time travel writing prompts

30 Time Travel Writing Prompts

Ever feel stuck in the present moment?

Wishing you could grab a pizza with Cleopatra, mastermind a plan with Machiavelli, or explore a future city filled with gadgets we can’t even imagine ?

Hold onto your hats because we’re about to blow the doors off time travel stories!

Forget boring timelines, paradoxes are your new BFFs. These prompts will have you rewriting reality, jumping through history , and making the rules of time as bendy as a pretzel.

Let’s check them out.

Time Travel Writing Prompts and Story Ideas

• Winds of the Lost Era: A gust of wind has the unique ability to transport anyone it touches to a different time for just one hour. When a young woman gets caught in this wind, she finds herself in the midst of a pivotal historical event. She has exactly sixty minutes to observe, interact , or possibly change history. What event does she witness? And what choices does she make?
• The Last Sunset Before Eternity: The world’s leading scientists discover that there’s only one sunset left before the earth stops rotating, plunging half the world into perpetual day and the other half into eternal night . They’ve also created a one-time-use machine that can send one person back in time to prevent this. Who is chosen? And what historical point do they go back to to make things right?
• Messages Across Time: A young woman discovers she can send messages to her younger self through dreams . Each message can only be a short sentence, but it’s enough to give her past self clues or warnings about the future. However, every change she makes creates ripples in her present, and sometimes, the outcomes are not what she expects. What message does she send first? And what unforeseen consequences emerge?
• The Day the Clocks Stopped: Time everywhere freezes, except for one city. Its inhabitants live through days, months , and years while the rest of the world remains static. As they advance technologically and culturally at a rapid rate, they prepare for the day time might resume for everyone. How do they plan to reintroduce their city to the world, which is now centuries behind?
• Chrono-Tourists: A company starts offering ‘Time Travel Tourism’. You can’t change major events, but you can witness them. A young couple decides to go on their honeymoon to witness a peaceful, beautiful moment from the past. But when they arrive, they realize it’s the eve of a significant, unrecorded disaster . How do they reconcile their experience with the joy they were expecting?
• The Museum of Moments: In the future, there are no traditional museums. Instead, there’s a museum where people can experience any moment from the past in full sensory detail. A teenager decides to relive the ‘most peaceful day on Earth’, only to realize that peace is often a matter of perspective. What does he truly witness on this so-called peaceful day?
• Time’s Locket: A locket passed down through generations in a family doesn’t just contain pictures ; it allows the wearer to briefly live in the moments the pictures were taken. A young girl decides to experience a day in her great- grandmother ’s life , hoping to understand her better. However, she discovers a family secret that has been hidden for decades, changing her understanding of her lineage.
• Letters in the Sands of Time: In a small coastal town, messages mysteriously appear at sunrise on the beach , always addressed to someone present there. These are letters from their future selves. A man, skeptical at first, starts reading a letter addressed to him and discovers details of a choice he’ll soon have to make. What decision looms in his future, and how does this knowledge affect him?
• The Two Lifetimes of Ms. Daniels: On her 30th birthday , Ms. Daniels wakes up to find herself back in her 10- year -old body but with all her memories intact. She lives her life again, making different choices based on her memories, until she reaches 30 again. And then, she’s back in her original timeline. How do her dual experiences shape her perspective? Which life felt more real to her?
• Echoes of the Time Vortex: A cavern hidden in the mountains is said to echo not sounds from the present, but conversations from the past and whispers of the future. When a grieving mother enters the cave, she hears the voice of her departed child from a future that never happened. What message does she receive, and how does it change her healing process?
• The Train at Midnight: There’s a legend of a train that passes through a town at midnight. Those who board it are taken to any point in time they desire, but they can only observe and feel emotions —they can’t interact. A woman boards to revisit a day she considers her life’s biggest mistake. What day does she return to , and what closure does she seek?
• Chronicles of the Hourglass City: In a city shaped like an hourglass, the top half lives in the past and the bottom half in the future. A bridge connects the two, and citizens are allowed a single journey across it. A young woman from the future decides to cross into the past. What or who is she seeking, and what challenges await her in this duality?
• Diary from Tomorrow: A man finds a diary on his doorstep, and to his astonishment, it’s filled with detailed entries from the next year of his life. Each day he reads about tomorrow, and each time he’s faced with the moral dilemma of acting on or ignoring the knowledge. What major revelation does the diary hold, and does he dare to change its course?
• The Timestream Weaver: In an old attic, a loom is found that doesn’t weave fabric but moments in time. When operated, it can merge moments from different times into one. A curious teenager weaves together a day from her childhood and one from her elder years. What harmonies or conflicts emerge from this singular day?
• Guardians of the Temporal Oasis: Deep in the desert lies an oasis where every drop of water lets you relive a moment from your past. But, you can’t choose the moment—it chooses you. A traveler, seeking refuge, drinks from the oasis and is thrust into a forgotten memory. What long-buried moment resurfaces, and how does it change his path forward?
• The Timeless Town Square: A secluded town has a central square where time doesn’t flow linearly. Every day at dawn, the square chooses a random day from the past or future to reflect. Townspeople can enter to relive memories or see snippets of what’s to come. One day, the entire town gathers as the square displays a date significant to all. What date is shown , and how does it bind the community ?
• Candles of Yesteryears: A boutique sells candles, each corresponding to a year in history. When lit, the room transforms, enveloping the person in the ambiance of that year. An elderly woman buys a candle corresponding to a year she wants to forget. As it burns, what secret memory unfolds, and what catharsis does it bring?
• Threads of Time: In a mystical land, there are multiple threaded structures that showcase the entire timeline of the universe . When touched, a person can feel the emotions of any moment stitched into it. A young prince touches a seemingly insignificant thread and is overwhelmed by its intensity. What hidden moment did he discover, and how does it reshape his understanding of history?
• The Mirror of Moments Past: A mirror in an antique store doesn’t show the present but a past version of whoever stands before it. A woman sees herself as a child, interacting with someone she doesn’t remember from her childhood. Who is this mysterious figure , and why have her memories of them been erased?
• Temporal Tunes of the Old Gramophone: An old gramophone has the power to play not just songs but also ambient sounds from specific moments in time. A listener can immerse themselves in the atmosphere of that moment. A man hears the background noise of a place and time he never visited but finds strangely familiar. Where does this sound take him , and what lost connection does he rediscover?
• The Garden of Future Blooms: In a secret garden, flowers bloom showing visions of potential futures. One rare flower is said to bloom only once every century, showing a vision crucial for humanity. As it blossoms, many gather to witness its vision. What future does the flower reveal , and how do those who see it react?
• Clockwork of Cosmic Consequences: A clockmaker designs a timepiece that can turn back time, but for every minute turned back, it fast-forwards another person’s timeline by a year. The creator, desperate to rectify a personal mistake, uses it, but at what cost? Whose life gets fast-forwarded , and how does this unintended consequence play out?
• Whispers of the Time-Touched Tree : A tree in a forest is said to be touched by time. Those who sleep under it dream of a moment from their past, but from the perspective of someone else who was there. A soldier, burdened by guilt, sleeps under the tree, hoping to understand a decision he made in battle. Whose eyes does he see through , and how does this new perspective aid his quest for forgiveness?
• Shadows of the Sundial: In an abandoned village, there’s a sundial said to cast shadows not of the current time but of times gone by. When a researcher places her hand where the shadow falls, she’s momentarily transported to the moment the shadow represents. She inadvertently touches a shadow that takes her to a day the village wishes to forget. What dark secret is unveiled, and how does she reconcile with the truth?
• Temporal Café: A café opens downtown where each table is set in a different era. Patrons can’t interact with the past or future directly but can witness and hear conversations. A detective sits at a table set in the future, trying to solve a case that’s stumped him. What revelation about the case does he overhear, and how does it change the course of his investigation?
• The Time-Torn Map: An explorer discovers a map that doesn’t just lead to places but to times. Marking a location and date transports the holder to the specified moment. The explorer chooses a date and place where a famous artifact went missing. What happens when he arrives , and how does this journey reshape historical narratives?
• Waves of the Temporal Beach: There’s a beach where each wave that crashes ashore comes from a different era. Collecting items brought by the waves can provide glimpses into various moments in time. A historian finds an item linked to her family’s past. What story does the item tell , and how does it redefine her family’s legacy ?
• Melodies from the Time-Touched Violin: A violin is found that, when played, doesn’t produce sound but images from the past or future. A musician plays a tune, and a series of events unfold before her, hinting at a future personal dilemma. What decision does she foresee , and how does she prepare for it?
• Stairs of the Epoch Tower: An ancient tower’s stairs are said to ascend through time. With each floor representing a different era, climbers can observe, but not interfere. A writer ascends, seeking inspiration , but finds himself on a floor mirroring a future event of his own life. What event does he witness , and how does it inspire his next work ?
• The Time Capsule’s Promise: A school ’s time capsule is unearthed not by students from the present but by visitors from the future. They leave behind a message for the current generation about an impending global challenge. What warning do they give , and how does the world rally in response?

Founder and Chief Content Curator @ Digital Phrases

I'm a writer, words are my superpower, and storytelling is my kryptonite.

Not Your Usual Time Travel Story Ideas (2024)

Looking for unusual time travel story ideas and writing prompts? You’ve come to the right place!

Read on for ideas like a world where time flows differently in different regions, a person with an ability to travel in their dreams, and more!

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• S tory ideas

Picture prompts

The time travel trope.

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Related posts: Tragic Love Story Ideas (2023) The Most Enticing Forbidden Love Story Ideas (Updated in 2023) 40+ Sad Backstory Ideas for Your Character (2023) 17+ Enticing Soulmate Story Ideas (2023)

Time Travel Story Ideas & Writing Prompts

Time travel has long been a captivating concept in storytelling, transporting us to narratives of endless possibilities. Now, let’s explore some unique and unconventional story ideas!

Please note that the genders in these prompts and story ideas are just placeholders and do not mean to enforce any hurtful stereotypes nor offend anyone.

Story ideas

From unexpected time travelers to unconventional methods of traversing through time, embark on a thrilling, time-bending adventure with these exciting ideas.

• Lost Time A group of explorers stumbles upon an alien-made, time-traveling elevator that can transport them to different moments within their own lifetime, at the cost of reduced longevity.
• Reversed A scientist makes a mistake in their time travel machine, which sends them spiraling into an alternate reality where time operates in reverse.
• Past and Future Memories In a post apocalyptic world, a person finds that they can jump into the past as well as potential future memories of others. Then, they navigate through different people’s experiences in the hope of finding a way to undo the effect of the apocalypse.
• Time is Money In a world where time flows differently in different regions, a society formed where time travelers exist and time itself can be a commodity. (Originally appeared in my post The Most Mesmerizing Fantasy World Ideas (2023) )
• Chronicler of Lost History A person wakes up every day in a different time period, with no control over when or where they’ll end up next. As they try to find out why, they realize that their purpose is to witness and document crucial moments in history that have been erased from collective memory.
• Time-Traveling Detective In a time when time travel is possible, a time-traveling detective agency specializes in solving crimes and incidents that occur across different points in time.
• Network of Selves There’s a new invention that allows people to split their consciousness into multiple timelines, creating a network of parallel selves.
• Tour Across Time Time travel is a regulated industry, and a tour guide accidentally takes a group of tourists to a time period that never existed, causing a ripple effect that alters the course of history.
• Time-Traveling Companion There’s a peculiar type of animals that have the innate ability to traverse time. Once they form a unique bond with a human, the bond will allow that human to time travel along with said animal.

