Nine Dorrance Publishing Writing Prompts to Try Out This Fall
By Zane Troxell
Fall is the perfect time to focus on your writing projects. Whether it be the autumn colors adorning the trees, sightings of migrating birds and scavenging squirrels, or the spooky decorations everywhere you look, there’s bound to be something that strikes inspiration during this time of year. In case none of that seems to be working, we here at Dorrance wanted to provide some additional inspiration with these fall-themed writing prompts.
This list is organized into several categories depending on what you’re looking for, however, we recommend you check out all nine. You never know what might inspire you to finish your current project. And who knows? Maybe you’ll also find the inspiration to start something completely new!
Quick Warm-Ups
Prompt 1: Brown, orange, red, and yellow leaves are probably the most iconic images used to signify the fall season. Take a few moments to create a table of some colors you most strongly associate with fall. Then, under each color, write a list of words that relate to this color. This list could include objects that have or feature the color, symbols associated with the color, or even moods and adjectives you personally connect with the color. Not only does this get your brain thinking about how color and symbolism function, but it also provides you with an extensive list from which you can craft metaphors and similes in the future.
Prompt 2: Fall is all about change. Write a short descriptive paragraph, or a simple list if you don’t have as much time, detailing a space or aspect of your life that has recently undergone a transformation. Maybe you redecorated a room in your living space or construction somewhere in your neighborhood has recently been completed. Which details stand out to you? What do you feel inclined to write about? Does this say anything about the details you notice as a writer?
Bolster Your Current Projects
Prompt 3: Suspense is often used in horror novels to keep readers interested in the plot. However, the practice of withholding specific information is also used in many other genres. Readers would quickly lose interest if each new character, location, or item was introduced along with every single detail there is to know about them or it. The experience of learning about characters, locations, or items in a novel as the plot progresses keeps readers reading.
Choose a person, place, or thing in a piece of writing you are working on. Write out an extensive list of information about your chosen subject containing absolutely every detail that the reader would learn throughout the story. Circle the items in the list the reader would know from the beginning, draw a box around details that the reader would learn about partway through, and underline details that wouldn’t be revealed until late in the plot. You can then write a second list with all the details listed in chronological order of when they are revealed.
This exercise could assist in planning complex characters, locations, and items within your novel, and help you maintain suspense about a particular subject in your story.
Prompt 4: Think back to a previous Halloween costume you’ve worn. Did you feel different when you had the costume on? Write down a few of the things you felt were different with the costume on. These can be positive or negative things.
Read through your list. Are the things you wrote down associated with the character you dressed as? Did people treat you differently at all? Beside each item on your list, try to write a short explanation for why you felt this way.
You can think back to this exercise when writing clothing descriptions in your own writing. How might your characters’ clothes affect their actions in the narrative? Does this change how you think about characters in your current writing projects?
Prompt 5: Perhaps more than any other time of year, fall brings with it an array of seasonal dishes and drinks that many look forward to enjoying year after year. But how can we write about these flavors in a unique way that changes the way people think about their favorite fall treats? One method is to go beyond the actual taste and connect the flavor with a specific memory.
Choose a popular fall food or drink, such as pumpkin pie, candy corn, or apple cider, just to name a few. Now, write about a specific memory that you have involving this chosen food or drink. Do any unconventional or unique memories stand out?
For example, rather than writing about eating caramel apples at a friend’s Halloween party, write about that one time you had a caramel apple in the middle of the summer. What’s the difference between a fall caramel apple and a summer caramel apple? Putting a well-known food or drink in an unfamiliar environment can add a whole new level to how that food exists in your narrative. Additionally, it helps to keep your writing unpredictable and unique. Can you reevaluate how food appears in anything you’re currently writing?
Start Something New
Prompt 6: Although horror fans may be most familiar with abandoned hospitals, haunted mansions, and foggy, moonlit graveyards, some of the most terrifying moments in horror novels take place in seemingly normal situations.
Write a brief paragraph describing a scene that does not contain any horror elements. Perhaps this is a character’s typical morning routine or a description of a group of people enjoying a sunny day at the park. Now, reread your paragraph and add one additional detail that would catch the reader off guard or show that not everything is as it seems in this scene.
