• 60 prompts
  • Checked October 2026

Writing Prompts for Writer's Block

For a piece already begun: the scene you are stuck on, in another form, another voice or another order.

Writing Prompts for Writer's Block

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  1. Give your stuck scene ten openings that are far too dramatic.First line: Little did she know that this sandwich would change everything.
  2. Write ten sentences for the stuck scene that explain far too much.First line: She was angry, because of the letter, which had made her angry.
  3. Put a line in brackets where the stuck scene should be, [they argue, she leaves], and carry on from the next scene.Angle: a bracket is a promise to come back. Most stuck scenes shrink once the next one exists.

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All 60 prompts

Change the form 15

  • Describe the scene that will not move as a map in words: where everyone stands, and the route each one takes. Angle: someone has not moved for a page. Move them and see what changes.
  • Fill in a lost-and-found form for your stuck scene: what goes missing in it, where it was last seen, who is asking. Angle: every scene loses or finds something. The form makes you say which.
  • Leave your stuck scene as a voicemail: one character tells it to someone who did not pick up. Angle: no interruptions, a beep at the end, and one thing said too late to take back.
  • Make a list out of your stuck scene: everything in the room, in the order your main character notices it. Angle: the third thing on the list is usually the one the scene is about.
  • Put the stuck scene of your story on a stage: spoken lines and stage directions, and nothing else. Angle: with no thoughts allowed, somebody has to say it or do it.
  • Retell your stuck scene as a fairy tale: once upon a time, three tries, and one rule nobody may break. Angle: finding the rule is the work. What may nobody in this scene do?
  • Rewrite your stuck scene as a letter one character sends the day after it happens. Angle: a letter leaves things out. What this character will not put on paper is your way back in.
  • Shrink the stuck scene to a postcard: room for four sentences, and a picture on the front. Angle: say what the picture shows. That is the image your scene has been missing.
  • Take the minutes of your stuck scene as if it were a meeting: who was present, what was decided, what was put off. Angle: put off until next time is often exactly where the scene is stuck.
  • Tell your stuck scene as a bedtime story to a small child who keeps asking why. Angle: every why needs a plain answer. The fourth why is the one you have been avoiding.
  • Turn the scene you are stuck on into a weather report for the room it happens in. First line: Pressure is rising near the door, with a cold front moving in from the kitchen.
  • Turn the scene you cannot finish into a classified ad placed by one of its characters: wanted, lost or for sale. First line: Wanted: one apology, any condition. Will collect.
  • Turn your stuck scene into instructions: how to get through this moment in seven steps. Angle: step four is where your character goes wrong. Write step four in full.
  • Write your stuck scene as a poem of eight short lines, one image to a line. Angle: a poem this small cannot explain. Keep the two lines that surprise you.
  • Write your stuck scene as questions only: twenty things a reader would ask about it, one after another. Angle: mark the three you cannot answer yet. The block is hiding in one of them.

Change the teller 15

  • A stranger looks in through the window at your stuck scene and hears nothing. Write what the stranger sees. Angle: only gestures. Who leans in, who steps back, who keeps glancing at the door?
  • Give the stuck scene to the family pet, who understands the tone and none of the words. Angle: who is tense, who is pretending, who smells of outdoors.
  • Give your stuck scene to a child in the room who has been told to go and play. First line: They used their quiet voices, which is how I knew to listen.
  • Hand your stuck scene to an object in the room: the clock, the door, the chair nobody sits in. Angle: an object cannot leave and cannot look away. What has it seen happen here before?
  • Have someone tell your stuck scene years later, knowing how everything turned out. First line: If I had known what that Tuesday would cost, I would have stayed for the soup.
  • Let the person with the smallest part in your stuck scene tell it. Angle: the waiter, the neighbor, the kid on the stairs. What do they see that your hero misses?
  • Let the setting tell your stuck scene: the house, the street, the weather over it. First line: I have held a great many dinners, and this one began like the rest.
  • Let your main character's rival tell the stuck scene, and make the rival fair about it. Angle: fair is harder than cruel. What does the rival admire and would never say?
  • Retell the scene you are stuck on as the character who wants it to go wrong. First line: I had been hoping she would open that drawer.
  • Rewrite your stuck scene in second person: you walk in, you see the table, you already know. Angle: you puts the reader in the chair. Notice what you now have to explain.
  • Split your stuck scene between two tellers: one has it up to the turning point, the other from there on. Angle: where you hand over is where the scene turns. If you cannot find that place, you have found the block.
  • Switch your stuck scene from he or she to I, or from I to he or she, and write its first half again. Angle: one sentence will not survive the switch. It was not earning its place.
  • Tell the stuck scene as a gossip passing it on the next morning and getting one thing wrong. Angle: the thing they get wrong shows what the scene looks like from outside.
  • Tell your stuck scene as the one character in it who is hiding something. Angle: they watch for different things: who looks at the drawer, who changes the subject.
  • Write the scene you are stuck on as a character who arrives five minutes too late and has to piece it together. Angle: a chair knocked over, two cups, one coat gone. Evidence first, guesses after.