• The Time Capsule After unearthing a long-forgotten time capsule, a tight-knit group of friends is transported back to their younger selves. (A similar concept appeared in my post Beyond the Mundane: Captivating Slice of Life Story Ideas (2023) )
• The Time Thief A physicist accidentally creates a device that allows them to move between parallel universes. They exploit this power to commit crimes across dimensions, staying one step ahead of authorities.
• The Reversed Time Traveler A time traveler’s machine malfunctions, causing them to experience life in reverse. Frustrated by their reversed existence, they seek to disrupt the flow of time itself.
• Cheering Through Time An alien with the ability to explore different time periods gets stranded on earth and befriends a cheerleader. But as the two jump between time periods, they unwittingly start a chain of event that might spell catastrophe for both of their home planets.
• Happy Days Specific emotional triggers can create a quantum leap, launching individuals through time to a moment in the past or future when a similar emotional event occurred.

Here are some time travel picture prompts, because a picture speaks a thousand words! What kind of time travel prompt or story jumps out at you when looking at the picture prompts below?

The concept of time travel has fascinated storytellers for generations, offering endless possibilities and narrative intrigue, allowing writers to explore the complexities of cause and effect, challenge the boundaries of linear time, and delve into the profound impact of altering the past or glimpsing into the future.

In time travel stories, protagonists often find themselves in paradoxes and moral dilemmas as they attempt to correct past mistakes, change the course of history, or prevent catastrophic events where the smallest alteration can have far-reaching repercussions.

Time travel narratives also provide a fertile ground for exploring themes of identity, self-discovery, and the relentless march of time, prompting characters and readers alike to ponder the nature of free will and the fragility of existence.

If you need more story ideas and prompts, please browse our Story Ideas & Writing Prompts category!

Have any question or feedback? Feel free to contact me here . Until next time!

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158+ ‘Time travel’ Writing Prompts

Time Travel Dilemma

You invent a time machine but it only makes one round trip. Where and when would you go and why?

Time Travel Destination

If you could time-travel to any era in history, which would it be and why?

The Time Travel Calendar

Imagine you have a calendar that can time travel to any date. What dates will you choose and why?

Adventures of the Time Traveling Carolers

Create an adventure story where a group of Christmas carolers accidentally time travel while caroling.

Christmas Journey Through Time

Detail an imaginary Christmas journey through different historical periods.

Transcendent Tyranny

Write about a villain who aims to harness time travel, potentially altering history to favor their reign.

Time-Travelling Bloodlust

In a world where time travel is possible, a vampire is chasing victims through different eras.

Time Travel Tales

Create a story about a time machine that allows you to travel anywhere in history.

Time Travel Daylight

Imagine waking up on the day of daylight saving time change and finding out you’ve traveled to a different era.

Historical Time Traveller

If you could go back in time to any historical epoch during your 7th grade history lessons, which would it be and why?

Time Travel Tourist

Imagine you can time travel to any historical event or period. Write about where you would go and what you would do.

A Way Back Into Time

Imagine your character has the ability to travel back in time to a period and place, where and when will that be and why.

Treaded Eternity

Design a story where deceased souls must time travel to atone for their sins in life before they can pass on.

Dystopian Restoration

A superhero born in a dystopian future uses their time travel abilities to prevent their world from descending into chaos.

Accentuate the Positive

Write about a time-traveller who uses his power to spread positivity by preventing negative events from happening in the past.

Grandfather Paradox

Write a story in which a time traveler meets his own grandfather back in time and their actions directly impact the present.

Dinosaur Days

Your protagonist has the ability to time travel back to the prehistoric era.

Your protagonist is part of a special task force that goes back in time to prevent crimes that have yet to happen.

Epochal Time Travel

Describe a chase scene across different periods of history as both the protagonist and antagonist can time travel.

Historic Time Travel

Write about a time-travel journey to a significant event in history.

Sands of Time

Imagine a beach bonfire that has the mystical power to show the past or future. Write a story revolving around a character who discovers this power.

Ghost Words

Construct an epistolary short story where letters from the past mysteriously appear in the present.

Journey Through Time

Imagine navigating various epochs of human history with the aid of a time machine.

Time Travel by Virtual Reality

Imagine using a virtual reality headset that can transport you to any moment in history. Which period would you choose to go to and why?

Puppeteer of the Past

Create a scenario where time travel allows individuals to alter historical events for personal gain.

The Inevitable Horizon

Imagine a future where time travel is possible and document an adventurous expedition a group of explorers undertake to witness the end of the world.

Borrowed Time

A character has found an artifact that allows them to time travel, but each trip shortens their life.

Journey to the Tomorrow

Write a suspenseful story of a time-travelling detective who prevents future crimes.

Chase through Time

Create a suspenseful cat-and-mouse chase between a relentless detective and a criminal with the ability to time travel.

Time Travel Summer Disaster

Write a funny tale of a time traveler who miscalculates and ends up in the middle of the hottest day of the year.

Time-Traveling Diary

Write a story about a diary that allows you to time travel whenever you write in it.

Caverns of Time

Write a story about a group of adventurers who find a mysterious cave that leads them back in time.

Time-Traveling Train

You’re the conductor of a steam-powered locomotive that can travel through time.

Time Turbine

Imagine a steampunk mechanism that could transport its operator through time.

The Timekeeper’s Paradox

Spin a tale about a master clockmaker who invents a time-traveling pocket watch, but everything goes awfully wrong.

Time Travel Agents

Time-traveling teens who work as secret agents to preserve the past.

Rewrite History

Choose a historical event and reimagine it with a speculative element, such as alien intervention or time travel.

Time-Travel Tourism

Imagine a future where time-traveling is just as ordinary as going on holidays.

Time Terror

Picture a teenager who finds a time machine, but every jump into the future reveals something terrifying.

Across The Time Continuum

Your story’s setting isn’t in a physical place, but across different periods of time.

The Paradox Experiment

Write about a scientist who makes a breakthrough in time travel, but creates a paradox that alters reality in unexpected ways.

Time Traveling Santa

In a world where time travel exists, Santa Claus uses this technology to deliver presents. How does he manage it?

Love Transcending Time

Write a romance story where one of the characters can time travel.

Time Travel Target

Imagine a detective with the ability to time travel who must solve the murder of their future self.

Lost in Time

Write a narrative about someone who has discovered a time machine, which only travels forward.

Sleeping Beauty and Time Travel

Sleeping Beauty wakes up not 100 years later from her own time, but in the 21st century after a scientific experiment goes wrong.

Jingle All The Way Back to Past

You are sent back in time to the filming of a classic Christmas movie. What happens, and how does it change the movie?

The ‘What If’ Scenario

Imagine if you were able to travel in time for a day. Where would you go and what would you do?

Time Travel

If you could time travel only once, would you go to the past or the future? Write about your decision and what you hope to see or do.

Back In Time Travel

If you could travel back in time, what era would you go to and why?

Time Machine Adventure

Write a story where you have the ability to time travel.

Imagine you have a time machine, describe where you would go and what you would do using new vocabulary words.

The Space-Time Anomaly

You encounter a space-time anomaly that sends you back in time upon contact. Describe the adventures you experience in the universe’s past.

Love Through the Ages

Compose a poem that traverses time, detailing a love that has lasted throughout centuries.

Images in Time

Write a poem that captures a specific moment from your past.

The Time Machine

Compose a poem about time travel, describing the era you’d love to visit most.

If you could time travel to the future, what age or era would you choose to visit, and why?

Time Machine Mix-up

In their first-ever time travel, a novice time traveller misinterprets the controls and ends up at a dinosaur-themed amusement park.

A Paradox In Time

Describe the dilemma of a time-traveler who accidentally altered the course of history.

Time-Travelling Phantom

Write about engaging in a mission with a time-travelling ghost.

Time Machine Journey

Write a story about finding a time machine and deciding to travel to a period in history.

Space-Time Slip

You accidentally find a device that transports you to different timelines. Write about your time-travel adventure.

Time Travel Mishap

Accidentally, you have landed in the wrong era due to a time machine error. Write about the wonky adventures you’d have.

The Time-Travelling Diplomat

Write a series of dispatches from a modern-day diplomat who has accidentally time-traveled back to ancient Rome.

Time Travel Tourism

You run a time-travel tourism company in the future, write about an average day in your life.

Time Travel Tour

Choose a historical period and pretend you are a tour guide for time travellers. Write a journal entry about it.

Chrono Travel Device

Write about a superhero who exploits a cutting-edge time-travel device.

Adventures with an Ancestor

Pen down the exciting adventures you could see yourself having if you traveled back in time to meet an adventurous ancestor.

Each person chooses an era, and together, write a story where characters time travel between these selected periods.

Artistic Time Travel

Choose a historical painting or sculpture. Write a fictional story about what was happening when the artwork was created.

Travel Through Time

Imagine you have a time machine. Describe a journey to a past or future era, detailing the sights, sounds, and experiences.

Musical Time Travel

Choose a period in history and create a song that would be a hit during that time.

Time-Travelling Adventures

What if you could time travel? Where would you go and what would you do?

The Tenses Time Travel

Write two short stories of the same event, one using past tense and the other using present tense.

Nightmare of the Time Traveler

Your protagonist can time travel, but every time they do, they see horrifying premonitions.

From Fiction to Fact: A Science Perspective

Choose a piece of science fiction technology or concept and discuss the feasibility in reality.

Time-Traveling to the Past

If you could time travel, describe a day in the life of your parents (or grandparents) when they were your age.

Unexpected Superpowers

Imagine waking up one day with a superpower of your choice, what would it be and how would you use it?

Journey to a Different Era

If you could travel to any time period, when would it be and why?

Fourth of July Through Time

Imagine you have the ability to time travel and attend any Fourth of July celebration in the history of America. Describe your experience.

Time Travelling Adventure

Imagine you have a time machine, write a comic strip about the different eras you visit.

The Time Travel Watch

Imagine if you invented a watch that could teleport you to any time period. Which period would you choose and why?

School Time Machine

If you had a time machine and could travel to any time in the school day, where would you go and why?

Maccabean Time Travel

Marry past and present by writing a time-travel story that involves characters from the original Hanukkah story arriving in the present day.

Tales Across Timelines

If could have a conversation with your future 25-year-old self, what would you ask or discuss?

Secret Door in the Basement

Your character discovers a hidden door in his basement which leads to a world he never knew existed.

Time Travel Love

Write a narrative involving one character traveling across time to find their destined love.

Time Travelling Musician

If you were a musician whose music could transport anyone to any time period, what songs would you play and why?

Time Travel Adventure

If you could travel back or forward in time, where would you go and what could you do?

Craft a narrative as if you’ve just arrived at an ancient version of today’s modern cities. How is it different? How is it similar? How do you feel about it?

Comic Time Travel Hypothesis

Compose a tale about a scientific experiment gone hilariously wrong, leading to an unintentional time travel mishap.

Hero’s Timeless Quest

Design a story where the hero embarks on a quest that transcends time.

Chronological Conundrum

Travel forward in time to uncover a secret that could save humanity.

