• 100 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Immortal Writing Prompts

Characters who cannot die, what they have seen and what it costs them, three at a time.

Immortal Writing Prompts

Show all 100
  1. An immortal who took the cure writes down instructions for the next one.Has seen: both sides of it. Turn: line one says buy a calendar; line two, you will love the weekends.
  2. An immortal has been the same village's new doctor seven times and has just been asked to write its history.Has seen: all of it. Turn: the publisher wants photographs of the doctors.
  3. An immortal who has avoided friends for a century is adopted, against her will, by a neighbor with a casserole.Has seen: what a friendship costs later. Turn: she works out there are forty years of casseroles in it, and stays.

Next step Deal a secret kept for less longDeal a flashback to the friend

All 100 prompts

The hundredth birthday 25

  • A girl who stopped at ten has her hundredth birthday, and for the first time someone asks what she would like. Has seen: ninety first days of school. Turn: she asks to be the teacher for a day.
  • A letter of congratulation arrives for a man's hundredth birthday, and he has to sign for it without looking his age. Has seen: four designs of the same stamp. Turn: the courier is new, curious, and stays for tea.
  • A man means to mark his hundredth by doing one thing for the first time, and has trouble finding one. Has seen: most things, twice. Turn: a child suggests being bad at something.
  • A man reaches one hundred having moved every twelve years, and he is running out of towns within a day's walk. Has seen: one river from nine bridges. Turn: the first town has forgotten him, so he can go round again.
  • A man turning one hundred needs a witness who has known him ten years, and has spent a century never staying nine. Has seen: a great many farewell parties. Turn: one person has followed him through three towns.
  • A man turns one hundred in a nursing home where he works as the youngest nurse. Has seen: the building when it was a hotel. Turn: a resident knows the way he carries a tray.
  • A village has kept a woman's secret for a century and plans a surprise party to tell her it knows. Has seen: three generations pretend, badly. Turn: she has a surprise planned for them.
  • A watchmaker turns one hundred and still has every watch his customers never collected. Has seen: the owners' grandchildren pass the window. Turn: he starts delivering.
  • A woman marks a hundred years by visiting every house she has lived in, and one of them still has her curtains. Has seen: an orchard become a street. Turn: the tenant asks if she is the lady in the attic photographs.
  • A woman turns one hundred looking thirty, and the town sends a photographer who thinks he has the wrong house. Has seen: the street paved, then repaved. Turn: she poses as her own great-granddaughter, holding the cake.
  • A woman turns one hundred on a long sea voyage and tells the crew it is her fortieth. Has seen: this crossing take three weeks. Turn: the cook bakes for the age in her passport, wrong in another way.
  • A woman who has hidden her age for a century is entered, by a neighbor, in the town's oldest-resident contest. Has seen: the contest's first year. Turn: she wins by a day, and the runner-up is furious.
  • An actor who cannot age has played the same young part for a hundred years under eleven stage names. Has seen: the play go out of fashion and come back. Turn: a critic's files hold all eleven reviews, and a photograph.
  • An immortal buys herself the same present every tenth birthday, and the shop has found the pattern in its ledgers. Has seen: five owners behind one counter. Turn: the present has been waiting, wrapped, since morning.
  • An immortal restarts her age every forty years and has never had a hundredth birthday, until a friend does the sums. Has seen: her own name go out of fashion twice. Turn: the cake has the right number on it.
  • An immortal teacher turns one hundred teaching the great-grandchildren of her first class, and one has the old seating plan. Has seen: slates, then paper, then screens. Turn: the child asks why the handwriting matches.
  • An immortal throws a hundredth birthday party and invites everyone who ever guessed. Three people come. Has seen: who kept quiet and who never noticed. Turn: the three have been meeting without him for years.
  • An immortal's first invented identity comes due on her hundredth birthday: she has to become her own daughter. Has seen: paperwork grow from a page to a folder. Turn: the clerk went to school with the mother.
  • At one hundred a man notices that he has not needed new glasses since his thirties. Has seen: every eyeglass shop on the main street open and close. Turn: the newest one keeps old records.
  • At one hundred a woman finally opens the letters she had saved to read when she was old. Has seen: the writers' handwriting age. Turn: the last letter asks a question she can still answer.
  • On her hundredth birthday an immortal is asked by a child how long she is going to live, and has to answer honestly. Has seen: enough to know the true answer is I don't know. Turn: the child says, me neither.
  • On his hundredth birthday a man goes to renew a driver's license, and the machine will not take his date of birth. Has seen: the road when it was a cart track. Turn: the form asks him to confirm that he is alive.
  • The tree planted on the day he was born comes down in his hundredth year, and he is asked to count the rings. Has seen: every storm that marked it. Turn: there is one ring too many.
  • Twin sisters turn one hundred together, and only one of them looks it. Has seen: the same century from the other side. Turn: the old one has always known and has opinions.
  • Two immortal brothers argue, on their shared hundredth birthday, about which of them is older. Has seen: each other, daily, for a century. Turn: their mother's diary turns up and settles nothing.

