A bus driver has one rule about phone calls on her bus. Write the ride on which a passenger gets very good news.Angle: the whole bus ends up knowing.
A waiting room has no screens, only a fish tank and a pile of old magazines. Write twenty minutes there.Angle: watch the other people watching the fish.
The stone tool is the oldest technology we know of. Write the afternoon someone made a better one.Fact: the earliest known technology is the stone tool.
A kid who has never gone a day without screens is handed a deck of cards. Write the first game.Angle: the rules are explained badly, by a grandparent, with pride.
A long car ride, no screens, one window. Write three hours of what goes by.Angle: the first hour is the hardest to fill.
A video game designer takes a day without screens. Write what she builds.Angle: she cannot stop designing levels: the garden path, the stairs.
A waiting room has no screens, only a fish tank and a pile of old magazines. Write twenty minutes there.Angle: watch the other people watching the fish.
Argue for the one screen you would keep on a day without screens, and name one you would not miss at all.Angle: give a reason somebody could disagree with.
The classroom's big screen breaks and the teacher finds a piece of chalk. Write the lesson.Angle: the chalk squeaks. The drawing of a volcano is not good.
Count the screens you pass in one ordinary morning. Cross each one out and write what you would look at in its place.Angle: do not forget the oven, the car and the checkout.
Describe the sound of a home on a day without screens.Angle: begin with what is missing, then what you can hear because of it.
For one day every screen in your home shows only its own reflection. Write what you see in them.Angle: a dark screen is a mirror. Who is in it at noon?
For one day, every question you would have looked up has to wait. Write the list, and the one you answered another way.Angle: who did you ask, and were they right?
It is movie night and the screen stays dark. Write what the family does with the popcorn.Angle: somebody tells the movie from memory and gets it wrong.
The map on the phone is gone for the day. Write getting across town by asking people.Angle: each person you ask sends you a slightly different way.
Tell the day from a television's side: its first day off in years.Angle: what does a television do with an afternoon?
Write a recipe card for a day without screens: ingredients, steps, serves how many.Angle: one ingredient is hard to find.
You have to wake up tomorrow without an alarm on a screen. Write the plan and the morning.Angle: a sibling, the sun, a wind-up clock, a neighbor's dog.
An old machine 15
A kid finds a rotary phone in an attic and tries to call a friend. Write the attempt.Fact: on a rotary dial the digits sit in a circle, with one finger hole in the wheel for each digit.
A message goes by telegraph in 1850. Write the message, as short as you can make it.Fact: the electrical telegraph sent electric signals over wire and was used mainly from the 1840s.
A school computer lab is cleared out for new machines. Write the goodbye of the oldest computer in the row.Angle: it remembers everyone who typed with two fingers.
A typewriter cannot delete. Write a page the way one would have it, mistakes left in.Fact: a typewriter key prints one character by striking an inked ribbon against the paper.
An abacus sits beside a calculator on a shop counter. Write which one the shopkeeper reaches for, and why.Fact: the abacus was used from ancient times until handheld calculators largely replaced it in the 1980s.
An old machine is about to be thrown out and gets one last chance to show what it can do. Write that hour.Angle: it is slower than its replacement and better at one thing.
Ask the oldest person you know about a machine that amazed them when it was new. Write their answer.Angle: ask what it replaced.
The family's first computer is still in a closet. Write what is on it.Angle: half a story, a game with one saved level, a report on volcanoes.
Find the oldest machine in your home that still works. Write who bought it and what it has outlasted.Angle: three newer machines have come and gone beside it.
One repair shop in town can still fix a certain kind of machine. Write a morning at its counter.Angle: every customer brings a story along with the broken thing.
The stone tool is the oldest technology we know of. Write the afternoon someone made a better one.Fact: the earliest known technology is the stone tool.
The top row of your keyboard spells QWERTY because of a machine from the 1870s. Write the keyboard's family history.Fact: the QWERTY layout was developed for typewriters in the 1870s and is still the English standard.
Write a conversation between a record player and a phone that holds ten thousand songs.Fact: a record player's stylus traces the groove of a record and is vibrated by it, reproducing the sound.
Write about a sound an old machine made that no machine makes now.Angle: a click, a whir, a clatter. Say who would still know it.
Write the first day at an office in the 1980s when a computer takes the place of the typewriters.Fact: typewriters were standard in most offices up to the 1980s, then personal computers took over.
A rule for phones 15
A basket by the door collects every phone at dinner. Write the dinner as the basket hears it.Angle: the phones can hear too, and they have opinions.
A bus driver has one rule about phone calls on her bus. Write the ride on which a passenger gets very good news.Angle: the whole bus ends up knowing.