A Timeless Easter

Craft a time-travelling adventure that throws the protagonist back to the first Easter.

Imagine traveling back in time, only to realize you are being haunted by a vengeful ghost that insists you amend a mistake from the past.

Time-bending Love

A lover returns in a time where their partner has aged, but they haven’t.

Time-Traveler Chronicles

Imagine if an elder in your community had the ability to time travel — detail their journey.

The Time Machine Invention

You have invented a time machine. Write about where you would go, what you would do, and who you would meet.

The Time Travel Letter

You find a letter written by you in the future. What does it say?

Write a story imagining you’ve traveled back in time to an important historical event.

45 Time Travel Writing Prompts

Time travel has fascinated people for centuries. It’s one of those things that makes us stop and think, “What if…?” Below, you’ll find a list of time-travel-themed writing prompts to get your students thinking about the possibilities of time travel.

Using This Guide

You could use this guide in your classroom when you read a book about time travel. Here are a few ways to use these prompts:

• Assign these along with required reading in your ELA class.
• Challenge students to use one prompt a night every week for an entire school week.
• Keep these handy for students who finish work early.

The Prompts

• If you could go back in time and meet any musician, who would it be? Why?
• Write a story about someone using time travel to cheat on a test.
• Write a poem about time traveling.
• Write a story where the main character travels back in time to warn their younger self about something.
• If you could go back in time and meet any actor or actress, who would it be? Why?
• What is a historical event that you would like to time travel to? Describe what you would see.
• What is your favorite movie about time traveling? What do you like about it?
• What is your favorite book about time traveling? What do you like about it?
• Write a story about a librarian who time travels via books.
• If you could go back in time and meet any prominent woman from history, who would it be? Why?
• Write a time travel story that involves a dog and its owner.
• Write a story where the main character travels back to the same morning every single day.
• If you could travel back in time to a certain summer memory, what would it be? Describe your day.
• Write a time travel story about superpowers.
• If you could travel back in time to any period of history, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a time trial story about video games.
• If you could go back in time and stop any major historical event, which would you choose? How would you stop it?
• Write a time travel story about school.
• Write a time travel story about your favorite season.
• Write a time travel story about a person who is nervous.
• Do you think time travel really exists? Explain your answer.
• Explain the pros and cons of time travel.
• If you could travel into the future, what do you think it would be like?
• If you could go back in time and try any food, what would you eat? Why?
• If you could go back in time and protect one endangered animal, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a story where the main character goes back in time to meet a relative or ancestor they never got to meet.
• Write a time travel story that takes place in a big city.
• Write a time travel story that takes place in the countryside.
• Can you think of a moment when you should have stood up for someone and didn’t? If you could, would you go back and change it?
• If you went back in time, would you purposely try to find your younger self?
• If you went ahead in time, would you purposely try to find your older self?
• Write about your favorite cartoon that features time travel.
• Do you think the time travel aspect of the  Harry Potter  series makes sense? Why or why not?
• Which time travel trope do you think is overused? Why?
• If you could travel back in time to see any band or musician live, who would you choose? Why?
• Write a time travel story featuring superheroes.
• Write a time travel story about your favorite holiday.
• If you could travel back in time to meet any artist in history, who would it be? Why?
• Why do you think society is so intrigued by the thought of time travel? Explain.
• Write a story about someone who only thinks they’ve time traveled, but they actually haven’t.
• Write a time travel story about science.
• If you could go back in time and witness any important event in history, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a time travel story that takes place 200 years from now.
• Write a time travel story that takes place 200 years ago.
• Write a time travel story that takes place during the year one of your parents were born.

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Whether you’re looking for writing guides, substitute teacher forms, or something in between, you’ve come to the right place. Our site is home to a number of educational resources to use in the classroom and at home. 

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Past, present, paradox: writing about time travel, crafting a believable time travel story requires careful consideration of the logic at play. let's crack the temporal code on traveling through time in fiction.

Table of Contents

Time travel in fiction can open your story to infinite possibilities. Ever wondered what it would be like if somebody taught the Romans how to make a nuclear bomb? Do you need to retcon an event in your story? Time travel!

It may seem simple for your time-traveling characters to hop in Tony’s Terrific Temporal Transport and whiz through time, but there are many hurdles to overcome when writing about time travel.

Chief among these is dealing with time travel paradoxes, so let’s look at those, discuss how you can write convincing time travel stories, and explore how some popular stories handle it.

The Problem With Time Travel

Consider an ordinary day in your life. It follows a sequence of events where one thing leads to another. This is called causality , the concept that everything that happens results from events that happened before it. The problem with time travel in fiction, especially travel to the past, is that it often breaks the rules of causality.

This can lead to time travel paradoxes and unforeseen results , including:

• Continuity paradoxes: The act of time travel renders itself impossible.
• Closed causal loop paradoxes: Traveling to the past creates a condition where an idea, object, or person has no identifiable origin and exists in a closed loop in time that repeats infinitely.
• The butterfly effect: Even the smallest action can have massive consequences.

With all that in mind, let’s embark on a journey through time and explore these further!

Grandfather Paradox

This thought experiment posits the idea of somebody traveling back in time and killing their grandfather before their parents were born. Because the grandfather never has children, the time traveler—his grandchild—cannot exist.

However, if the time traveler never existed, they couldn’t kill their grandfather, so he would go on to have children and grandchildren. One of those grandchildren is the time traveler, though, who might go back in time and kill their grandfather. If that seems confusing, it’s okay—it’s supposed to be.

The bottom line is that if somebody travels to the past and changes something that prevents them from ever traveling to the past, they have broken the timeline's continuity.

Polchinski’s Paradox

American theoretical physicist Joseph Polchinski removed human intervention from the time travel equation.

Imagine a billiard ball travels into a wormhole, tunnels through time in a closed loop, and emerges from the same wormhole just in time to knock its past self away.

Doing so prevents it from ever entering the wormhole and traveling through time, to begin with. However, if it does not travel back in time, it cannot emerge to knock itself out of the way, giving it a clear path to travel back in time.

Bootstrap Paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is the first closed causal loop paradox we will explore. This presents a situation where an object, idea, or person traveling to the past creates the conditions for their existence, leading to it having no identifiable origin in the timeline.

Imagine sending the schematics for your time machine to your past self, from which you create a time machine. Where did the knowledge of how to create the time machine begin?

Predestination Paradox

The most nihilistic of paradoxes explores the idea that nothing we do matters, no matter what. Events are predetermined to still occur regardless of when and where you travel in time.

Suppose you time travel to the past to talk Alexander the Great out of invading Persia, but he hadn’t even considered this until you mentioned it. By traveling to the past to prevent Alexander’s conquest, you caused it.

Butterfly Effec t

Less of a paradox and more an exploration of unintended consequences, the butterfly effect explores the idea that any action can have sweeping repercussions, no matter how small.

In the 1960s, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered that adding tiny changes to computer-based meteorological models resulted in unpredictable changes far from the origin point. In traveling back in time, we don’t know what effect even minor changes might have on the timeline.

How to Write Convincing Time Travel Stories

Time travel can be pretty complex at the best of times, but that doesn't mean writing about it has to be a challenge. Here are a few practical tips to craft narratives that crack the temporal code.

Ask Yourself, "Why Time Travel?"

If your story has time travel, to begin with, it likely plays a pretty significant role in the narrative. Define the purpose that time travel has in your story by asking yourself questions like:

• How and why is time travel possible in your setting?
• What does it mean for your story and your characters?
• What are your characters meant to use time travel for?
• Is the actual practice of time travel different from its intent?

If you can't be clear about time travel's purpose in your story, how can you convincingly write about it? To get crafty with time, you first need to master its relevant mechanics.

Keep a Record of Everything

You're asking your reader to potentially make several mental leaps when time travel is involved in a story, so it's imperative to have all of your details sorted. Do the work of planning out dates and events ahead of time by creating a time map for yourself—like a mindmap, but for a timeline.

You'll be able to keep a birds-eye view of the narrative at all times, be more strategic about moving the order of events around, and ensure that you never miss a detail. You may even want to have multiple versions—a strictly linear timeline and a more loosely structured time map where you draw connections between events and in the order they appear in the narrative.

In Campfire, you can do both with the Timeline Module —create as many Timelines as you want by using the Page feature in the element. You can also connect your Timeline(s) to a custom calendar from the Calendar Module for extra fun with time wonkiness in your world.

If a new idea pops up while writing, don't stress! You'll have your handy time map already laid out so you can easily see if a new scene or chapter makes sense, as well as where it will best fit into the narrative.

Never Forget Causality

I mentioned this concept earlier in the article, but it should be reiterated: The most important rule of time travel is that every action results in a consequence. Remember cause and effect : an action is taken (your character time travels to the past), and causes an effect, the consequence (the timeline is forever changed).

"Consequence" doesn't have to be a negative thing, either, even though the word has that connotation. The resulting consequence of a given action could be a positive effect, too.

Regardless, seek to maintain causality so you don't confuse your readers (or yourself, for that matter). Establishing clear rules for how time travel works in your setting and sticking to them will help you keep your time logic consistent and avoid running into narrative dead ends or plot holes.

Tips & Tricks For the Time-Traveling Author

Now that we’ve examined several obstacles you can encounter when writing about time travel, let’s see how you can either avoid them or exploit them. That’s right! Even time travel paradoxes present opportunities for superb storytelling.

Focus on the Future

Fortunately, all the named paradoxes here involve the past, so the easy way to avoid them is to not go there! Thanks to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, you don’t even have to invent a clever way to travel instead to the future.

An aspect of Einstein's theory is time dilation , in which the faster an object moves through space, the slower it moves through time. With this, you need only zip around at near the speed of light for a few weeks or months, and when you come back to Earth, years or centuries will have gone by.

Create a Multiverse

A popular trope in science fiction today, and a theory gaining popularity among theoretical quantum physicists, is the multiverse concept. According to multiverse theory, whenever an event occurs, every possible outcome of the event happens simultaneously, splitting the universe into parallels that each contain differing outcomes.

Since all these realities exist, perhaps changing the past is simply a way for time travelers to travel between realities, shifting their perspective to a timeline where things occurred differently than in their original reality.

Get Creative With Consequences

Instead of avoiding paradoxes, maybe you want them to occur. Leading to some fascinating stories, this can be approached in a variety of ways. Perhaps you want to examine the unintended consequences of the butterfly effect, create a time-traveling police force that enforces the laws of time travel, or simply break time itself and revel in the chaos that ensues.

Just be sure to remember the action-consequence rule and keep your timeline handy for easy reference—especially if you're toying around with multiple timelines!

Best Time Travel Stories

What follows are what I think are some of the best time travel stories. As you will see, the first two fall victim to time travel paradoxes, while the other two do a great job of exploring various elements we’ve discussed.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

The corporation Cyberdyne Systems has remnants of the Terminator from the first movie, which they use to create an artificial intelligence system called Skynet. Skynet then actually creates the terminators and sends one back in time. Thus, it gives humanity the technology to create itself in a classic example of a bootstrap paradox.

Back to the Future

In this film, Marty McFly travels to the past and inadvertently interrupts the event where his parents first meet. This causes a chain of events where Marty’s parents never get married and have children, threatening to erase Marty and his siblings from the timeline.

