Free prompts
Prompts for the quiet hours
Writing prompts for late nights and early mornings: fiction, poetry and memoir, ready when the house goes still.
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Pick one prompt, set a timer for ten minutes, and write without editing. Or let Selene whisper one for you.
Write with SeleneHow to use a prompt
- Set a timer for ten or twenty-five minutes, and keep going until it rings.
- Don't edit yet. Messy words now, careful words later.
- Follow the tangent. If the prompt leads somewhere else, go there. That's the point.
Night-writing prompts
- Write about the hour after everyone else has gone to sleep.
- A light is on in a house that's been empty for years. Who keeps turning it on?
- Someone hears a sound at 3:14 every night. Tonight, they finally go and look.
- Describe your street at midnight using only sounds.
- A letter arrives forty years late. Who opens it?
- The last bookshop in the city stays open all night. Who comes in?
- Write the conversation two strangers have at an all-night diner.
- The moon makes a promise. To whom, and does it keep it?
Memoir and family story prompts
For more, see Moonlit Memoir.
- What did your grandmother's hands do every day?
- Describe a place you loved that no longer exists.
- Write about the song that was playing when everything changed.
- What's the quietest moment you remember? Stay in it a while.
- Tell the story behind a scar, a ring or a photograph.
- Write about a meal you'll never forget and who was at the table.
- What advice did you ignore, and what happened next?
- Describe your first job and the person who taught you the most there.
Poetry prompts
- Write a poem to the hour you love most.
- Write a list poem of things you can only hear at night.
- Write to the moon as if it were an old friend.
- Write a poem that begins with a kitchen light still on.
- Write eight lines about something you keep but never use.
- Write a poem in the voice of a house when everyone has left.
Story starters
- Begin with: "Nobody in my family talks about that summer."
- Begin with: "The house remembered everything."
- Begin with: "I only ever lied to her once."
- A detective solves crimes only between midnight and dawn. Why?
- Two rivals are stranded together on the longest night of the year.
- A ghost who is very bad at haunting.
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The Quiet Hours prompt pack
More for the quiet hours
- A night-shift nurse keeps a notebook of what patients say at 4 a.m.
- Write about the first snowfall seen through a window at midnight.
- Someone receives a phone call from a number disconnected for decades.
- A town where the streetlights go out one by one each night. Only one person notices.
- Write a scene that takes place entirely in a train's sleeper car.
- A musician plays the same song every night for someone who never comes.
- Two people share an umbrella who absolutely should not.
- The power goes out. By candlelight, someone confesses something.
- A lighthouse keeper receives a message in a bottle addressed to them by name.
- Write about a road trip that went wrong in the best possible way.
More memoir and family story questions
- What did your family argue about at holidays, and who usually won?
- Describe the view from a window you looked out of a thousand times.
- Who did you call when you had good news?
- What did you want to be when you grew up, and what happened to that dream?
- Write about a time a stranger helped you.
- Describe a tradition you inherited, and one you started.
- What was your favorite hiding place as a child?
- Tell the story of how your parents or grandparents met, as you heard it.
- Write about a time you were braver than you expected.
- What do you hope your family keeps doing after you're gone?
More poetry prompts
- Write a poem made only of questions.
- Write about a word your family uses that no one else does.
- Write a poem that ends with the sun coming up.
- Write an apology to an object you lost.
- Write a poem about the sound of someone you love sleeping.
- Write a poem using the names of streets you've lived on.
- Write a lullaby for someone who is grown.
- Write a poem about a door you never opened.
- Write a poem in which the moon is jealous of a lamp.
- Write a thank-you note to the quiet hours.
Write with others
Prompts are better with company. Join a nightly writing sprint: twenty-five quiet minutes alongside other night writers.