Prompts

40 creative writing prompts for teens

By the TeenExpressions team · November 9, 2026 · 8 min read

Pick one that makes you a little curious and write for ten minutes. Don't plan too much. The point is to find out what happens.

Story starters

1. Your phone autocorrects one word in every message, and the new words keep coming true.
2. The school lost-and-found has a box that's been there for fifty years. Today you open it.
3. Every person in town wakes up with the same dream except you.
4. A street musician plays a song you wrote and never showed anyone.
5. The elevator in your building has a button for a floor that doesn't exist.
6. You're hired to walk a dog that only walks backward.
7. A storm knocks out the power, and the only light on the block is coming from the empty house.
8. Your grandmother's recipe card has a note on the back that isn't about cooking.
9. You find out the substitute teacher has been teaching at your school since 1962.
10. The group chat gets a message from a number nobody recognizes, and it knows everyone's secrets but one.

Character builders

1. Write about a character who is very good at something they hate doing.
2. Describe someone only by what's in their backpack.
3. A villain explains, calmly, why they think they're the hero.
4. Two best friends want the same thing, and only one can have it.
5. A character keeps a promise they made when they were seven.
6. Write a character's morning routine, and let one tiny detail reveal what they're scared of.
7. The quietest kid in class narrates a fire drill.
8. Someone returns a library book twenty years late. Why now?
9. Write a conversation between a character and the person they'll be in ten years.
10. Your character has one rule they never break. Today they break it.

Poetry prompts

1. Write a poem made entirely of questions.
2. A six-line poem where each line starts with the same word.
3. Describe a color to someone who has never seen it.
4. Write an apology poem to an object you've broken.
5. List poem: things that are louder at night.
6. A poem about your neighborhood written as a weather report.
7. Write about your name: who gave it to you, how people say it, how it sounds in your head.
8. Take a text message you received and turn it into a poem.
9. A poem where every stanza is a different season of the same place.
10. Write the instructions for a feeling, like a recipe or a user manual.

Quick experiments (100 words or less)

1. A whole story told in exactly six words.
2. A scene with no dialogue where two people still have an argument.
3. A story told only through notifications on a lock screen.
4. Rewrite a fairy tale ending so the side character wins.
5. An interview with something that can't talk: a streetlight, a sneaker, the moon.
6. A 100-word story where the last sentence changes everything.
7. Describe a memory backward, from the end to the start.
8. A map of a place that only exists in a dream, with a legend.
9. Write the back-cover summary for a book you'd want to read.
10. A letter you'll never send, to someone who'd never expect it.

Turning a prompt into a finished piece

When you've written something you like, put it away for a day. Then read it out loud and ask three questions: Does the opening make me curious? Is there one detail I can see clearly? Does the ending feel like I meant it? Fix one thing per question and give it a title. That's a finished piece.