Some argue that the McFly offspring ceasing to exist is a great exploration of the consequences of time travel. However, they would never have been at risk had Marty not been in the past to impede their parents’ romance. And if he ceases to exist, he’ll never go back and get in the way, thus creating a grandfather paradox.

War of the Twins

In this second volume of the Dragonlance Legends trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, the mage Raistlin Majere travels into the past, kills a wizard named Fistandantilus in a battle for power, and assumes his identity. Throughout the book, Raistlin unwittingly follows the historical fate of Fistandantilus, in a wonderful exploration of the predestination paradox.

It’s hard to talk about time travel in fiction these days without mentioning Loki. The show explores two suggestions from my list above: the multiverse and policing the timeline. In this series, varying outcomes of events lead to branching timelines, creating a multiverse of possibilities. However, an agency called the Time Variance Authority exists to prevent this from happening, and they set out to eliminate any branches separate from what they consider the Sacred Timeline.

Bon Voyage!

I hope this exploration of time travel leaves you prepared to tackle these obstacles and opportunities that naturally present themselves when playing around with time.

Just knowing about the complexities of time travel and the paradoxes it can bring about is the best way to avoid trouble and create innovative storytelling moments. So, dust off your DeLorean, polish your paradox-proof plot, and get ready to write your adventure through the ages!

Learn more about making a timeline with Campfire in the dedicated Timeline Module tutorial . And be sure to check out the other plotting and planning articles and videos here on Learn, for advice on how to plan your very own time travel adventures!

Fiction Writing , Writing Prompts and Exercises

Time travel writing prompts, by lisa  •  may 3, 2019  •  0 comments.

What if you could travel back in time and live your life over again starting from the point you went back to? Would you do it?

To sweeten the deal, what if you retained the memories of everything that you had lived through and experienced in the future? Now you could avoid all the stupid mistakes you had made. Everything would turn out better, right? But would it?

Every decision we make, whether good or bad, sets into motion things that will happen. Each decision we make, the bad ones as well as the good ones, helps to form us into who we are.

The following quote is from Towards Zero , one of my favorite books by Agatha Christie: When you read the account of a murder – or, say, a fiction story based on murder – you usually begin with the murder itself. That’s all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. […] The murder itself is the end of the story. It’s Zero Hour.

That quote pertains to murder, but the same can be said for just about any other circumstance in our life. If we had the ability to go back in time to relive parts of our life over, it would change the future and maybe not for the better.

Writing Prompts:

Look at your own life and choose a decision you made in the past that you would like to change. Now pretend that you’re able to go back in time while retaining all of your present memories and change that decision.

How is your future affected? Since you remember what your life was like before you changed a decision you made in the past, you can see how different it is now. You can see the ripples that were put into motion by that one changed decision.

What is different?

Is your family life the same? Is it worse? Or is it better?

Do you have the same parents? How has you changing the one decision affected them? Do any of the family members you once had no longer exist? Are there new ones?

If you were married, are you still married to the same individual? Do you have the same children?

What about your job? Do you have the same job or do you have a better job?

Do you have the same circle of friends? Do any of the friends you had no longer exist?

Has your financial situation changed?

I’m sure there are many more ways you can think of that your life would have been changed by that one changed decision. Make notes on all of these things and write a story.

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Book Reviews

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The Writer's Workout

Be a better writer..

• Susan Matteucci
• Dec 22, 2022

Tips and Tricks to Writing Time Travel Into Your Story

Time travel and time manipulation is a very common conflict in science fiction, fantasy, and even more action-based genres of fiction. However, despite it being so common, it is possibly one of the hardest supernatural qualities to write effectively into a story.

Time travel can be very confusing, and you can lose your readers if you are not careful about how you approach it. Not only that, but since time travel has been done so many times, authors may feel the need to be original in their works which can cause even more confusion.

However, writing time travel can be fun and easy if you know what you’re dealing with! When writing a story with any sort of time manipulation, make sure you first answer the question: what are the rules of time travel in my story? Once you’ve asked this, there are common writing tips that can help you write these rules effectively into your story.

Rules of Time Travel

Before we worry about what your characters understand, let’s focus on you, the writer. Before writing a story with time travel, we want to make sure that you understand exactly the type of time travel you are writing (there are many different kinds!).

But what exactly is a rule of time travel? Well, since you’re the one writing the story, the rules are what you make them. However, there are common types of time travel that writers tend to fall into, whether they are trying or not.

The Different Types of Time Travel:

When discussing time travel, there are four categories to choose from:

Traveling back in time

Traveling forward in time

The gift of foresight

Of course, within each of these categories, there are many subcategories and creative possibilities. But looking only at the broad strokes, every time travel story has one of these.

In choosing which type of time travel to include, it’s important to consider what you want from your story. A story of time loops, like Groundhog Day , usually focuses on the character development of the person in the loop. Meanwhile foresight and traveling forward usually deal with morality. And traveling to the past is a great way to discuss free will. It’s all about what you want.

There are so many options with time travel. The important thing is to find the type of time travel that fits your story best, create rules for it, and stick to those rules . This leads us to the first tip in writing time travel:

Consistency

These rules are just for you. You don’t necessarily need to tell your readers about them. There’s no need for some sort of exposition explanation (although if you want to, feel free). But deciding what time travel can and can’t do in your story will stop plot holes from forming. Keeping your time travel consistent is important.

For example, let’s look at Supernatural . Supernatural is great at giving us examples of what not to do.

In season 4 of Supernatural , Dean Winchester is sent back in time to when his parents were his age. Dean attempts to kill a demon that will kill his mother in the future. At the end, he fails and ultimately causes the events that will happen (classic unchangeable past time travel rules). Castiel tells him that it is impossible to change the present by traveling to the past.

We then jump to season five. Anna, a runaway angel, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before they can have Sam. Castiel and the brothers become worried about this. But why? If we can’t alter the past, then what’s the problem? Even if Anna doesn’t realize her goals are futile, why would Castiel be concerned?

Backstory :

This leads us to our next point. After you decide your own time travel rules, you have to consider how much each character knows about these rules . If you have decided that a seer has unchangeable visions, and they know this, then that character should never try to change their fate.

The time travel rule of Twelve Monkeys is that you cannot change the past. However, the movie only has a plot because the main character doesn’t know this. He believes he can change the past until the very end when he realizes his goal is fruitless.

However, the Prisoner of Azkaban has the same rules of time travel and Dumbledore and Hermione both know they can’t change the past. There is still conflict in the book because that is not their goal.

If a character has a backstory where they studied time travel for years, and has traveled hundreds of times before, they shouldn’t be shocked by the rules of time travel. Withholding the information from your characters can create interesting conflict, but make sure each character understands a plausible amount.

Show, Don’t Tell:

Having your characters have a long conversation about time travel can be fun to write, but it’s important to remember that the best way to ensure your audience understands time travel is to show characters traveling through time .

As long as you stick to your rules, your time travel will eventually make sense to your audience. And, when it comes to time travel, you’d be surprised just how long your readers will be okay with being in the dark.

In Avengers: Endgame , Hulk/Bruce Banner goes on a long explanation about how time travel works in this universe. They bring up Hot Tub Time Machine and Back to the Future . But in the end, did anyone in the audience completely understand what that time travel was about from the Hulk’s rant? From what I can gather, no.

About the Author: Susan Matteucci is an author, editor, and reader currently finishing up her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. She has two publish short stories and hopefully has many more on the way. She has a passion for Sci-Fi, particularly time travel, and fantasy. It is her belief that straying from the realistic is the best way to comment on society.

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10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story

Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands.

If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we’ll share it with out community!

1. Future War

A future dictator invades the past. He sends giant war machines into 19th Century London, Paris and Washington, and he demands that all world leaders surrender to him. It’s up to a team of time traveling heroes to stop him.

2. As Time Goes By

A scientist discovers that he can slow down time in a localized area. He can use this to visit the future (and stop off anywhere along the way), but he can never go back. At first, he uses the device to prolong his own life, spending a day inside the time-bubble as a month passes outside. Later, curiosity compels him to travel into the distant future in search of new wonders and a fresh start.

Our protagonist finds a future world full of wonders, and he begins to build a new life for himself. But when things start to go wrong, he finds himself traveling forward yet again. Eventually, the urge to travel forward becomes irresistible as he searches for perfection. Is he really searching for something, or just running from his own past?

As our traveler comes to the end of his life he realizes that, while he has seen more than most people, he hasn’t really lived at all. He’s spent his whole life running.

3. Doing Time

Using a time machine, a penal colony is established in Earths distant future – a future in which humanity is extinct and the sun is approaching the end of its natural life-cycle. When the end finally comes, do the guards evacuate the prisoners or leave them to their fate?

4. The Man You Used To Be

After his wife leaves him, a scientist travels back in time to be with her again. He’s determined to get it right the second time around, and thinks he knows what to do to keep her happy. But when he travels into the past he comes across an obstacle he hadn’t counted on – the past version of himself.

SEE ALSO: Travelling in time but NOT space

Desperate to be with his wife again, he plots to do the unthinkable – he plans to murder his past self and take his place.

There are two obvious ways in which this story could end, each equally as ironic. 1) He kills his former self and is happily reunited with his wife, but after spending one perfect day together the time paradox begins to kick in and he vanishes into oblivion. 2) He kills his former self, but his wife recognizes that he is not the man he used to be. Because of what he’s been through and what he’s done, he’s changed, and his wife can see it in his eyes. She leaves him again.

5. Future Tense

Fearing the extinction of humanity is on the horizon, a large group of humans travel into Earths distant future to avoid the catastrophe. They arrive in a time in which the Earth has recovered from the disaster, and in which all traces of human civilization have disappeared. Many animal species have evolved beyond recognition. In this new wilderness, they attempt to build a home.

Knowing that the end of human civilization is near, people are desperate to travel to the future colony. With a limited number of places available, people fight for the last remaining passes. Eventually, the future colony finds itself with too many mouths to feed.

6. Past Participants

With the destruction of Earth imminent, humanity begins colonizing the distant past. The colonization effort slowly begins to interfere with the timeline. Each group of colonists that arrives from the future has experienced a different version of history, with increasingly interesting results.

One group of time travel colonists is from a fascist timeline in which the Nazis won the Second World War, and they try to take over the colony. Another group reports having found the remains of the colony during a future archaeological dig, indicating that the colonization effort will eventually fail.

7. Populating Zion

A team of scientists rescue Jews from Nazi extermination camps by transporting them forward in time just before the moment of their deaths. Nazis are confounded when they open the doors to gas chambers and find that their victims have mysteriously vanished. In the future, thousands of rescued Jews struggle to understand what has happened to them, and they begin to hail the lead scientist as their Messiah.

8. Time Me Up, Time Me Down

After inventing a time machine, a scientist travels into his own future where he meets his beautiful future wife. Back in his own time, he meets his future wife for the first time (for her at least), but she isn’t interested in him. He tries his hardest to impress her but fails. How can this be when they are meant to be together?

Determined to win her heart, he travels back to their first meeting over and over again, trying something different each time. He even visits her past in an attempt to learn more about her, but nothing works. Becoming increasingly obsessed, he eventually resorts to kidnapping her. He takes her forward in time to show her their future life, but his actions have drastically changed the timeline.

