10 Great Fantasy Writing Prompts To Help Inspire your Writing Today
Write about a family that is magical but after 400 generations of magic, they birth one unmagical child.
Write a character who is a kleptomaniac (compulsive thief). One day they wake up to realize every object they’ve ever stolen has come to life.
Write about a child who has always blamed their mistakes on an imaginary person. On the child’s 30th birthday, they awake to find this imaginary person they blamed everything on has come to life.
Write about a character who picks up a book written in a language they’ve never heard of before. Strangely, they can read and understand every word.
Write about a country that hasn’t been discovered yet.
Write about a species of bugs that only come above ground once every 1,200 years. Their arrival is completely unexpected, and their intentions are truly sinister.
Your character’s sister mysteriously vanishes. The quest to find her is one that reveals many secrets about the family’s dark past.
The country is in a panic. The reason? Magic, an art lost over 600 years ago, has been discovered in the slums.
While walking in an unknown part of the forest, your character discovers a cave with a strange egg inside. When they visit the egg again, they instead find a baby beast they never knew existed. Now it’s up to them to raise it.
Write about a character that makes a wish on a star. The next day they realize their wish has come true. The bad part? They worded their wish wrong… very, very wrong.
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Great fantasy writing prompts can help you flex your creative skills and improve your writing style. By stepping out of your comfort zone, you may discover that you have found your new passion! You can expand your wheelhouse of imagination by starting with a simple idea and expanding on it. You are the captain AND the navigator and can steer your story in any way you please 🙂
Fantasy writing gives you the freedom to make the story as wild as you want. There are no rules and no limitations. You can create the perfect world, or take the opposite approach and build a world no human could ever survive.
Finding daily writing prompts like these can help overcome writer’s block and get the creative juices flowing!
As long as you can follow your imagination and let your words flow then there is no telling where you and your characters might end up. Half the fun is going on the journey with your characters and no one will help them get there without you. So grab your pencil or laptop and take that first step out their front door that ends with a world of possibilities.
Whether it’s non-fiction or fiction writing prompts, either can work to help a writer break out of the same toolbox they may be working in. Sometimes it can be helpful to find a good writing prompts generator but google and Pinterest work just as well, and Reddit writing prompts too.
Take your time, look up some fun writing prompts, and take the leap. Start writing your own fantasy story today. You can start with one of these prompts, or combine a few. Who knows? You just might be surprised with where you land.
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Enjoying 10 Great Fantasy Writing Prompts? Take a moment and consider sharing this social-friendly image to say thanks and feel free to comment with your thoughts below! 🙂
Check out these FREE trial resources from Amazon for when you work from home (or are stuck at home 🙂 ) As an Amazon associate, if you do sign up or buy anything using Amazon links from our site we make a commission at no extra cost to you.
Use bad habits as a writing tool for fictional characters. Write bad habits into their character and they will be more familiar to your reader. Use this bad habit list to help as writing prompts for your fictional characters.
Bad habits in hygiene can lead to certain consequences.
Will they get a certain bacterial infection?
Will they get a fungal infection?
Will they be the smelly kid?
Will a bully make fun of them for their bad hygiene?
Write some of your fictional characters with these bad habits in order to make them appear to be bad with certain hygiene habits.
Why you would want to be thinking about bad habits for your fictional characters that you are writing?
Bad habits help your audience resonate with your characters.
They make our characters more believable and more human.
Adding a few bad habits to our characters will make them more enjoyable to our readers. After all, no human is perfect and that should include not all but most of our fictional characters.
5 Questions to Ask Yourself as You Make the Outline of Your Story: Does every character have a purpose for being in the story?
# 2.Does Every Character Have a Purpose for Being in the Story?
Readers will notice when you introduce a secondary character.
If that character has no purpose in the story by the end, that can leave our readers confused, underwhelmed or worse, disinterested and disengaged. Make sure every character has a purpose to the story, even if the impact may be minimal to the overarching outcome of the story.
Ways to incorporate every character:
Your secondary character shares a different perspective that causes your main character to make a decision
Your secondary character encourages your main character when no one else will
Your secondary character has the influence and power to do a favor for the main character
Your secondary character has influence and power that your main character lacks
Your secondary character is an unexpected help
Your secondary character has the very resources your main character needs
5 Questions to Ask Yourself as You Make the Outline of Your Story: How does your character try to solve the problem, and what are the consequences of that solution?
# 4.How Does Your Character Try to Solve the Problem, and What Are the Consequences of That Solution?
Just like in real life, your main character shouldn’t succeed at everything the first time.
When your character makes bad judgment calls or things don’t go exactly to plan, that makes your reader relate to the story on an empathetic level. Your character will be more believable, and the tension will increase, making your reader more invested in the story.
Also just like in real life, there are consequences for actions (whether good or bad). Even when the action causes the main problem to be solved, there are always loose ends that need tying or repercussions involving others.