Outliving a friend 25

  • A friend of ninety asks an immortal, as a birthday present, to finally say how old he is. Has seen: her whole life, from the next desk on. Turn: her guess was too low.
  • An immortal goes to a school reunion as the janitor, to hear how everyone turned out. Has seen: that class at eight, at eighteen and at eighty. Turn: one of them thanks the janitor by his real name.
  • An immortal has given the same toast at a friend's wedding, the friend's child's and the grandchild's. Has seen: three first dances. Turn: the fourth couple asks for it by its opening line.
  • An immortal has known one elm longer than she has known any person, and the city has marked it with a white cross. Has seen: it as a sapling she nearly trod on. Turn: she takes a cutting, and the long view.
  • An immortal has rowed the same two-seat boat with a friend, then the friend's son, and now his daughter in the bow. Has seen: three generations pull a little to the left. Turn: the newest one rows straight.
  • An immortal has sat in the same barber's chair for seventy years and four barbers, each trained by the last. Has seen: one joke told by all four. Turn: the fifth is the first not to know it.
  • An immortal is finishing a friend's novel at a page a year, so that it will never be done. Has seen: the first half written, at a kitchen table. Turn: a publisher's letter, a century late, asks how it ends.
  • An immortal is now the only speaker of a small language she and a friend invented as a joke. Has seen: it made up at a kitchen table. Turn: she teaches it to a child, with the original mistakes.
  • An immortal is the last person who remembers how her friend laughed, and is asked to describe it for a family history. Has seen: what set it off. Turn: the great-grandson laughs, and she does not need to.
  • An immortal keeps a best friend's garden going after her, by the friend's notes, and the notes run out in June. Has seen: forty springs in that garden. Turn: July is in the handwriting of the friend's granddaughter.
  • An immortal keeps one photograph of every friend, and in the oldest the friends are holding very still. Has seen: how long they had to hold. Turn: a new friend refuses the camera and says, remember me moving.
  • An immortal keeps up the bench where he and a friend ate lunch, repainting it the same green as the paint is discontinued. Has seen: the paint factory close. Turn: a stranger sits at the other end with the same sandwich.
  • An immortal learned each close friend's best recipe and now cooks a dinner at which every dish is somebody. Has seen: the kitchens they came from. Turn: a guest knows her own grandmother's soup.
  • An immortal makes friends with an old man who turns out to be the boy he once taught to whistle. Has seen: him at seven, with no front teeth. Turn: the old man whistles first.
  • An immortal promised a friend to look in on his shop, which is now a phone repair kiosk run by a great-great-niece. Has seen: the sign painted, gilded and replaced. Turn: she hires him for Saturdays.
  • An immortal sailor has outlasted six ships and is sentimental only about the second. Has seen: her bell hung up in a tavern. Turn: a model of her has one mast wrong, and he says so.
  • An immortal sees a friend's face again in every other generation of the friend's family, and has learned not to stare. Has seen: that nose on four people. Turn: this one stares back and asks if they have met.
  • An immortal still plays the second part of a piece written for two, and leaves the gaps. Has seen: the first part played on a thousand evenings. Turn: a student next door fills one gap, wrong.
  • An immortal who has avoided friends for a century is adopted, against her will, by a neighbor with a casserole. Has seen: what a friendship costs later. Turn: she works out there are forty years of casseroles in it, and stays.
  • An immortal who is bad at goodbyes is left a friend's letter marked: open in fifty years. Has seen: the fifty years. Turn: it holds a joke that has only now become funny.
  • An immortal writes to a friend every year on her birthday and has gone on mailing the letters to the same address. Has seen: five families at that address. Turn: this year somebody writes back.
  • Every sixty years an immortal makes one close friend, and this one has worked out the pattern. Has seen: four best friends. Turn: the fifth leaves instructions for finding the sixth.
  • The last member of a walking club that began with twelve still books a table for twelve. Has seen: every one of their boots wear out. Turn: eleven strangers who heard about it turn up.
  • Two friends plant a slow tree; one of them is immortal and has promised to report back. Has seen: the sapling staked. Turn: she reads the report under it to the friend's great-grandchildren, who heckle.
  • Two immortals who fell out three centuries ago over a borrowed book meet again at the library's closing sale. Has seen: each other's worst century. Turn: the book came back in the first week.