9. Final Interview

A time travel agency sends a man to interview famous historic figures just hours before they die. The interviews are not only important to historians, they have also become a form of popular entertainment. After interviewing countless historic figures over a long and distinguished career, our protagonist has become something of a celebrity himself. One day, a younger man arrives at his home insisting that he be allowed to interview the protagonist. The protagonist realizes that the younger man is his future replacement, and that he himself is soon to die.

(Thanks to  Jorgen Lundman for this idea, the full version of which can be read here )

10. Jesus vs The Time Police

The technology needed for time travel exists, but it has been outlawed by most of the world’s governments. A special police unit or federal agency uses specialist equipment to track down illegal time travelers and prevent them from damaging the timeline.

Some of the time travelers are attempting to alter their own past for personal gain, others are rich tourists seeking a thrilling but illegal encounter with the past. One day, however, they track down a time traveler who has managed to evade them for several years. He has been living in the past for all this time, and he claims to have become an important historical figure. Doing a little research, they determine his claims to be true. The time traveler has had a profound effect on the timeline, and undoing his actions might have profoundly negative consequences. He has written himself into history – a history that the time-police have always accepted to be true.

The illegal time traveler might be a famous general, monarch, or president. He might even be a religious figure, such as Jesus (as such, he may not have had an entirely positive effect on history, but a profound one nonetheless). If the illegal time-traveler is Jesus, might his ascension to heaven actually be his forced return to his own time, staged by the time-police?The time-police are faced with a dilemma – set the timeline straight and undo his actions without knowing what the result might be, or allow him to continue living in the past.

This article was written by Mark Ball . With thanks to Jorgen Lundman.

Use our Random Story Idea Generator for inspiration for more stories.

1158 Writing Prompts About Time Machines

March 24, 2021

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Have you ever wondered at least once in your life how it would feel like to have a time machine that would allow you to travel back in time to correct past mistakes or go to the future to see how your present decisions would affect the future? If your answer is ‘yes,’ maybe you should consider writing a story about it to satisfy your curiosity.

Enter writing prompts about time machines.

Below are some storyline suggestions and plot ideas that would allow you to write stories about time machines and time travel that would work for any genre, including sci-fi, adventure, historical fiction, and fantasy. May they inspire you to create short stories and novels.