5 Questions to Ask Yourself as You Make the Outline of Your Story: How has your character changed from the beginning to the end?
# 5.How Has Your Character Changed From the Beginning to the End?
Change is a powerful tool to get your reader invested in your characters.
The more they see the need for the character to change or the more change they feel they are able to see the character go through.
As the reader sees this change happen over time, they can feel like they went on the journey of change with that character and might even feel as though they changed along the way with the character.
Changes your character can have:
They can age physically
They can be injured (scars, ailments, loss of limbs)
They can mature emotionally
They can go from making bad choices to good choices
They have a new perspective or outlook on life
They now put others first
I hope this helps you write your story outline better!
10 Sort of Gross Bad Habits for Fictional Characters
Write some of your fictional characters with these bad habits in order to make them appear to be a bit gross.
Why you would want to be thinking about bad habits for your fictional characters that you are writing?
Bad habits help your audience resonate with your characters.
They make our characters more believable and more human.
Adding a few bad habits to our characters will make them more enjoyable to our readers. After all, no human is perfect and that should include not all but most of our fictional characters.
Write some of your fictional characters with these bad habits in order to make them appear to be toxic for themselves and others.
Why you would want to be thinking about bad habits for your fictional characters that you are writing?
Bad habits help your audience resonate with your characters.
They make our characters more believable and more human.
Adding a few bad habits to our characters will make them more enjoyable to our readers. After all, no human is perfect and that should include not all but most of our fictional characters.
10 Toxic Bad Relationship Habits for Fictional Characters
Write some of your fictional characters with these toxic bad relationship habits in order to make them appear to be toxic for themselves and others.
Why you would want to be thinking about bad habits for your fictional characters that you are writing?
Bad habits help your audience resonate with your characters.
They make our characters more believable and more human.
Adding a few bad habits to our characters will make them more enjoyable to our readers. After all, no human is perfect and that should include not all but most of our fictional characters.
10 Bad Habit Ideas for Low Self-Esteem Fictional Characters
Write some of your fictional characters with these bad habits in order to make them appear overly self-conscious.
Why you would want to be thinking about bad habits for your fictional characters that you are writing?
Bad habits help your audience resonate with your characters.
They make our characters more believable.
Adding a few bad habits to our characters will make them more enjoyable to our readers. After all, no human is perfect and that should include not all but most of our fictional characters.
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Common! I don’t have all day! Pick up your weapon and face me!
He hates me! I knew it!
I didn’t know what to do so I hid in the bathroom and prayed!
I had never seen anything so beautiful!
The treasure glimmered in the firelight and reflected in her eyes.
Where were you last night?
Why am I the only one that thinks this is insane?
Tell me again, were there two of you or four of you?
I told him I could only give him a ride a couple of miles down the road, but when he pulled a gun on me I said, where do you need to go? He was pretty polite after that.
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If you enjoy Writing Prompts, Storytelling and writing in general, you might love owning a domain of your own where you can write about it? Ever want to own your own domain name (Yourname.com)?
Bluehost hosts your blog so that you can own your domain and make money blogging. Check them out only if you’re interested in making money blogging; otherwise, go for a free blog instead 🙂
One of the best ways to develop your characters and reveal who they REALLY are deep down to your readers is to put them into specific situations and then allow your readers to see who they are without just telling them boringly.
Case and point: Instead of saying he is mean and arrogant, you write that “he yelled at his sister for leaving the roast in too long and he bragged to everyone, he got the chance to, about making varsity this year and took up the whole conversation talking about his football throw and how far and accurate he could throw. He wasn’t interested in hearing anything about them at all. In fact, any time they would try to chime in, he would interrupt them or zone out until he could say something else about himself.”
By writing a scene and dialogue that shows who your character is, you never have to actually talk about their personality at all.
Your readers will be able to see it. Your readers will love you for this and they won’t even know you’re doing it. It gets amusing figuring out how to write their actions or inactions into scenes that show what you are desiring to tell.
Just a Tip before getting started: Take a few minutes, sit down, and write out specifically what you want to reveal about your character through these scenes. For example: arrogant, funny, secretive, aloof, gruff. You can use these scenes on your protagonist, antagonist, secondary characters, villains, pedestrians, temporary characters, any character you can think of.
Now on with it.
# 1 Write The Action Scene
The action scene is an easy setup and an easy way to reveal character quickly.
The key secret to a well set up action scene that reveals character is putting the character against a problem where they must take action or decide not to take action but either way their action or inaction reveals who they are deep down as a character.
Important note: It’s not only the action they take that defines to the reader what their true nature is as a character.
It’s also the actions they don’t take.
Not only that, but you can also reveal character by how they make the decision as you write.
Are they meticulous and plan everything out?
Or are they quick to action and don’t plan anything out?
Does this lead to further problems by taking too long to plan things out?
