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Writing prompts

Five new writing prompts every Monday, each in a different genre, some with a word limit or a rule. Pick one, set a timer for twenty minutes, and write.

This week

The first week of prompts is not out yet. It will appear here on the Monday it starts.

How to use a writing prompt

A prompt is a starting point, not an assignment. It hands you the situation so you can spend the session on the writing instead of on deciding what to write about.

  1. Choose the prompt that makes you want to know what happens next.
  2. Set a timer. Twenty minutes is enough for a first draft of flash fiction, or for one scene of something longer.
  3. Write without stopping to fix anything. A prompt session is for finding the story, and revising comes after.
  4. Keep what surprised you. If a character or a line outlives the prompt, it may belong in a bigger piece.

Break the rules when they stop helping. Change the genre, move the year, tell it from the other side of the door. When a prompt carries a word limit, though, try keeping to it once: cutting to fit teaches more about a draft than almost anything else.

Each prompt also opens straight into Tabularia. The button makes a new project titled for the prompt, with the prompt kept in a Sheet beside the page, so it stays in view while you write and never ends up in the manuscript by accident.

Earlier weeks

This is the first week. Earlier weeks will be listed here as they go by.

Every week of prompts, from the first one.

Try it on your own manuscript

Nothing is metered: as many projects as you like at any length, the outline and minimap to move through them, drafts and markup mode for revising, snapshots to return to, sheets and timelines beside the page, and export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text and Fountain. Bring in what you have already written and read it back as a book.

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The Cloud plan is $18 a month, or $172.80 a year, and adds backup, sync across your devices, sharing a manuscript for review, and publishing your work as a web page — the readers and collaborators you invite do not need a paid account of their own. Tabularia is in Public Beta and shipping steadily; the release notes record what has landed.