101 Flash Fiction Writing Prompts & Short Story Ideas

Before reading the flash fiction writing prompts and short story ideas you first have to understand that both flash fiction and short stories share some common elements, they both are short and quick to read compared to a novel that is lengthy and takes hours to read even for a daily reader.

When we talk about flash fiction then it starts with the fact that it is a fictional work of extreme brevity and a short story is like the elder brother of it that shows some more experiences and knowledge.

Whether writing flash fiction or a short story, a writer has to limit his writing keeping the events and plot short but still interesting for readers.

Let’s know the word count of flash fiction and short stories-

Traditionally, flash fiction is written under 1000 words and goes maximum to 1500 words.

Typically, any piece of short fiction written under 8000 words is called a short story and most short stories are written between 1500-5000 words.

A ”longer” short story which is called a novella is written in under 20000-30000 words.

Below is the list of some of the best flash fiction writing prompts and short story ideas specially curated for writing short fiction which without killing much time of its reader delivers a great reading experience in a short time.

Contents

101 Flash Fiction Writing Prompt & Short Story Ideas-

List of best flash fiction writing prompts and short story ideas for your short tale:

General Flash Fiction Prompts-

-A character is a great singer but she is hiding her talent for a reason.

-A man and his beloved boat get stuck in a storm and he had to choose between saving his life or his boat.

-A curious character who loves asking questions about everything is liked by every teacher in his school except his classmates who make fun of him and bully him all the time, calling him a nerd.

-A school mountain trip turns into great chaos due to a sudden change in weather and then one student went missing. The missing student founds himself in a cave accompanied by a good yeti.

-Two best friends are getting apart after one is moving to another state.

-A girl loves reading books and her school’s big library feels like a haven for her.

-A character whose neighbor is his school’s strict science teacher who is always scolding everyone including him in the school, but turns so sweet when she’s at home.

-Write a story about a man living alone on his farm with his animals and hates any visitor.

-No one is liking the newly appointed teacher in school and students are bullying him from the first day. But their perspective changes when everyone realizes how good is he.

#10

-A teen girl finds out that her parents are taking divorced and she has to choose between staying with her loving father or her mother, a strict lady and very disciplined school teacher.

#11

-A very shy and introvert girl who wants to become a singer takes the tough decision of coming out of her comfort zone and joining the school band. Everyone is surprised after listening to her sing.

#12

-A boy loves fishing with his fisherman grandpa and participating in fishing competitions on holidays and this time he catches a popular big fish and wins the competition.

#13

-Write a story about a boy who lives near the beach and befriended a dolphin.

#14

-Write a story about a girl who brought a stray cat home but she knows that her parents won’t let her keep it.

#15

-A character was very close to his grandparents, so when his grandpa died, he moved to their house to live with her lonely grandma. Grandma was a great cook and they were living happily together until one day she passed away too leaving the boy heartbroken.

#16

-Write a story about a boy born with blue skin color because of the rarest disease.

#17

-A character is one of the best students in his class but his alcoholic father stays ill most of the time and asks him not to go to school and help him in his small shop.

Horror Story Ideas–

#18

-A character was sleeping when he heard the voice of his grandfather telling him about a secret key and a hidden door in his room. His grandpa had died just a day before.

#19

-A character visited a new city when he met a lady in his hotel who invited him to her hotel room. The woman is a witch.

#20

-A character bought an old portrait painting of a girl from a stranger. The same night he started hearing a girl’s voice & murmuring in his house.

#21

-A character had adopted his neighbor’s cat when she died of an illness, but every night the cat ran away to his previous house and was found playing with a shadow.

#22

-A character had moved into a new place when she learned that the next-door family of 3 had gone missing mysteriously. The next day the character wakes up in their house with a note in his handwritten, “bring us back”.

#23

-A character was on a long drive to reach a remote place for his project, while crossing the forest, he found a young man asking for a lift. The young stranger is a vampire.

#24

-A girl goes missing. three days later, she returned back safely, but with a black cat. The cat is demonic.

#25

-A character was playing hide-and-seek with his little sister. Hours passed but she didn’t show. Soon he heard a scream coming from the basement. There is no one in the basement.

#26

-A character had shifted into her new apartment. When she noticed a big antique & old mirror in her room which was not before and neither she brought.