A secret kept for centuries 25

  • A portrait in the town hall has the immortal's face, and she has worked in the building beneath it for nine years. Has seen: the painter lose patience. Turn: the cleaner sets down the mop and looks from one to the other.
  • An immortal buried a box of keepsakes in every century and has forgotten where the first one is. Has seen: what she thought worth keeping at twenty. Turn: builders find it, and it is embarrassing.
  • An immortal has been his own heir six times, and the family bank has put a keen young archivist on the account. Has seen: the bank as one room with a stove. Turn: the archivist admires how the family's signature never varies.
  • An immortal has been the same village's new doctor seven times and has just been asked to write its history. Has seen: all of it. Turn: the publisher wants photographs of the doctors.
  • An immortal has hidden in one trade for centuries, because there is always work for a night watchman. Has seen: lanterns, then gaslight, then cameras. Turn: someone has begun reviewing the old tapes.
  • An immortal has kept a diary for six centuries in a shorthand of her own, and a student has just cracked it. Has seen: everything in it. Turn: the student takes it for a novel and has notes.
  • An immortal has kept a promise not to open a box for four hundred years and has outlasted everyone who knew what it was for. Has seen: the box change hands, to hers. Turn: a new label has appeared on it.
  • An immortal has kept a recipe secret for five centuries only because nobody asked. Has seen: the spice in it go from treasure to shelf. Turn: somebody asks.
  • An immortal has left the same small gift on the same doorstep every midwinter for four centuries, for whoever lives there. Has seen: thirty families. Turn: this year something has been left out for him.
  • An immortal has never told a proud family that she taught its founder to read. Has seen: the founder hold the book upside down. Turn: the family motto is something she said, misheard.
  • An immortal has pretended for three hundred years to be bad at the one game he has had three hundred years to practice. Has seen: every opening tried twice. Turn: a child beats him anyway.
  • An immortal has quietly paid for the upkeep of a footbridge ever since she was the reason it fell, in a flood, in a hurry. Has seen: it built four times. Turn: the town wants to name the new one after its anonymous friend.
  • An immortal hid a friend's painting under another painting two hundred years ago, and it has just been sent for cleaning. Has seen: both painted. Turn: the restorer finds a third layer she knows nothing about.
  • An immortal is the ghost that a manor house has advertised for two hundred years, and the new owners want to renegotiate. Has seen: the brochure improve. Turn: they offer her a salary and a uniform.
  • An immortal is the only one who knows the town was founded by mistake, by a man who was lost. Has seen: him ask for directions. Turn: this year the founder's day speech is hers to give.
  • An immortal keeps a list of everyone who ever found out, in two columns: told, and guessed. Has seen: both columns grow slowly. Turn: a third is needed, headed: always knew.
  • An immortal knows the real name of a ship raised from the harbor mud, and the museum has it wrong on an expensive sign. Has seen: the name painted on. Turn: correcting it means saying how he knows.
  • An immortal knows which of two feuding families was in the wrong, because she was there, and it was neither. Has seen: the pig in question. Turn: a wedding between the families asks her for a reading.
  • An immortal made up the town's oldest folk song and has to sit through an expert explaining what it means. Has seen: the afternoon she wrote it, about a goat. Turn: the expert is nearly right, and it is better his way.
  • An immortal mapmaker drew one false village on a map so that he would know a copy, and the village is now real. Has seen: the map copied for three centuries. Turn: the village invites him to its anniversary.
  • An immortal once swapped two cradle blankets as a joke and has spent three centuries unsure whether it mattered. Has seen: both families prosper. Turn: the blankets are in a museum, each under the other's name.
  • An immortal promised a king's cook never to say what went into the royal pie, and a baking contest has set it as the final. Has seen: the pie carried in. Turn: the secret is that it was bought from a shop.
  • An immortal started the rumor that the well in the square grants wishes, to cover for dropping his keys in it. Has seen: four hundred years of coins. Turn: the keys come up in the dredging, labeled as an offering.
  • An immortal witnessed a lease three hundred years ago, and the lease is now in court. Has seen: the handshake behind it. Turn: she is called as an expert on the signatures.
  • An immortal's accent comes from a city that no longer speaks that way, and a linguist on the train asks him to say that again. Has seen: the last other speaker. Turn: her recording is played at a conference and dated two centuries late.

