How it works
Each of these emoji writing prompts is a row of three or four emoji to turn into a story. The line under a row names every emoji in words and reads it one way, then leaves the rest to you.
Read the full guide
Reading a row
Take 🦊 🐔 🥚: fox, chicken, egg. The line reads it as a fox hired to guard the eggs. Left to right it could be the fox's morning. Right to left, an egg hatches something the fox did not expect. The emoji are who and what. The verbs are yours.
Four kinds of story
A day out starts somewhere (a bus, a tent, a ferris wheel) and something small goes wrong. A mystery row holds a clue. A problem and its fix shows the trouble first. An animal tale gives two animals and the thing between them.
- Give the first emoji a name. Bus is a thing. The 8:15 with the broken door is a start.
- Stuck? Tell it from the last emoji's side: the crab's, the dog's, the bee's.
Questions and answers
What is an emoji writing prompt?
A short row of emoji that stands in for the opening sentence of a story. The writer decides what joins them: balloon, tree, ladder could be a rescue, a race, or a balloon that does not want to come down.
Is this an emoji writing prompt generator?
It deals three rows at a time from a list of 72, or from one kind of story. The rows are fixed, not mixed by chance, so every one makes a story that holds together.
Where can I get random emoji prompts?
Here: three rows come up in no order, a mystery beside an animal tale. For a row nobody else has, pick three emoji from your own keyboard with your eyes shut.
Do the emoji look the same on every phone?
No. Each maker draws its own pictures, and the shape of an emoji can vary a good deal from one to the next. That is why the line under a row gives each emoji's Unicode short name.