Winter and the holidays bring great inspiration to writers. If you’ve had a busy autumn or a tumultuous year, but you have a nice winter or holiday break, that’s a great time to get back into a writing habit again!
Although these are fiction prompts, some of them could be adapted to autobiographical prompts for essays, journaling, or memoir writing as well.
Merry Writing, and a Happy Book Year!
- A Christmas card arrives in the mail fifty years after it was delivered.
- The Christmas ornament is supposedly enchanted.
- Someone has just became fabulously wealthy and is picking out gifts for their family.
- Someone is transported to a Christmas in a past century.
- To impress her, he learns all of the words to her favorite Christmas carol. And he doesn’t even like carols. Or Christmas. Or singing.
- Someone embarrasses herself at a Christmas party.
- Notes and gifts from a “Secret Santa” take a strange turn.
- After the blizzard hits, they’re stuck together for a while, and they have to stay warm.
- A single person reacts to getting Christmas cards from married couples with pictures of them with their smiling children.
- Two strangers wind up participating in a holiday activity together.
- Someone has been cutting down and stealing trees from the Christmas tree farm.
- Someone resorts to desperate measures to get home for Christmas.
- Write about the worst present your character ever got.
- They’re putting up a Christmas tree at the hospital.
- Write about someone who’s determined to make amends at Christmas.
- Write a scene that incorporates the smells of Christmas.
- Someone receives a gift wrapped in newspaper and duct tape.
- At the castle, Christmas is very different from what she’s used to.
- He and his very pregnant wife can’t find a hotel room right before Christmas.
- Okay, he’s not Santa, but he did have a very good reason for breaking into the house.
- What’s a reindeer doing in your part of town?
