Advanced Mystery Writing Prompts

Your character picks up the landline to make a call, only to find their partner already on it and talking mysteriously to someone else.

Consider the era where it would have been possible to listen in like this, and use your language and setting appropriately to reflect this.

On the morning of your protagonist's wedding day, they discover something surprising about their partner.

Be creative with this discovery, and how your character handles it. What emotions do they experience, and how will you convey this to your readers?

Your character works in this shop, and one day makes a very important sale.

Your character discovers that the person they've been married to for a decade won the lottery last year, but didn't tell them about it.

Well-Known Secrets

Compose a poem with this title in mind.

Compose a poem about false awakenings.

A false awakening is when you wake up within your own dream. Those who experience false awakenings do not realise they’ve woken up inside another dream.

You are enjoying a tour of an art gallery, when you notice that all the paintings are fakes, and no one seems to have noticed.

Continue the story.

The protagonist is in the middle of a business meeting, when they suddenly remember something unrelated, but of vital importance.

Continue the story.

Write a story that is very dark or gloomy but takes place in an otherwise happy setting.

The setting can be anywhere from a colorful kitchen to a field of daisies in the middle of the day, but have the events be dark or mysterious.

'There had been few occasions in which he had been so certain he was about to die.'

Write a short story continuing from this line.

Write a story about a police investigation that uses an unreliable narrator.

An unreliable narrator can make you suspect the truth of a story. Consider what perspective you would write it from, and which bits of information you would leave out to make the narrator seem untrustworthy.

Can You Keep A Secret?

Write a poem with this as the title.