• You use your time machine to go back in time and kill Hitler.
• You accidentally open a wormhole and find yourself back in the Middle Ages.
• You travel along a relative’s family tree to discover something unpleasant about your past.
• A sudden power surge transports you 400 thousand years in the future.
• A time traveler with the same machine as you asks to see the future, but in order to do that you must both target the exact same place at the exact same time.
• You develop a time machine but can’t find the main power button.
• When your time machine arrives, the city is enveloped in a black mist.
• You use a malfunctioning time machine to try to save someone you don’t like, only to find yourself doomed.
• You’re the first human to govern outer space.
• You discover a small vial of glowing fluid and a note stating that it can deliver anyone from a fixed point in time to another point in time relative to their own current position.
• By the power of God, your time machine crashes in prehistoric times and you are stranded there. After months, you encounter one of the creatures…
• You send your time machine to the future, and it explodes when it reaches its destination.
• You parallel park your time machine in a space that is much too small.
• An astronaut arrives from the future with a time machine. He shows you some things that may or may not happen.
• The past shows you a previously unknown superhero from the future who’ll be the next savior of mankind.
• You can’t stop yourself from using the time machine.
• While seated at breakfast, a time traveler sits down, telling you stories about the future.
• You strangle a loved one to death in the past to prevent a terrible future.
• A woman from the past shows up asking if you know the date and you do. Then she explains that people from the future made her travel back in time to ask you this question.
• Your grandchild hears you have a time machine and asks if you can travel to the moon to see if there is life there back in the ’70s before NASA sent a probe.
• A time traveler appears in front of you, takes you for a ride in his time machine and asks you to go to eight years in the past.
• You enter an uninhabited city with dozens of buildings in ruins. You wonder when it happened and what caused it.
• You travel back in time to meet an ancestor you previously only knew by name or reputation.
• You discover that changing something in the past makes your present and future different.
• In the future, fresh water can be purchased, but it is illegal to drink water from the tap.
• You want to travel in time to visit a specific person or event.
• Your future self tries talking you out of doing something, but you ignore your future self.
• Someone claims they visited you in the future with a time machine and that the events they described are taking place in your present.
• You travel off the end of the world and back again transforming your planet in multiple ways.
• You meet yourself in the past and stop yourself from doing something crazy.
• You accidentally travel back in time and ruin your own birth or your own death.
• You witness your favorite crime take place. You send yourself back in time to stop it.
• A person from the future appears before you in a time travel suit.
• But what writing prompt would be complete without an interactive presentation?
• You travel a million years in the future and return to find the whole planet has been ripped apart by the sun.
• You journey back in time and witness the death of your own mother.
• The time machine gets broken beyond repair. What did you do?
• You see into the past and find out your life is about to take a turn for the worst.
• Your final time travel expedition before retirement.
• It is 2064 and you have invented a time machine capable of going back fifty years in time. What have you been doing for the last fifty years that allowed you to build the time machine?
• You meet yourself in the past using your time machine.
• A small boy from the future steps into a time machine asking for his past life.
• Your time machine erupts in flames.
• A scientist steals your time machine and hides on top of Mount Everest.
• Someone steals your time machine. Possibly to go back in time and give you a nicer model.
• A dying homeless person asks you to take him 50 years in the future with your time machine. The drug addict is so charming you contemplate sparing his life, just to see what will happen. Or maybe you could help him recover. Or would it be better to help him now? If you bring him forward in time would he become cured automatically?
• You build a time machine to learn how grandma will react when you tell her your relationship.
• You are playing cards with Adolf Hitler and accuse him of cheating.
• What is your favorite thing about time travel? Remember that there are no bad answers to this– you just want to write right now!
• You visit yourself growing up through time with your time machine.
• You take your date to the future, but somehow end up back in prehistoric times.
• You accidentally visit and alter the past. A different version of you comes along with you and gives you sound advice that – with your original time machine – prevents the history disaster from happening.
• You’re on an island where everyone has a time machine, and yet refuses to use it on moral grounds.
• Someone you love time travels.
• Your time machine closes and then opens again a minute later, erasing a decade of your life. How do you survive?
• You plant your time machine into the back garden so your distant relative could use it to go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby.
• You find the vision you have just experienced a year ago to be true.
• You decide to fix the future by backtracking to the beginning of time and making sure the Big Bang never happened.
• You’re able to correct a fatal mistake before it happened. But when you return, what is the correction you don’t do that makes the fatal mistake be there anyway?
• You find yourself in the Stone Age and you use your time machine to make yourself his great leader.
• You travel back to a time where you have already been and see yourself doing something you’ve never done before.
• A person is inspecting your time machine and is just about to touch it when you beckon them not to.
• What good is traveling through time to visit prehistoric dinosaurs.
• Your biggest competitor is working on a time machine very similar to yours.
• Your last chance to see your dying grandfather in the hospital is in the past, when he was alive and well.
• You accidentally kill yourself with your own time machine and there’s no way to prevent it.
• All attempts at designing a time machine have failed, until your invention worked. What are your feelings on accomplishing a goal no one else could? A) Excited B) Angry C) Scared D) All of the above So, we designed the time machine correctly and built it. Now we’re going to send a person into the past… Who should be the first? How does he react to seeing yourself without knowing who it is? In the middle of a heist, you realize your temporally-oriented watch is working again. What would you do with your chance to do it over? Another inventor and you begin to have a rivalry. What steps can you take against her/him? Your logical time machine reveals that paradoxes are a basis for your universe. Will you continue to use your time machine or try another one? You travel to the future and see that from 2150 to 21505, humanity began to haven the universe until we encountered a powerful adversary. We lost
• You get the idea to use a time machine to overthrow your boss.
• A time traveller arrives in your time and claims he owns every book in a library you spent your life years building.
• You travel back in time to do something evil to yourself in the past and it all backfires.
• What historical event occurs three hundred years into the future?
• An inventor is working on their latest invention. It looks like a normal box but is much too small to fit any living thing inside. What does the inventor claim will happen when they turn it on?
• You’re been critically injured by a time traveler.
• You’re the only survivor after an atomic holocaust.
• Your time machine’s history shows you an identical machine knocking over the water cooler and spilling it all over your briefcase. What did you do differently?
• You’re being pursued by a killer, and take refuge in the time machine.
• A thick fog descends as you approach the spot where you left your time machine.
• You find a way to travel back into the past.
• You find a new use for your time machine.
• A dwarf appears in your time machine saying he is from a parallel universe. He says that his universe runs on a day length that’s half of your days. You adjust your machine so that you can time travel to his universe. What happens?
• The professor you write reports for is working on time machine technology. If you can’t tell him who you are, what do you do about it?
• Describe a weird thing that happened when you were traveling through time.
• You receive a message from the year 5023. What is it?
• What did you do with your time machine at first?
• You find out time travel is real and set off on an adventure to visit historic events.
• You travel to the beginning of time and observe the Big Bang with your time machine.
• You create a time machine so powerful that you create two of yourself. Two inventors. Where do you meet? What do you do?
• You encounter yourself out of the blue. You remember he’s trying to kill you, so you fight him. Who won your first fist fight with yourself and why?
• The movie Time Cop showed what a bad idea it is to mess with the timeline. Now, what would happen if you REALLY messed with the timeline?
• You are kidnapped by your doubles from the future.
• Earth is populated by colonies of time travellers constantly travelling back in time to change the course of history.
• A scientist tells you that you will never invent the time machine and he will never live to invent the time machine.
• While traveling back in time, you encounter yourself.
• You use your time machine to fix a mistake you made in the past.
• An unmanned time machine crashes into your home.
• You discover chimpanzees are the true but hidden masters of humanity.
• You discover you’re a character in a futuristic video game.
• You don’t know how you managed to survive for this long in the year…
• A time traveler approaches you on how to make time machines.
• You find a time machine but you can’t use it – you have to convince someone to use it for you.
• After you’ve traveled into the future a year, the world you observe seems to be stable. But in future year two, nuclear armageddon occurs. You go to your past year one self and tell them to warn their future selves to evacuate the world. But it wouldn’t work because now you yourself are the problem with the time travel.
• You design the perfect murder using your time machine to dispose of the evidence.
• A man who claims to be your father from the future warns you that you must prevent your family from getting in trouble with the mob.
• Someone tries to mess with the time-space continuum and sends you on a wild ride through time.
• You time travel to ancient Egypt where you help Joseph make the pyramids. You’ve studied Egyptian history all your life – how could you help Joseph?
• You travel back in time and accidentally kill your father when he was a little boy.
• You watch Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg address. How do you convince him that it is important?
• A magical genie appears and gifts you with a time machine. Upon activation the genie promises to appear each year on your birthday and grant you a single wish. The wish cannot involve the time machine.
• Write a story about yourself being given the power of time travel.
• When the time is right, you decide to go back and kill your own grandfather before he can conceive your mother.
• At the end of mankind, robots from the future come and transport humans to the far future.
• If your Kickstarter project is successfully funded, you have indicated you will send a personal time machine to backers who give a certain amount. Will the time machine be designed like a box? Why or why not? If so, can you share your design with us?
• The inventor of the time machine dies before he can reveal the secret of how to actually make it function. It’s in his head. The thought of a paradox makes your head hurt! Never mind.
• A time traveller from the future tells you how to become filthy rich.
• An alternative time line splits off when you decide whether to make cookies or brownies.
• You are arrested for sabotaging your own time machine, providing a one-way ticket to the past.
• You have the chance to go back in time and make either of your parents famous jazz musicians. Which one do you make famous? Who do you marry? What do you do?
• Your time machine requires one more fix before it’s finished. While days turn into weeks, months and even years, you’re still tinkering with it. What keeps you motivated to build it?
• A time traveller comes to you and predicts the past saying that everything is going to be alright.
• You see an advanced race who have developed a pocket sized time machine!
• Your path to the future is blocked by an increasingly steep hill. You climb it, unaware that it is no hill – it is a descending path and you will meet yourself at the bottom.
• A person arrives from the future and warns you not to return to 2003.
• A group of historians want to take a tour of the ancient savage world with your time machine.
• You invite a friend along on your time machine. Both of you pick dates in the future to return to.
• Try writing one or two paragraphs using the prompts.
• A perfect crime has occurred in another country. Using your time machine, you go back in time and stop the crime before it happens.
• You’re reading a book about time travel and turn to a page randomly and read the last few words.
• Corporal Matthews is driving around in his tank when it suddenly materialises in the middle of a World War One battlefield. How does he react?
• You use your time machine to give King Philip IV of France an unshaven face.
• You spend more time in the past than the present.
• You arrive in the future and find a society clone-based around a genocide you  perpetrated against a minority.
• You travel back in time and prevent yourself.
• You’ve secretly decided to manipulate things that happened in the past.
• The time machine repairs itself and launches you into The International Space Station.
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• You find a way to return to the past and tell yourself to avoid being arrested.
• You have the chance to travel to any point in your past.
• Imagine that you’ve built the first time machine. What mischief do you get up to after that? Write a story inspired by it.
• You find out you were actually allied with an evil dictator, whom you topple.
• You’re a dailiness reporter in Buenos Aires and you witness Hitler taking the bunker. He asks for your name and tells you to go back to tomorrow, when you’ll find a letter to you.
• Go on the moon with Neil Armstrong using your time machine.
• You claim to be an alien from the future.
• You’ve built a time machine but realize that someone has stolen the instruction manual.
• You’re late for work, and nothing can get you there in time.
• You’ve managed to travel back in time. In your quest to change history, you find a family photo of Adolf Hitler.
• A wormhole splits a town in half.
• You’ve only been married for three years but have been separated for another thirty. What was life like?
• The world is ending in a week and you’re kidnapped and told to stop a time traveller.
• You find yourself in the last time a specific event occurred, such as an apocalypse.
• You are tasked by the President of the United States to build the first ever time machine.
• You’ve never heard of “groundhog day” until you meet yourself in the future and learn about it.
• You accidentally step on a butterfly, and sends the earth off course, ultimately creating the apocalypse.
• You visit the time of Jesus, but have a hard time because He sees you as an angel.
• You are taken into the time machine. What would you say to the designer to improve it?
• Somewhere in the pit of your stomach, you feel something stir at the sight of your time machine rusting in the corner, ready to be used again.
• You meet a time traveler from a planet identical to Earth.
• You wake up from a magical coma centuries in the future.
• It’s Star Wars, but instead of the Force you–
• You use your time machine to make tons of money before returning to the present.
• Your time machine has malfunctioned and now your world is stuck in a new permanent dark age. What do you do?
• Using your time machine, you race ahead of important events or people and write eyewitness accounts of very important events.
• You arrive at a crossroads in time, where versions of yourself seem to be playing out opposite versions of your life.
• You travel to the future and discover that the human race has been wiped out.
• Everything is bleak and dark in the future world.
• A girl comes up to you and tells you she’s actually just travelled from the past to talk with you, then adds…
• You use your time machine to set up a sports betting operation in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon.
• You attempt to shove your annoying friend into the past, but accidentally send him to the future.
• How far into the future will you visit yourself? How will you react when you see yourself?
• A stranger drops by with a time machine similar to yours and says they are you from the future.
• You are abducted by aliens. They leave you on present Earth and let you keep your time machine.
• You’ve always dreamed of entering a time machine, and finally you win the lottery and you can buy one.
• A brilliant scientist says he can prove parallel universes exist.
• As you move through time, you notice you look different each day. Yesterday you were blond, today you’re Asian.
• You’re visited by your future self as a child.
• You discover that time travel is not a fluke of your invention but has been around for a while. Your inventor friends bet you a million dollars you don’t go back and kill their baby selves.
• Your future self reveals that time travel is actually removing your soul and popping it into your destination. Your future self also reveals that the only way to use this process is to kill yourself, which right now he is in the process of doing…
• A spooky person in a costume approaches you saying he knows that you created being the first time machine and goes on to make an Oprah-like self-help statement.
• You come back from your time machine to find your sister has become President of the United States. The weather and the rest of the world remains the same.
• You go back in time to take Napoleon’s place and save France.
• A professor wants you to invent a time machine so that she can see her son again.
• On your way to the bank, your time machine is broken by a monkey.