#27

-A character was looking for some books in the library when he found a book with the title “language of the dead”.

Related: 101 Horror Story Ideas

Fantasy Writing Prompts–

#28

-A man wakes up in the roman era as a king.

#29

-A woman adopted a cat that started to bring good luck to her in everything.

#30

-A daily newspaper one day printed newspapers irrelevant news, with a date six days ahead on the calendar, but soon every news started turning into reality.

#31

-An old man wakes up as a 20-year-old young man.

#32

-A small asteroid falls in someone’s backyard and has magical abilities.

#33

-A strange cloud is over a character’s house and it rains all the time only at his house.

#34

-A character was returning home when lightning struck his car, and when somehow he reached home, he got shocked to see a man looking like him having dinner with his family. He has got stuck in a time loop.

#35

-A man buys an old & antique mirror from a shop and later discovers that it is a portal to his future.

#36

-A world where animals also talk and co-exist with humans, work with them in the offices, and banks, earn money and have houses of their own.

#37

-A teen boy wakes up as a 30-year-old man.

#38

-In the kingdom of the evil witch queen, none of the wizard’s magic works except the character’s.

#39

-A little wizard character goes to a normal school instead of going to a wizarding school for wizards as the boy’s wizard parents want their son to live a normal life like every kid but the character’s fate follows him.

#40

-Some evil wizards are planning to dethrone their wizard king by stealing his powerful wand.

#41

-Three teen wizards escaped their secret wizarding world to see and explore the real world of humans.

#42

-A wizard’s family was living among humans disguising as normal people until their son used magic to fight some bullies in his school and the principal called them.

#43

-A character promises his wizard parents not to use magic outside his house but the promise is broken one particular day.

#44

-No one knows that the new boy in their class is a werewolf except the other werewolf.

#45

-An escaped wizard couple was crossing the forest when they found out that the forest was not real but a trap for them.

#46

-A family of civilized vampires was living peacefully among humans disguising themselves as normal beings until a family of werewolves became their neighbor.

#47

-The wizard police were looking for an intruder who had entered the secret world of wizards.

Related: 101 Fantasy Story Ideas

Romance Writing Prompts–

#48

-A teen girl and a boy from different schools see each other every day at their common bus stop. A childhood love tale ensures.

#49

-A girl started liking his two best friends but doesn’t know whom she loves and whom she just likes.

#50

-A character falls in love with his professor, a single mother of a twelve-year-old boy whom the character gives home tuition.

#51

-A young boy falls in love with his new neighbor’s daughter, a pretty young girl, but he’s too shy to tell her until she tells her first.

#52

-An introvert teen of a rich lawyer stays at home and gets homeschooled and falls in love with the daughter of his tutor who visits his house with his dad sometimes.

#53

-A girl had fallen in love with her childhood friend but the boy already had a secret love affair with the girl’s twin sister.

#54

-A boy finds out that his best friend was dating his crush and now she was his girlfriend.

#55

-Two strangers going to Paris met for the first time at the airport and coincidently got adjacent seats. A love story ensures.

#56

-A pretty princess in the Roman empire started liking his new bodyguard, a newly recruited young & shy soldier.

#57

-In the year 2089, a character falls in love with a girl living on Mars.

#58

-A character didn’t like her sister’s new friend until she visited their house and the character talked to her for the first time.

#59

-A millionaire falls in love with his new assistant. The pretty woman can’t be impressed with money as she believes in simplicity and simple living.

#60

-In the Victorian era, a young policeman investigates the theft of a donkey by a pretty farmer girl. In the end, the young man finds the donkey and his first love.

#61

-A character works at a grocery store after his college and gets bored every day until he is joined by a girl who is also from his college.

#62

-Year 2077, a character does know that the girl he is dating is an a.i robot.

Related: Romance Genre in Literature

Science Fiction Story Ideas-

#63

-An old scientist had created a time travel machine and kept it secret while using it for many years but revealed it to his grandson on his deathbed.

#64

-A genius schoolboy creates a wormhole in this basement and no one knows where he went through it except one of his school friends.

#65

–A character finds out that his parents and his sister are robots and even his school teachers, his friends and everyone in his town is a robots and so he tries to find the reason without letting anyone know that he knows their truth.