How did writing the overall scene before adding in the unsettling detail affect the tone of the paragraph? Did it help in creating a sense of uneasiness? If this exercise resonated with you, this paragraph could also serve as the beginning of a larger narrative or novel!
Prompt 7: Unreliable narrators are a fantastic tool for crafting scary stories that keep readers on their toes. To practice writing with an unreliable narrator, write a third-person account of an event that happened, either real or fictional, in which someone did something they shouldn’t have done. This first account should be completely reliable and serve as a basic description of the event from which we will pull details later.
Once you’ve completed your account of the situation, go through and cross out the details your unreliable narrator, the person at fault in the situation, would choose to omit in their own account of the event to feign innocence.
Finally, using the account with the redacted details, rewrite the account in first-person point of view through the unreliable narrator. Feel free to try out different voices for your narrator. They could be emotional and distressed or completely calm and unbothered.
Since you began with the unredacted account of the event, what omissions could you employ in your unreliable narrator’s account to characterize them? Did they fail to give certain details that characterize them as detached and ruthless? Or did this narrator twist the truth in a way that displayed their cunning and intelligence? Perhaps this exercise could lead to a larger novel featuring this unreliable narrator.
Prompt 8: Fall marks the beginning of the school year in countries all around the world, and many people are drawn to dark academia novels around this time. The dark academia aesthetic consists of Gothic architecture; university campuses; the pursuit of knowledge; and certain fields of study including classics, literature, and languages.
Many of the most well-known dark academia books focus on one specific field of study. For this exercise, consider a subject you think could serve as the central focus of a dark academia novel. Write out a mind map with your chosen field of study in the center. Use the branches of the map to record some major specializations within that field of study. Then continue to branch out with more and more intricate details regarding each specialization. For example, if you were to choose history as your subject, one specialization could be environmental history. Then a smaller branch of the environmental history specialization could be tracing the geographical origins of certain plants.
Once your mind map is filled up, you can investigate each branch for potential plots and storylines. Using the previous example, perhaps a group of university researchers discovers an unknown plant and needs to use their expertise in environmental history to trace the plant’s journey across the globe and learn more about it. Want to branch into fantasy? Perhaps the plant has magical properties and only ancient historical records located in the region in which the plant originated reveal all its secrets. How about blending it with mystery? Maybe the head of the environmental history department recently disappeared while tracing the unknown plant’s origins. Using her incomplete notes, the researchers need to retrace her steps to find their mentor and the lost history of the plant to which she dedicated her life’s work.
In this way, you can use your interest in a subject as the backbone of your narrative and create a reading experience in which readers can also be exposed to new academic subjects they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.
Hoping to Get More Poetic This Fall?
Prompt 9: Think about an autumn memory or experience you had in the past. Write a brief poem about it using any structure and form you want. It can be as abstract or concrete as you wish.
Now, we’re going to essentially carve your poem like you would a pumpkin. First, we’re going to carve out the eyes. The eyes can refer to the visual details described in the poem, or if the poem is more abstract, it can be the way a certain idea or situation is viewed by the narrator or reader.
After carving out the eyes, we’re going to turn our attention to carving a nose. Like with the eyes, the nose can refer to scents described in the poem. Alternatively, it can refer to a consideration or contemplation of something new. Oftentimes, before we try a new food or drink, we will smell it first before actually trying it. By applying this to our writing, we can find instances in which we are trying out new ways of viewing a situation or challenging the status quo.
The final feature of the poem we will isolate is the mouth. The mouth of a poem can refer to dialogue that is written out in the poem. More abstractly, it can be instances in which the main thread or theme of the piece is communicated to the reader. Obviously, the entire poem is used to communicate the overall idea, but by isolating a specific line or phase that encapsulates what it is we are trying to communicate, we can home in on our message and make the poem more precise.
Now that you’ve carved up your poem, you have isolated some of the major descriptive and/or thematic aspects of your poem. Hopefully, it also made you consider the relevance of each line for later revisions. This exercise is not supposed to make you think that a poem needs all these elements to be a worthwhile poem. (Perhaps your pumpkin has seventeen eyes, no nose, and two mouths!) It merely challenges you to evaluate your own writing in a deep and meaningful way.
Hopefully you were able to find some fall inspiration with these writing prompts and had the chance to reflect on this beautiful time of year.
Happy writing and happy fall from Dorrance Pubishing!
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