Make a note of anything that stands out for you. 1. Novels and Novellas. Inspiring novel-writing examples can come from the first paragraph of a well-loved novel (or novella), from the description on the back cover, or from anywhere in the story.
25 Creative Writing Prompts to Ignite Your Creativity
Here, we've broken down 25 prompts into five categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, dialogue, and story starters. Fiction allows writers to flex their imaginative muscles. The following prompts can help to stir up new ideas for a unique storyline: Write a story where the main character finds an old, mysterious letter in the attic.
20 Strategies to Write Your Novel's First Paragraph
And the whole paragraph ends with a joke, which is perfect thematically for the rest of the book. It's a hilarious opening, and the rest of the series is just as funny. If your book is funny or scary, let the reader sense that theme right in the first paragraph. 8. Draw Your World.
1800+ Creative Writing Prompts To Inspire You Right Now
Here's how our contest works: every Friday, we send out a newsletter containing five creative writing prompts. Each week, the story ideas center around a different theme. Authors then have one week — until the following Friday — to submit a short story based on one of our prompts. A winner is picked each week to win $250 and is highlighted ...
70 Creative Writing Prompts to Inspire You to Write
Creative Writing Prompts Can Boost Your Writing Skills. Using writing prompts can boost your creativity and improve your writing skills in a number of ways by: Helping to overcome writer's block. Exercising your imagination. Increasing your rate of practice. Teaching you more about yourself.
How to Write Your First Paragraph
A good rule of thumb is look squint eyed at any paragraph that is 100 percent description. Use the last sentence as a bridge to get away from mere description and tease the reader with impending action. Think about it: the last sentence of your first paragraph is the springboard from which you launch into the rest of your book.
70 Opening Paragraph Examples to Kickstart Your Story
Starting a fiction story is no small task. It's often said that the beginning is the most important part of any tale. Yet crafting that perfect opening paragraph or sentence can sometimes feel elusive, even to the most seasoned writers. It's a delicate balance, introducing a new world and its inhabitants in a way that is both engaging for readers and true to the narrative that follows. To ...
100 Creative Writing Prompts for Writers
Click to continue. *****. 100 Creative Writing Prompts for Writers. 1. The Variants of Vampires. Think of an alternative vampire that survives on something other than blood. Write a story or scene based on this character. 2. Spinning the Globe.
10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You'll Love)
A lot falls under the term 'creative writing': poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is, it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at ...
105 Creative Writing Prompts to Try Out
15 Cool Writing Prompts. #1: List five issues that you're passionate about. Write about them from the opposite point of view (or from the perspective of a character with the opposite point of view). #2: Walk around and write down a phrase you hear (or read). Make a story out of it.
Creative Writing 101: Everything You Need to Get Started
Creative writing is writing meant to evoke emotion in a reader by communicating a theme. In storytelling (including literature, movies, graphic novels, creative nonfiction, and many video games), the theme is the central meaning the work communicates. Take the movie (and the novel upon which it's based) Jaws, for instance.
What Is Creative Writing? (Ultimate Guide + 20 Examples)
Creative Writing is the art of using words to express ideas and emotions in imaginative ways. It encompasses various forms including novels, poetry, and plays, focusing on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes. (This post may have afilliate links. Please see my full disclosure)
Short Story Tips: 10 Hacks to Improve Your Creative Writing
-Allyson Goldin, UWEC Asst. Professor of Creative Writing. 2. Write a Catchy First Paragraph. In today's fast-moving world, the first sentence of your narrative should catch your reader's attention with the unusual, the unexpected, an action, or a conflict. Begin with tension and immediacy. Remember that short stories need to start close to ...
Free AI Paragraph Generator
Ahrefs' Paragraph Generator uses a language model that learns patterns, grammar, and vocabulary from large amounts of text data - then uses that knowledge to generate human-like text based on a given prompt or input. The generated text combines both the model's learned information and its understanding of the input.
The meaning of the Minsk agreement
The world loves a peace agreement. The beauty of any deal like the Ukraine ceasefire agreed in the early hours of Thursday morning is that it can be presented in two equally interesting ways ...
Everything you wanted to know about the Minsk agreements
Paragraph 11 of the Minsk-2 demands Ukraine make changes to its Constitution to provide for this "special status" for the ORDLO. ... "First of all, Russia, the real aggressor, continued to pretend that it was a mediator (like France and Germany) rather than a party to the fighting. Second, the parties disagreed on the meaning of a number ...
The background to the Minsk agreements
First, the Kremlin had become concerned about the EU's expanding profile in the non-Baltic post-Soviet space. The EU's presence and activity had grown appreciably after the 2009 launch of the Eastern Partnership, which was an attempt to invigorate EU policy towards Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.
The Minsk-1 agreement
This was the context in which the first Minsk agreement ('Minsk-1') was signed in the capital of Belarus on 5 September 2014. Echoing Poroshenko's earlier peace plan, it called for the following measures: an OSCE-monitored ceasefire; an exchange of prisoners; the withdrawal of 'armed formations, military equipment and fighters and mercenaries' from Ukraine; the establishment of an ...