A grandmother has one rule for phones in her house and never says it out loud. Write how visitors learn it.Angle: a look, a cough, a plate of something.
A hiking club has one rule about phones. Write the rule and the view that made someone want to break it.Angle: the photo is never taken. Describe the view anyway.
A pay phone on a street corner has rules of its own: bring coins, wait your turn, keep it short. Write the line waiting for it.Angle: everybody in line hears half of everybody's call.
A phone rings in the quietest place you can think of. Write the next ten seconds.Angle: the ringtone is the worst part.
The phone makes a rule for its owner. Write it.Angle: not before breakfast, not in the rain, not at that volume.
Should phones be allowed in class? Write one side, then the other side in the same number of sentences.Angle: make the side you disagree with sound reasonable.
Two friends agree that the first to pick up a phone at lunch clears the table. Write the lunch.Angle: both phones buzz at the same second.
Where should a phone sleep at night? Write its bedroom.Angle: a shelf, a shoebox, the kitchen.
Write a rule for phones at a birthday party, as the person about to blow out the candles.Angle: one photo, then pockets.
Write a rule for phones that would have sounded ridiculous twenty years ago and sounds ordinary now.Angle: or the other way around.
Write the rules of a phone-free hour as the instructions of a board game.Angle: players, setup, how you win.
Write the sign for a place where phones are not welcome, with the reason in small print.Angle: a theater, a swimming pool, a beehive.
You may check your phone only while standing on one foot. Write a day under that rule.Angle: a silly rule changes things a sensible one does not.
What comes next 15
A child in the year 2100 asks what a keyboard was. Write the answer.Angle: you have to explain typing first.
A computer finishes your sentences. Write a page in which you keep surprising it.Angle: the page gets stranger and more yours as it goes.
A new technology solves a problem and makes a smaller, stranger one. Write both.Angle: the new problem is funny for about a week.
A time capsule is filled with today's devices. Write the note that explains each one.Angle: say what it was for, not how it worked.
A town meets to vote on a brand-new technology. Write the meeting and the one question nobody can answer.Angle: the question comes from the back of the room.
Name one thing technology will never change, and write the scene that proves it.Angle: a lullaby, a handshake, waiting for bread to rise.
The next big thing turns out to be small. Write about a tiny change that everyone is using within a year.Angle: a better hinge, a quieter zipper, a cap that cannot be lost.
Something people do by hand today will be done by a machine. Write what is lost and what the hands do afterward.Angle: kneading, sewing on a button, parking a car.
Stone tools, fire, the wheel, the printing press, the telephone, the internet. Write the next thing on the list.Fact: the printing press, the telephone and the Internet each lowered barriers to communication.
Tell a story in which the newest device in the house and the oldest one must work together.Angle: neither can do the job alone, and neither will admit it.
What will be the old machine in your grandchildren's attic? Write them finding it.Angle: it is something you use every day.
The word technology goes back to knowing how to make things. Write about the next thing you want to know how to make.Fact: the older Greek word tekhne meant knowledge of how to make things.
Write a thank-you note from the future to someone working on a hard problem today.Angle: do not say what was solved until the last line.
Write about a job that does not exist yet, and one morning of the person who does it.Angle: start with what is on their desk.
Write the last day of something we use now: the last key turned in a lock, the last paper ticket, the last light switch.Angle: nobody notices that it is the last.
How it works
These writing prompts about technology start from the tools people use every day and what those tools change. Use them as tech writing prompts for a journal, an opinion piece or the first page of a story.
Read the full guide
Computer writing prompts among the old machines
An old machine holds fifteen prompts, several with a dated fact from Wikipedia: a typewriter that cannot delete, a rotary phone found in an attic, an abacus beside a calculator. Two are about computers: the family's first one, still in a closet, and the oldest in a school lab.
Tech story ideas
What comes next is the group for fiction. The newest device in the house and the oldest must work together, a town votes on a technology nobody understands yet, and a child in 2100 asks what a keyboard was.
Pick one device and stay with it. A page about one phone beats a page about technology.
Give the machine a side. An old computer has seen things.
Questions and answers
What is a good creative writing prompt about technology?
One small enough to picture. A basket by the door collects every phone at dinner: write the dinner as the basket hears it. Or tell the day from a television's side, its first day off in years.
What is technology?
More than screens. Wikipedia calls the stone tool the earliest known technology, followed by the control of fire. The word covers tools and machines, and also things nobody can touch, such as software.
When did computers replace typewriters?
Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s, Wikipedia's article says. After that, personal computers running word processing software largely took their place. One prompt asks for the first day of that change in one office.