Or by acting to rashly to quickly do they create self-destructive problems?
Does the character learn as they go and approach problems differently based on past events you took them through?
Or do they keep making the same mistakes?
Are they cowardly and take no action at all by running or leaving the problem for others to solve?
Writing task: Take a few minutes to develop a problem and write out how the character works their way through the problem or problems and be sure to write character traits you want to portray to your reader by showing how the character would or wouldn’t take action.
# 2 Write The 1-2-3 Punch Scene
The 1-2-3 Punch scene is called “the 1-2-3 Punch Scene,” because it happens REAL fast. If you blink you might miss it. (So don’t blink…Okay, do blink)
Your reader won’t know that you’ve done it but all within one paragraph usually you’ll have divulged very specific character traits that run down through your character’s core in a matter of a minute or two.
Let’s use the movie “Guardians of the Galaxy” as an example, and we’ll use Ronin the antagonist.
It happens really fast but in the first few moments, we see Ronin as he is going through ritualistic ceremonies.
You can tell they happen daily.
In an instant, we see that he is dedicated, determined, no-nonsense, and disciplined down to his core. And then immediately following we see him harshly judge a man and execute him with his own hammer. We watch his victim’s blood flow into his bathing chamber.
We see his cruelty and how he judges an individual based on his ancestor’s actions without any thought to see how the person is individual.
We see that he’s determined, extremely cruel, and prone to violence, and desires genocide. In a matter of minutes, we know this character.We know that he is cruel and that he will stop at nothing to carry out his cause of vengeance.
This is, in essence, the 1-2-3 Punch. In as quick as a paragraph you can have your character carry out 1-2 or 3 quick actions that display who that character is down to their core and it all happens as quick as a punch and your audience suddenly has a large sense of who that character is. To execute this type of scene well you need to decide a couple of character traits you want your character to have.
Let’s make an example: I have a Protagonist named Jim. I want to portray that Jim is kind, caring, and charitable.
Let’s say Jim’s widowed Aunt stays with him and his son.
She comes home one day and realizes she forgot the butter. Jim hears her exclaim her disappointment and he quickly jumps up and says “Don’t worry about it Auntie, I’ll run out and get your butter for you so that you don’t have to run back in town.” He says it with a big smile of course and a great attitude about the whole thing whistling as he’s off on his way to the store.
While waiting in line to buy the butter the person in front of him is a dollar or two short. Jim quickly says “Oh, let me get that for you” and smiles at the distraught stranger while digging in his pocket for two dollars.
In a short paragraph, we have seen that Jim is kind, caring, and charitable. We didn’t have to SAY “Jim is kind, caring, and charitable.” We used a scene to let the reader see it for themselves.
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# 3 Write The Vulnerability Scene
Have you ever been reading a short story or novel and you start to notice that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the main character or their antagonist?
If you notice, you’ll see that you start to lose interest and resonate less and less with the “perfect” character. This is because, in real life, we know there no such thing as a perfect person. And if their life was perfect, it would be boring. This is why it’s important to have the Vulnerability Scene.
This scene is exactly how it sounds. You have to make your character a little vulnerable in some way. You can go as far as you want with it, but you have to show that the character isn’t perfect and that they have consequences just like people in the real world. Most often it doesn’t have to be some big unheard-of thing. In actuality, this can work best if it is some quick notice of something that could be considered “normal” or small.
For example: Our Sheriff drinks most nights when he’s off duty (and sometimes on duty.) The mailman sometimes reads our letters before delivering them. The DMV worker has an expired license but drives anyway. It could be anything and it could be small or a big deal, but if your characters are going to be believable you have to show some vulnerability so that readers can relate to them a little.
Another way to write a scene that shows who the character is is to put your character through loss. The loss doesn’t have to be a big deal to you, but whatever it is that they lost, it MUST be a big deal to them. The more strange the loss is and how much it hurts the character you write emotionally the more readers can see what is actually important to the character and see what they are like as you write.
If you write your character losing a family member and is only a little sad, but they lose an animal and sob for weeks we can see what is important to this person. Another good example you can write would be a character losing their job and not caring, but their car gets a scratch on it and you write them going into an unforeseeable rage. As we see what the character doesn’t care about and what they care most about in their heart we can see their heart and the core beliefs of the character as we write.
Like I said the loss doesn’t have to always be something that most people would see as a big deal. It could be something you write that you don’t consider to be a big deal, but the fact that it is a big deal to them helps the reader see more and more of who this person is at their core self.
On the flip side, you can use the BIG loss scene in reverse. Write them through a scenario where they experience a loss that most of society would consider a big deal but the fact that you write the character doesn’t, shows who they are as a person and a key part of their character and maybe even an important part of your plot. Make them lose a father, mother, brother, or sister and make them not care and your readers will be lead to curiosity why they don’t care.
Play with the big loss scenario and use it both ways to show what is and isn’t important to your character.
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