The cure 25

  • A chemist offers an immortal a way to age again, and she asks for a week to think, which he finds very funny. Has seen: enough weeks to know one is short. Turn: she spends it listing what she would miss.
  • A cured immortal has his first real birthday and is appalled at how fast the year went. Has seen: years take whatever time they liked. Turn: he writes a list for the next one, and means it.
  • A researcher learns why an immortal does not age and wants it for everyone; the immortal wants the opposite, for one. Has seen: what forever does to a Tuesday. Turn: they agree a trade, one for one.
  • An immortal climbs to the place where the cure is kept and finds a line, a ticket machine and a bench. Has seen: emptier mountains. Turn: her number is called while she is still deciding.
  • An immortal clockmaker wants the cure so that she can leave her best clock to somebody at last. Has seen: it lose one second a century. Turn: her apprentice says a clock wants an owner who can be late.
  • An immortal finds the cure growing wild beside a railroad track: a plain yellow flower she has stepped over for centuries. Has seen: the track laid. Turn: it is to be widened in spring.
  • An immortal has had the cure in a drawer for two hundred years, behind the good tablecloths. Has seen: the drawer opened every holiday. Turn: a house guest goes looking for a tablecloth.
  • An immortal is cured and has to learn to hurry. Has seen: no reason to rush in five hundred years. Turn: he is late for everything, then on time for one thing.
  • An immortal is offered the cure by her own apprentice, who has spent thirty years making it as a retirement present. Has seen: him arrive at fourteen. Turn: refusing would be the first unkind thing she has done to him.
  • An immortal seeks the cure and finds that its keeper is another immortal, who has guarded it for a thousand years untempted. Has seen: every reason people give. Turn: the keeper asks for hers and is, for once, interested.
  • An immortal takes the cure and gets her first gray hair, which she shows to everyone on the bus. Has seen: other people's, for centuries. Turn: a child asks if it hurts, and she has to think.
  • An immortal takes the cure by mistake, in a cup of tea meant for someone else. Has seen: four centuries without a cold. Turn: he sneezes, and is delighted, and then worried.
  • An immortal takes the cure, it does not work, and she has already given away the house. Has seen: the house built. Turn: the new owners ask her to stay on as their eccentric aunt.
  • An immortal who has refused the cure for centuries wants it at last, so that she can be a proper old lady for one small child. Has seen: four generations of that family from the porch. Turn: the child prefers her as she is.
  • An immortal who took the cure writes down instructions for the next one. Has seen: both sides of it. Turn: line one says buy a calendar; line two, you will love the weekends.
  • An immortal's cat is immortal too, and the cure comes in a bottle with enough for one and a half. Has seen: nine centuries of being ignored by the same cat. Turn: the cat knocks it off the shelf, on purpose.
  • The cure exists, there is one dose, and it is found by two immortals who have been married for three hundred years. Has seen: each other through everything. Turn: each has decided, secretly, that the other should have it.
  • The cure is a riddle carved over a door, and an immortal solved it in her first century and has been deciding ever since. Has seen: the carving wear smooth. Turn: a tourist solves it aloud beside her, wrong but usefully.