• You blackmail a time traveler that you are planning to publish his past in your blog.
• You create a device to travel forward through time just an hour. When you return, everything is different.
• The time machine you invented leaps into the past. But it’s been stolen by another inventor.
• While being chased by time police, you accidentally run through a time chrono-inversion.
• A baby is born and an old man dies simultaneously. Decide who is lucky and who is cursed.
• You meet your older self. He tells you a secret about the family that you didn’t realize until decades later.
• Wherever you go in time, the most influential person is always Henry Ford.
• Your time machine malfunctions and throws you back in time into an unknown world.
• While traveling through time, you lose all your stuff and have a chance encounter with the only alien ever to live on earth.
• A child who seems familiar to you follows you to your time machine.
• You hear a knock on the door one night and open it to find yourself there.
• Someone steals your time machine and takes it back a decade but doesn’t return.
• There exist time machines in the future but you suspect the alien invasion and so you go to the future and kill Hitler.
• Time travelling is not as easy as you once thought when you found yourself in ancient London where the Great Fire is occuring.
• Someone betrays you and erases your memories and your time machine.
• Using the time machine, you travel to the nearest possible future or the nearest possible past.
• You think your daughter might grow up to be a murderer. You’re going to make sure of it.
• You are monitoring a black hole to prevent its collapse. As you observe, it consumes your time machine. You must now decide what you want to do next.
• You’ve cracked the designs for the first time machine when you meet a stranger who wants to buy it.
• You attempt to travel back in time to kill God but you travel back to the beginning of time instead.
• Your time machine breaks down in the primeval forest of the Middle Ages.
• An agent from the future approaches you. Says the world will never be the same again.
• You help the time machine inventor you are working for with the first time machine. But she might not have your best interests in mind.
• You travel back to Armageddon and stop the apocalypse. You realize however that the universe is borderline rational and the apocalypse is actually a bingo tournament.
• Your time machine starts working and you get messages telling you to change your past.
• You use your time machine to travel back to the Stone Age.
• You travel back in time to your tenth birthday only to find out that you are yet to be born.
• You get trapped in a time loop again and again.
• Your brother invents a time machine. You steal it and ditch him in the past.
• You accidentally kill the wife of your past self while using the time machine.
• Your life is unfulfilled. In your time machine, you visit yourself in the past
• An alien with superior technology offers to send you back in time.
• You visit an alternate universe where everything is upside down and you need to escape.
• You somehow enter the time stream and return back to the moment when you were born.
• While time traveling you pursue a Neanderthal man going the opposite direction, and are mortally wounded.
• Find a frying pan, a banana, a sledge hammer and a spider.
• The person you defeat in a battle travels back in time to kill your ancestors.
• In the unimaginably distant future, humans create a time machine and through it discover that alien life has been visiting Earth for centuries.
• You find a time machine in Ancient Egypt and are the first ever time traveller.
• Clanking into the stables, you see a very old machine. Realising it is your original invention, you start to hear voices from inside the room …
• You visit future America using your time machine.
• You discover a remote cabin that is a tunnel to the stars.
• When you travel back in time you watch yourself living the week you just left
• You travel into the future to confront the villain who wronged you in the present.
• You use your time machine to force your very worst enemy to undergo a horrible transformation.
• You’re allowed to bring a single item of tech from the future or past.
• In ancient New York you meet a time traveler who has come back to warn you of a disaster that not even he can escape.
• You travel to the future and find that humanity has finally died off from a nuclear holocaust. The only being left is a clump of blue self-replicating goo in the middle of Australia.
• You design a time machine that only works in the day or the night and there is a switch over an hour during the transition. If you miss the switch you go to the wrong time period. What happens when you get a late start going home?
• Clinging to the side of a comet centuries away from Earth, you wonder if Earth as you knew it is still there.
• A man sat in the corner of a café is revealing to his friend that he has access to travel through time, but can only go to the future and is suggesting his friend make use of his services.
• The machine is designed with no safeguards. The last one you send away through it never returns.
• Suddenly, you get the opportunity to stop yourself from making the biggest mistake of your life.
• Newly-weds experience marital problems when the husband goes back in time and sleeps with the bride at her own wedding.
• You visit a time before humanity. All that you’ll ever do has already been done.
• A time-travel researcher tells you his project is being shut down by shadowy figures.
• You are arrested for stealing the Declaration of Independence, but you’re able to prove you did it with a time machine, and you’re set free.
• A man without a past murders you with a time machine and continues to murder you repeatedly in the past in random locations until he has a past.
• The Zombie Apocalypse is taking place in your time. You have a time machine and could spend the rest of your life hiding, however the government has control of your time machine and says you must help stop the zombie apocalypse. Do you do it?
• You build an army of time machines and conquer the earth.
• What is your time machine of choice?
• A deep regret starts troubling your mind to the extent where you want to erase it by traveling to the past. You know, however, that your very own self is responsible for the regret. How would you deal with it?
• The age of the dinosaur is peaceful. What does your newly discovered, peaceful existence make you think about.
• Writing prompt for time travel
• You go back to the future and miss your appointment with your own past self.
• You use your time machine to travel back in time and kill Hitler.
• You get a glimpse of how life a thousand years into the future looks.
• By using the time machine you realize that you have won the lottery by traveling back in time and buying your winning ticket.
• You find a time machine in a workshop.  After trying it out for yourself, you decide to tell your ancestors about it.
• A group of time travellers accost you. They want to borrow your time machine.
• You meet someone in the past with a time machine.
• You’re given the option to fix any problem with time. What are you going to do?
• A mysterious time traveler comes to you saying he teases time.
• Your time travels were successful, and human civilization went on well despite all the negative prophecies.
• A Time Traveller walks into your bedroom and scares the living daylights out of you.
• You’re a decorated soldier who has been sent to stay in the future for your company.
• After a night of debauchery, you wake up in the future.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you into the Mesozoic era.
• You bump into yourself from the future with your time machine.
• You enter your time machine and emerge again at the same place but just a year ago.
• You find an abandoned time machine in your garage.
• You step into your time machine as it’s nearing a critical singularity.
• What would you like to see in the future?
• After borrowing a time machine, you drop in on yourself on the other side of the world after you’re famous. What do you say to yourself ?
• Your boss requires you to prove the time machine actually works.
• Each day, every hour, someone is killed by a time machine. The authorities catch the culprit and you are needed to testify in court. Who is guilty?
• You visit the time of Jesus Christ and meet a side of him no one’s ever heard about before.
• You accidentally hit the “return home” button in your time machine which leaves you stranded in the past.
• You meet a man from the future who steals your time machine to travel backwards in time to 2023. When he does this, he takes away your access to a cure for your favorite dog of cancer. Worse yet, you steal the time machine to go to 2023 and find he got there first and imprisoned you in a subway to get away with the time machine and his crimes.
• A time traveller from the future tells you that you are doomed and that he can only accelerate the time when you will meet your end.
• A newspaper article is printed declaring you, the inventor of the time machine, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• You’re the first person in the history of humanity to travel more than 10 years back in time. What do you do?
• You travel into the past to see the birth of your first pet.
• You are given a time machine by your future self. He tells you that you can raise a kid that will save the world. As a child, you make a terrible mistake, something that ruins your adult life. Using your time machine, you make the change so that the terrible thing never happens. But after making the change, you find that everything changed back.
• A criminal pursued by the police hides in your time machine.
• You get stuck in time with the ability to just pop back to the present when convenient. Time goes by really fast.
• During a time travel experiment you arrive in the middle of the road and accidentally force an oncoming vehicle swerve and rollover on top of a highway divider.
• While flying your time machine to see the dinosaurs, you fall back to the age of the dinosaurs’ reign.
• You find yourself in prehistoric times.
• You appear in a time where time machines are common and they already have mastered quantum physics.
• You take in a wrong turn in the time machine and wake up to realize the future is bleak.
• You see a flying car and kidnap the inventor.
• A woman appears in a flash of light, crying out that you are destined to save the future, and that time travel must never exist after you invent it.
• A love affair with a time traveler sends your life into a downward spiral from which you never recover.
• Butterfly effect. A butterfly causes you to step into the future with your time machine.
• A director is filming a time travel movie and wants you on set to give him some pointers about time travel.
• Travelling through time, you find yourself witnessing your own funeral.
• Your brother has met a good poker player ten years his senior, but then he breaks the heart of the girl living across the street. If he didn’t break her heart, she would have won the lottery.
• You’re stuck in the Dawn of Man era. A member of your tribe who just read “The Singularity is Near” and feels invincible due to the exponential increase in intelligence and strength of humankind comes and trashes your time machine.
• A time traveler visits you and warns you not to build a time machine.
• Your friend tells you that he has a time machine. You visit him from the past just to see for yourself, but there’s no mechanical impossibility that prevents him from referring to his time machine if he explains how it works. Your friend has no reason to lie. Still, you just can’t figure out time machines.
• You take your own tape recorder with you and ask famous people of the future to record their answers.
• You are approached by a man claiming to be a time-traveling Roman.
• You travel to the past and abduct your younger self.
• You add a “past” button to your time machine, but it overshoots and instead it takes you to the future.
• Your wife is dying of cancer in the present but you can save her with a time machine from the future. Meanwhile, you’re forty pounds too heavy, while your wife is a trim model.
• You build a time machine and travel forward a day in your calendar and the world has ended.
• Localized time paradoxes make time travel into specific time periods impossible.
• You go back in time and save yourself from an earlier accident.
• You’re thrown off your time machine by a no-good time bandit, causing you to land at random.
• You accidentally take 10 minutes instead of 7 minutes and find yourself another person.
• You pick up key structural elements from the Roman Empire and recreate them to design your time machine.
• Two versions of you use your time machine to meet each other, and you are in a position to gather some important information, but your younger version doesn’t know that you’re from the future. What do you do?
• Your time machine runs out of juice, forcing you to recharge it somehow.
• You are trapped in a time loop.
• You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you find yourself stuck in the Middle Ages. How do you manage to survive?
• Your best friend just graduated. You borrow their time machine to travel back in time to tell them to major in something else.
• Your time machine’s power runs out in the middle of a crucial football game.
• You are torn between going back in time to save a loved one from death and going forward to see how the rest of your life will progress.
• Your time machine wipes your memory and you have to find a “time traveller” savvy enough to help you get back.
• You travel a billion years into the future and meet a god.
• A scientist invents a time machine and appears to disappear. The police question you to see if you are responsible for messing with the time-space continuum.
• A letter falls out of your drawer. It’s addressed to you by yourself from the future and contains advice or information.
• You have to stop a killer who knows your secrets, and who also has a time machine.
• Your time machine lands on top of a very tall building.
• A time traveler from the future confronts you and gives you two tasks.
• You discover writing from a mysterious woman who claims to be from the future.
• Describe a time machine disguised as something not expected.
• Your friend wipes their memory using your time machine.
• The first time machine tour guide is eaten whole by a bookshark.
• You and your kids partake in a major altercation over your time machine usage.
• What is time would be like to a tortoise and infinitely long, containing everything possible.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the distant past. You have to fend for yourself.
• You meet yourself in the past with your time machine.
• It is your loved one’s birthday anniversary.
• After building a time machine, you visit yourself on Friday. Friday acts like everything is everyday, even something as drastic as the transportation of matter from the past into the present. Do you tell him?
• A malfunctioning time machine appears to have sent someone from the future into a prehistoric age.
• Two men show up in a time machine, both claiming to have invented it.
• All the components of the first time machine you were developing disappeared in the middle of the night. Only a letter left behind instructs you to give up inventing, and is signed by yourself.
• The writing prompts in this article are just enough to get your creative juices going. But don’t stop there. Take out your journal, grab your pen, and wait for inspiration to strike.
• You win the lottery using a foreseeing device.
• Your uncle, a wealthy businessman, steals the time machine.
• The world ceases to exist. You use your time machine to set into motion events that will alter the past, therefore creating a new future for yourself.
• You build an abusive time machine that traps and tortures anyone stupid enough to use it. Who do you suggest first?
• You discover a time machine on the other side of the universe.
• A scientist in ancient Egypt transfers the soul of the pharaoh into a wooden puppet to save his life.
• You leap through time accidentally and lose the ability to return home.
• Your time machine accidentally creates a time paradox and a second time machine falls out of the sky emitting a loud “BANG”.
• You go back in time and arrive immediately after the Big Bang, allowing you to alter the Universe.
• The government has invented time travel and appointed you commander of a time army.
• You meet your parents when they were in their mid-twenties, and they start asking you questions about who you’re dating in high school, and you accidentally tell them that you’re gay, and the universe changes.
• You are thrown back in time and climb into bed next to your young parents.
• You run into yourself with your time machine. Explain.
• The time machine is used for divorce proceedings.
• You work together with your future-self in a project. You encounter a time paradox, and together, you have to solve it.
• Another time traveler steals a major piece of information from the future and threatens to change the course of history. Now you have to chase him down and retrieve the missing data.
• You set the time machine to return to your Birth Time by mistake and end up there as a baby.
• A pigeon steals your time machine and takes a trip into the past.
• Along your travels you’re confronted by a time-traveler from your future.
• You discover a way to travel back in time to kill Hitler.
• You find yourself in the same place again and again in time.
• You’re trapped in a house where you can see yourself outside through a window.
• A kaiju appears and starts destroying cities in your time after slowing down time.
• When you flee into your time machine, it transports you a few seconds back in time.
• You have a time machine, but decide that going into the future would be no fun with only one head — you could only imagine what would happen if your nose grew — so you went back in time. When you arrive at your house, a young lady tells you that she will marry you in fifty years. Will she still be single?
• You discover your time machine is the last machine on Earth.
• A strange traveller invites you to a feast and entertainment in his time machine.
• You’re flying home over the Pacific, when all of a sudden your jet’s engines cease to function. Panic sets in until you spot a gigantic floor fan a few kilometers away. You float over to it and get blown safely to shore.
• You join a resistance with a time machine and go back in time to stop the powerful.
• A bearded figure approaches you saying he comes from the future and tells a story of a vampire with huge fangs haunting you in the future.
• You achieve enough power to build a time machine. The first thing you do is…
• Your girlfriend is using the time machine to neglect her responsibilities on Earth. You’re angry, confront her about it, and she says you were the same way when you were with her.
• You’re visited by yourself from the past using your own time machine.