#66

-A character who started receiving calls from himself. The other person is himself but from a different dimension.

#67

-A man working at a shop falls in love with a woman, a daily customer but he finds out that she’s just a robot designed to work at shops.

#68

-An innocent man serving a lifetime prison sentence in the future time escapes and comes into the past using time travel to prove his innocence.

#69

-A family who is actually highly intelligent robots sent from the future to investigate a crime.

#70

-A NASA scientist finds out what existed before the big bang. He got amazed.

#72

-A time in the future when time travel becomes possible and everyone is allowed to go back in time but they can’t return.

#73

-An astronaut returned to earth and later discovers that it was not the earth that he had left but a multiverse.

#74

-Year 3090, a group of brave astronauts are traveling back in time before the big bang. They are amazed at what they saw.

#75

-A criminal clones himself and calls the police to arrest his clone. The clone man is an innocent man who gets a lifetime prison sentence for the crimes of his creator. A cop knows all this but he had to catch him to prove it.

#76

-In the far future, a spaceship entering the milky way galaxy gets a message on its screen saying, beware of ultra-advanced humans.

#77

-Someone from the future is trying to contact the present humans through some advanced technology. He holds a crucial message for humankind.

#78

-Parents are cloning themselves to take care of their babies when they are at work. A clone couple escapes with the baby.

#79

-Year 2067, a young man living and working on mars as a spaceship engineer for a company finds his life very boring on the planet and is trying to return to earth. The company won’t let him leave.

#80

-Now every house has an a.i robot. The richer the people are, the more advanced robots they have. A family wants to get rid of their old robot and wants to buy a new one. Their robot is heartbroken hearing this.

#81

-The world is full of flying cars and a school teacher who loves flying cars is working hard to earn enough money to buy the expensive flying car of his dreams.

#82

-An explorer spaceship finds an alien world inhabited by giant human-like creatures.

#83

-A schoolboy discovers that all the teachers of his school are robots.

#84

-A character is very good with computers and creates a real-world simulation where people could upload their consciousness and live forever as one of the characters in the simulation leaving their bodies in a deep freeze.

Related: Science Fiction in Literature

Dystopian Writing Prompts-

#85

-Write a story about a dystopian world where the poor live in underground cities and rich lives on the surface.

#86

-Drones of the government fly everywhere in the city and anyone found breaking the rules is punished on the spot.

#87

-Most of the earth’s water has evaporated due to an extreme heat wave and now the corrupt governments have control over every drop of water.

#88

-Now robots hold the authority and have full control over everything on the planet. This happened when a computer virus made them corrupt and reprogrammed them all.

#89

-When the whole world submerged under water after the apocalypse. The survivors are now living in water cities made on giant boats.

#90

-A virus turning humans into living-dead outbreaks from an ancient grave opened by a team of explorers. Now the uninfected people live inside cities guarded by huge walls.

#91

-After the government collapsed, everyone was on their own and to survive the anarchy every family had to guard their houses day and night. The neighbors who didn’t like you are your first enemies

#92

-A group of people is planning to rebel against the totalitarian government.

#93

-Under the new totalitarian government made by the rich society, you can’t even trust your friends or relatives as now anyone can be their spies working for them to eliminate the rebellions.

#94

-A man living in the city surrounded by huge walls finally made the escape after seven years to find his sister who couldn’t make it to the city.

#95

-A little girl got left behind while boarding the last train to the enclosed city with his family. 15 years later the girl is now the leader of the survival group.

#96

-A character born and raised inside the underground city post-apocalypse is trying to see the land.

Mystery Writing Prompts-

#97

-A college student living with his strange roommate who suddenly went missing.

#98

-Write a story about a genius school boy who has a strange hobby of solving impossible crime cases and anonymously helping the police.

#99

-Write a story about a drone following a boy wherever he goes.

#100

-A character finds out that his friends are members of a secret club which organizes adventures every month.

#101

-A strange family that doesn’t interact with anyone in the neighborhood and suddenly disappears leaving their home.

Bonus-

#102

-A group of old school friends who decided to do a reunion which turns into the greatest mistakes of their lives, as one by one people started a mission at the home party.

#103

-A farmer who had a big farm inhabited by many animals but one day they all went missing except a donkey.

Related: Mystery Genre in Literature