  • The cure is real, but it must be taken in the town where she was born, and that town is under a reservoir. Has seen: the valley filled. Turn: the old clock tower shows in dry summers.
  • The cure is temporary: one ordinary year at a time, renewed by choice each New Year's Eve. Has seen: what she is like with no deadline. Turn: she signs a little earlier every year.
  • The cure must be given, not taken: an immortal can be made mortal only by someone who would miss her. Has seen: centuries of keeping people at arm's length. Turn: she has to make a friend first.
  • The cure turns out to be a place: a village where immortals age like anyone, and the bus goes on Thursdays. Has seen: every other kind of village. Turn: there is a waiting list and a choir.
  • The cure works slowly: an immortal ages one year for every promise kept. Has seen: how few he has made. Turn: he starts promising small things to strangers.
  • Every immortal knows of the cure and none says who has taken it, until one notices who is missing from the hundred-year dinner. Has seen: the table get shorter. Turn: they are at the next table, old, ordering dessert first.
  • Of two immortal sisters, one took the cure and is seventy now; the other visits with the face she had at twenty. Has seen: her sister turn into their mother. Turn: the old one says the knees are terrible and she would do it again.

How it works

Each of these 100 immortal writing prompts follows someone who does not age through an ordinary problem: a birthday, a friendship, a form to fill in. The line underneath says what the character has seen and gives one turn.

Read the full guide

Four places to start

The hundredth birthday is the day the secret gets hard to keep: a man turns one hundred in the nursing home where he works as the youngest nurse. Outliving a friend is about what is left to look after: a garden, a recipe, a bench. A secret kept for centuries makes the immortal the only witness. The cure asks whether to grow old after all.

Writing prompts about immortality, not about power

None of these characters rules anything or fights anyone. The interest is time: what a person notices after four hundred years in one town, and which small promise is still being kept. Put the long view into one thing the character has watched change.

  • Date nothing. Let the reader work out the centuries from what the character has seen replaced.
  • Give the immortal one ordinary weakness: bad at goodbyes, hopeless with forms, always early.

Questions and answers

What can I write about an immortal character?

The small costs of a long life. On this list one immortal has been his own heir six times, one repaints a friend's bench as the paint is discontinued, and one has lost a game on purpose for three hundred years.

Are these prompts sad?

Some are bittersweet, since an immortal outlives friends. No death is shown, and each premise turns toward what carries on: a granddaughter's handwriting, a table of strangers, a tune taken up by a student next door.

Does an immortal character have to be a vampire or a god?

No. Nobody here is a vampire, a god or under a curse, and nobody explains why they do not age. They are otherwise ordinary people: a watchmaker, a teacher, a night watchman, a village doctor.

What is the cure in these prompts?

A way to start aging again, as fiction. The prompts ask who would choose it and why: for a small child, for a clock, for a first gray hair. It is a story device and has nothing to do with medicine.

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