Skip ahead 15

  • Jump from your stuck scene to the chapter after it and write that chapter's first paragraph. Angle: where are we, and how much time has passed? The gap shows how big the stuck scene should be.
  • Jump past your stuck scene to the next time the same two characters meet. Angle: are they warmer or colder with each other? The stuck scene has to cause that.
  • Jump ten minutes past the place where your scene is stuck and start writing mid-sentence. First line: ...which is how the two of them ended up on the roof.
  • Leave the stuck scene unwritten and write the one that comes right after it. Angle: start with what has changed. Now you know what the stuck scene had to do.
  • Put a line in brackets where the stuck scene should be, [they argue, she leaves], and carry on from the next scene. Angle: a bracket is a promise to come back. Most stuck scenes shrink once the next one exists.
  • Skip ahead one year in your story and write a character remembering the scene you are stuck on. Angle: what a person remembers a year on is all the scene ever needed.
  • Skip ahead to a quiet moment and let two characters talk about the scene you are stuck on as something long over. First line: You never did tell me what happened in the kitchen.
  • Skip the stuck part of your scene and write only its exit: the moment one character leaves the room. Angle: who leaves, how fast, and what they take. Now write back toward the door.
  • Skip to the last page of the story you are stuck in and write its final paragraph. Angle: a draft, not a promise. An ending tells you what the stuck middle is for.
  • Skip to the moment your main character first tells someone else what happened in the stuck scene. Angle: what they leave out in the telling is what the scene must show.
  • Skip your stuck scene and write only its consequences: what is broken, what is missing, who is not speaking. Angle: three consequences. Then go back and make the scene earn them.
  • Skip your stuck scene and write the same characters in the same room a week later. Angle: what has been moved, mended or thrown away since? Work back from the room.
  • Stuck in the middle? Skip to the scene you have been looking forward to, however far ahead it is, and write that. Angle: then list what a reader must know before it. That list is your missing middle.
  • Summarize the three scenes after your stuck one in two sentences each, as if the stuck one were already written. Angle: if the three make sense without it, ask whether the stuck scene belongs in the story at all.
  • Write the next morning: your stuck scene is over, and one character wakes up. Angle: what do they reach for first, and who are they avoiding at breakfast?

Ten bad sentences on purpose 15

  • Begin the next paragraph of your stuck scene ten times, each time with the word Suddenly. Angle: ten surprises on purpose. Cross out nine and look hard at the one you kept.
  • Describe the room of your stuck scene in ten sentences, each with a comparison worse than the last. First line: The kitchen was as quiet as a very quiet kitchen.
  • Give ten clumsy lines to the character in your stuck scene who has not spoken yet. Angle: let them say exactly what they mean. One of the ten will tell you what they want.
  • Give the scene you are stuck on ten bad titles. Angle: The One Where Nobody Says It. Even a bad title has to know what the scene is about.
  • Give your stuck scene ten bad endings, each a way out you would never really use. Angle: a trapdoor, a phone call, it was all a dream. Then say why each one is wrong.
  • Give your stuck scene ten openings that are far too dramatic. First line: Little did she know that this sandwich would change everything.
  • List ten sentences the main character of your stuck scene would never say, on purpose. Angle: the opposite of each is a line they might say. Pick one and keep going.
  • Start your stuck scene's next moment ten ways, one bad sentence each, with a different character acting first. Angle: bad is allowed. You are finding out who should move, not how well.
  • Take your stuck scene the wrong way in ten sentences: wrong mood, wrong weather, wrong person walking in. Angle: a wrong turn shows you the edge of the right one.
  • Write ten sentences for the stuck scene that explain far too much. First line: She was angry, because of the letter, which had made her angry.
  • Write ten sentences for your stuck draft in which nothing whatsoever happens. First line: He looked at the door. The door remained a door.
  • Write ten sentences for your stuck scene in the fanciest words you can find, then say the best one again plainly. Angle: the plain version of your favorite is probably your next line.
  • Write ten sentences in which someone in your stuck scene says the dullest true thing about it. First line: Well, said the uncle, we are all standing in a hallway.
  • Write the next ten sentences of your stuck draft as fast as you can, and fix none of them. Angle: no backspace, no crossing out. A bad sentence can be fixed and a blank page cannot.
  • Write the ten worst possible next sentences for your stuck scene, one after another, on purpose. Angle: aim low. Somewhere past the middle, one of them usually turns out not to be bad.

How it works

These writing prompts for writer's block start from the page you already have, so you return to the draft with something you did not have before.

Read the full guide

Writing prompts for when you're stuck in a novel

Fifteen prompts skip the stuck scene altogether. Write the scene after it, the next morning, or the final paragraph of the book, then work back: what the later page takes for granted is what the missing scene has to do. One prompt leaves a note in brackets where the scene belongs and carries on.

Ten bad sentences on purpose

The last group asks for the worst you can write: ten openings that are far too dramatic, ten bad titles, ten sentences in which nothing happens. A sentence written to be bad still has to be about the scene, and one of the ten is often usable.

  • Do the prompt on a separate page. The draft stays as it is until you choose what to carry back.
  • Stop as soon as a line makes you want the draft again. The prompt has done its job.

Questions and answers

What are good writing prompts when you're stuck in your story?

Ones that keep you inside it. Tell the stuck scene as a gossip passing it on the next morning and getting one thing wrong, or as a weather report for the room it happens in.

Are there writing prompts to cure writer's block?

No prompt can promise that. What these give you is a small, finishable job on the same scene: a postcard of it, a list, the minutes of it as a meeting. A finished small job is often enough to start the next sentence.

Which writing prompts to end writer's block are quickest to try?

The bad-sentence ones, because they cannot be done wrong: write the next ten sentences of the draft as fast as you can and fix none of them. Whether a block ends there differs from writer to writer.

Do these prompts work for a poem or an essay?

Most do. Read scene as the part you are stuck on: a stanza, a paragraph, an argument. Changing who says it, or writing the part after it first, works the same way there.

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