1000+ Story Ideas for Your Screenplay, Short Film, or Book
Struggling with writer’s block and no good ideas for your writing? These resources of writing prompts can be your next screenplay, short story, book, poetry, or script idea!
On my archived filmmaking resources blog: The Artful Filmmaker, I previously referenced @DailyPrompt (est. in 2009) which is a Twitter (now “X”) page that posts new writing suggestions and topic ideas daily. Unfortunately, this page is no longer publicly viewable and requires you to ‘sign in’ in order to access and scroll through the prompts.
Writing.com, who created the page, has their own writing prompt generator available on their website — no account required. The web page says there’s “1,000 prompts found”. Clicking through them, I found they are similar to their prior tweets: there’s random dialogue lines, general character and topic prompts, specific situational outline ideas and actual line descriptions to build from. For certain prompts, they also provide a genre, such as comedy. Lots of options, and since they’re presented one at a time, no endless scrolling overwhelm.
Poets & Writers, Inc. is a large nonprofit literary organization that also offers writing prompt exercises on their website. They have archived their prompts from their email newsletter and they list that over “2,000 writing prompts are available”. Their built in search tool on the page allows you to filter by genre: poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. Though these genres are the only options listed, don't think the prompts can’t be applied to become a good screenplay idea or any other writing genre. Poets & Writers consistently updates this prompt list every week too.
I like these two websites because you can still view and scroll through them without being totally inundated with advertisements like some other blogs and websites nowadays.
Literally thousands of writing suggestions are waiting to prompt your creativity that could lead to your next great story, novel, short film script idea, or more. I’d definitely check out these resources to see if anything speaks to you.
I think the practice of taking the time to write from a randomized prompt as an exercise, like a creative writing class assignment, can be a productive way to engage another part of your brain and utilize your imagination and writing abilities. It can be a change from your typical creative outlet, or a different way to engage in your writing method even when you have no inspiration for it. It’s not like it’s graded or for a project deadline, so there’s no pressure with it. Avoid getting caught up in finding the right topic to pick, choose the first one you find and take 30 minutes to write. If it doesn’t yield much, who cares? It was only 30 minutes of your time. There’s more time and more prompts. Without the act of showing up and trying, you never know. It might in fact lead somewhere…
So fill in that blank page and keep creating.