• The Scientist can always do one nice thing for the Hero when she has exhausted her Loyalty/Heroism/Sanity tokens.
• Your time machine is stolen and used by a madman. You had your mission to fulfill.
• You send a book back in time for yourself to read when the events in it take place.
• The cargo the government wants you to bring back is the memories of a woman who has committed suicide.
• You just won the lottery but used the money to buy a time machine. How will you use it?
• You accidentally destroy your time machine, only to discover you’ve already built a new one.
• You are given the opportunity to speak to a famous historical figure from centuries ago with the help of your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and puts you into the past instead of the future. Do you try to fix it or simply stay in the past?
• A wizard claims to have sent a message into the time stream to avert some disastrous event in the future. Is he telling the truth?
• You accidentally wind up in the past, right before your 16 th birthday.
• Your happily married, 60-years-young grandparents invite you to their place. They live isolated from the rest of the city in an old dilapidated building overlooking their sprawling garden.
• You end up as chopped liver.
• You try to go back in time to save a friend’s life. But strangely, that friend never existed.
• You discover another time machine and decide to steal it.
• One day you have a philosophical debate with Einstein about time travel.
• You attempt to change the past but discover that doing so is futile.
• You visit a parallel universe.
• You use the time machine to steal pretty things from the time you just arrived in.
• You plan to steal a treasure from a museum in the 1930s but you are distracted and return without the treasure or the time machine.
• You take your time machine out for a joy-ride and end up seriously injuring yourself.
• Your time machine causes you to run over your own self days ago.
• You stumble on a time machine part during your vacation.
• You save someone’s life, but the time ripple effect kicks in, causing your new found friend to become handicapped.
• The ghost of your great-great etc. grandmother visits you with a task to perform.
• In the 19th century, you encountered yourself from earlier that morning in a verdant part of the Amazon River basin. You catch a pig which your younger self is squealing after, for your morning breakfast.
• The clock is devoted to telling the correct time.
• You find a time machine in a pile of junk and take it home.
• You’re trying to get your pet chimp into the past to make him human.
• You visit yourself in the past before the birth of yourself.
• Your family hires a thief who claims that he can engineer a time machine.
• Your time machine breaks and you are stranded outside the present day.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the future.
• You bring yourself back to the past as a baby in an attempt to win the lottery with your newfound wealth.
• You find that your girlfriend from the future is now your ex, and you’re crushed.
• An old tramp from the 1800s tells you that he is your grandfather.
• Your time machine can only physically exist at one place at one time. It can only move through time when it is not occupying space. Where do you choose for the machine to be tethered to?
• In ancient Rome, you are captured by the emperor and made to fight against gladiators for survival.
• An old friend tells you this is the first time you two met.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you land in the distant past in ancient Egypt.
• After losing the election and feeling extremely depressed, you visit a future where the revolution has succeeded and there’s a tramp sitting on the throne and…
• After traveling into the distant future you are attacked by a spaceship from a rival time traveler on your way home. How do you find it?
• A time traveller from the future tells you he is invading Earth at present.
• You travel back to the past and give some experience to your younger you for the future.
• You’ve had a good run of it so far since designing your time machine — all gold, all the time. What happens the first time you use it and it gives you an unexpected bounce?
• You live in a society where it is a crime to use time machines.
• Your time travels attract too much attention.
• You build a time machine that only allows you to visit the same location and time twice. For instance, if you were in Paris in 1968 you can return the same time in 1968 to Paris. What do you do with this advanced technology?
• Write a story opening with a character using a time machine to try and correct a mistake. You know they can’t succeed.
• You meet yourself in the future.
• A scientist declares the impossibility of time travel, but he and his colleagues go ahead and build one anyway. What happens?
• Undo your wrongdoings
• Your mother-in-law/uncle-in-law/yourself asks to take your time machine for a spin.
• You vanish for half an hour and when you return, there is a zombie apocalypse.
• Things didn’t just change in the future, they changed more than anyone expected. You had a tendency to speak your mind to everyone, and got thrown into jail.
• We’ve smashed graphene into dust.  Worst is yet to come.  Write about it.
• An intelligence sends you a cryptic message from the future, which you can’t decipher.
• An inconsiderate kid dings your helmet with a toy laser gun and now you can’t see out of your time machine.
• You can never be sure that a piece of technology is truly intelligent. Or maybe you believe that inanimate objects can be sentient.  Write a short story about a  smartphone, or perhaps a  car  that explores its own  consciousness   or experiences an awakening .
• You specifically made a time machine to counter terrible things that were to happen in the future.
• You travel back in time and gather seeds of now extinct plants.
• Your story ends in one hundred words or less.
• Using your time machine, you travel to a place in the past. While there you meet two little angels on your shoulders and two little devils on your hips. How else did things change besides those four and your physical appearance while you were in that time? What if angels looked like tiny devils and vice versa? What if you can’t decide between good and evil? An angel and a devil aren’t exactly helpful as they’re constantly in your mind.
• You find a time machine and steal it, taking it back to your era.
• Your time machine malfunctions and suddenly you take several left turns within warped time and space.
• A friend takes the time machine to go back in time and win the lottery.
• You step inside your time machine and vanish. The only way to get back to where you need to be is to retrace your steps.
• A machine is invented that can reduce wash time from two hours to ten minutes.
• You travel to the future and your machine is destroyed. You must survive in this new world.
• You take an experimental time machine to a job interview and hope for the best.
• A criminal jumps into your time machine and disappears. You just know he’ll appear in the distant past where he’ll destroy evidence against him. He could already be back to his own time. Or, perhaps, he’s traveling around time killing you at intervals.
• There exists a society in the future which consists of the smartest people from throughout history.
• You decide to kill your arch rival when travelling in time.
• Future tells you about life changing technology.
• You pretend to be God with your time machine.
• Your dog, acting as a time machine, takes you on a trip to the Moon.
• The god of life, Yor, hates everyone you know and has sent you back in time to ensure that no one for whom you care is born. You have one year to find their ancestors and change their names to remove them from notice.
• A secret organization appears to be trying to destroy your time machine before you can fix it again.
• You use your time machine to exact revenge on a neighbor.
• You are able to time travel and create a duplicate of yourself.
• A time traveler arrives out of nowhere and shocks you by saying he’s already met you..in the future.
• You suspect the time machine will betray you, but with some modifications you convince it to take you back to the age of mammoths.
• Someone gives you a rare item from a time not yet witnessed. You collect it, what would it be?
• You gave yourself advice in the past. And then regret it.
• You travel back to the time of your parents’ high school prom.
• You stay in the past too long and instead of heading home to the future your matter degrades into a pile of dust.
• The Earth ran out of coffee and you must find a new solar system with this time machine.
• You become lost in time and find yourself in the very distant future.
• You claim to have designed the first ever time machine. A man stands in front of you, asking how you built it.
• You invent a time machine with your friends, and are looking for ideas on where to go.
• You get stuck in the past due to unexpected time machine failure and drop a message as a time capsule for future generations.
• A time traveler visits you and tells you to do everything you do except today.
• A time traveler who’s stuck in the past decides to sire a son and give him the time machine into your hands.
• Zombies are attacking people and only your time machine can get them to safety.
• Your time machine malfunctions while on a field trip with 30 of your students.
• The whole town is quarantined following a sloppy test of a new chemical that grants eternal life because all of the people turn into their Halloween costumes.
• The first time you visit your future home, you find it as a smoldering ruin. People you know are helping with the construction of additional buildings. When you see yourself carrying a large stack of lumber on your shoulder, you realize how you are responsible for the end of the world.
• You can only take one object with you if you are abandoning your home due to nuclear fallout. What is that object?
• Using the time machine, you travel back and prevent your house from being burned down.
• Your favourite goal of travel in the future with your time machine is to see other versions of yourself. Have you tried it? Are you comfortable with that?
• You visit Mars in the 24th century and have a good conversation with a robot from that time.
• Time detectives torture you to find out about your time machine.
• You find a note telling you to never use the time machine and to destroy it.
• A message sent from the future arrives just in front of you.
• You inadvertently landed in the time of King Arthur, but you were unlucky and ended up in a battle between King Arthur and some unruly knight.
• You are put in prison for murder. The judge gives you time travel as your sentence.
• You use your time machine to locate a missing person and save them.
• Do time machines work backwards in time? To answer this question, advance your time machine into the past and see if you can reach its entrance.
• You construct a time machine that allows you to change small details that are part of your life, but not your journey. You must decide whether you will do this or not.
• You get too close to a black hole and end up witnessing the big bang.
• Someone from the future reveals himself to you and announces that he is your greatest fan.
• You don’t die.  You only dream of dying.
• You land in a field you recognize as your own. You return to your time.
• Your family is present in a portrait from centuries before.   You feel a sense of dread at the foreboding.
• Your brother brings home a disturbing book from his school, and he may be thinking of living as an anarchist.
• You use your time machine to exact cruel revenge on a certain authoritarian figure from the past…
• Part 1. Your memory is erased every night when you sleep, and eventually-
• Your wife accepts a dinner invitation from Hitler. You suspect she’s going to sleep with him, and you think it’s your duty to kill Hitler, but you’re unaware of any means of preventing your wife from following through with the plans.
• People in the future are using skins of animals as if they were human clothing. What’s your first reaction?
• You need to travel back in time to eliminate a younger version of yourself before you can be born.
• You’ve been given the honour of piloting the first ever manned mission to the closest star. What do you say to the time machine driver?
• An alternative version of yourself travels in time to warn you about the end of the world.
• Much to your horror, you see your kids acting as vampires and drinking your blood when you go back in time.
• A time machine appears before you. It is tempting but you recognize it as a trap and throw away the key.
• A time traveler from the distant future complains to you about the direction of the present day to help him complete some books he’s been writing.
• You are given the entire future to be filled with whatever you’d like to do.
• Your time machine stops, but you don’t know how to figure out why.
• Your time machine slowly begins vibrating.
• A friend builds their own time machine. Their first thought is to go back in time and kill Hitler.
• A time machine is found on a desert island. What’s inside it?
• You travel to the past but find yourself unable to return as your time machine does not work anymore.
• Your future and past selves meet.
• What if the ancient Mayans didn’t miss the deadline to stop building their dam of suns and asteroids ended up pulverizing their civilization?
• You meet your ancestors from the past with your time machine.
• Visiting the future, you find people attached to giant machines that keep them alive indefinitely.
• You travel to look at dinosaurs in the past.
• You always wanted to work as a shopkeeper in the days before credit cards. But your time machine has malfunctioned and thrown you back into the past. How will you survive?
• You order a ride with a time machine company.
• You send your neighbor Sonic the Hedgehog back in time to be eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex.
• A pornographic movie is made in the future with the technology from your time machine.
• A disturbing figure demands the time machine and takes it away.
• Your father invents a time machine, which he never finished, and you’ve been working all week to build it. At 11pm on the 11th day, you finally finish it. You turn it on and a blinding white light surrounds you. Before you know it, you feel intense nausea and feel like you’re falling over but you’re still standing. You fall to your knees and everything goes black.
• Your time machine malfunctions again, this time sending you sixteen years into the future. Reflect on this.
• You find yourself lying on a hospitable planet next to a time lodged robot.
• You visit a parallel universe where everyone is living the opposite of your existence.
• You are trapped on a desert island. You have a time machine.
• The universe runs on a finite clock of time.
• You have the chance to interview great political figures like Hitler or Gandhi but you have the added ability to travel back in time to watch them at work. What do you do?
• Your psychic ability gets out of control and you see the future -and it’s not good.
• You accidentally travel through time and witness your own funeral.
• You realize the time machine breaks a fundamental law of physics.
• You go to a costume party dressed as a time traveler. After you have arrived home, you realize that you came dressed as someone who was alive in the 1800’s. Explain how this could have happened.
• You find a mysterious clock marked with golden numbers. It seems to govern the flow of time.
• Access the Dark Future Through Time Travel Plot Line Generator
• You’ve died and been reincarnated through time. You don’t wear the glove in this life though.
• You are working on a time machine and decide to take a break with a cup of coffee. You return to find your friends have become ants.
• You want to prove time travel works, so you take the time machine on a test run…where are you going?
• A strange girl with a curved ear beamed into your living room coming from an alternate time. She gives you a cryptic message.
• The latest trend in technological advances includes transporters that can take you back in time to place you exactly where you were seven seconds ago. A mishap occurs during your seventh trip.
• You can say anything you want to a young you.
• You have the chance to kill Hitler as a baby with the time machine, but minors cannot go back.
• You build a time machine that always fails you.
• You travel back in time and stop yourself from inventing the time machine. So now you never invented it. Uh-oh!
• A farmer who hates machines claims he once saw a time machine.
• Your time machine is malfunctioning. During your visit to the past you discover you have saved Hitler. What do you do?
• What would you do if your time machine gave you a warning that the country will experience a catastrophic event? Hope you enjoy/find this free list of time machine writing prompts useful!
• You find a time machine.
• You meet your future self when you have just acquired the time machine.
• You are absolutely amazed to see your own biography on sale in a futuristic bookstore.
• Your time traveling partner is kidnapped with a time machine that is stolen from you. Go into the past in your own time machine and rescue him/her.
• You approach a black hole and find a time machine that you use to escape before your ship is destroyed.
• Somebody wants to buy the patent for your time machine.
• You travel back in time and see what your life was like before you were born.
• You go back to the past to discover the origin of your favourite game, but realize it didn’t originate with you.
• You mess up the past by accidentally bringing a butterfly into the present…
• You invent a time machine and use it to go back in time dozens of years to tell your father the exact lottery numbers for him to save a bunch of money. But one number he refuses to reveal is the secret code for launching World War III through Bluetooth devices.
• You find a time machine, whose location is unknown to you, but you suspect that it belongs to someone you know.
• Two copies of you are made from different futures with time machines.
• You join a time traveling race and can only move forward in time.
• You discover the secret origin of time travel and attempt to change history to make the world a better place.
• Time-traveling villain tells you the world will be destroyed after he kills your friends.
• You use your own time machine to change history.
• You witness a future war and you’re changed forever by it.
• What is the strangest thing you can imagine is hiding in the UFO that crash- lands on your roof?
• You are told that clones of yourself automatically appear in other lifetimes once you die. How do you react?
• You bring a book about time travel with itself stuffed inside.
• You create a time machine that brings you back to the time of your childhood.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you vanish from the future, you reappear in the past.
• An eccentric gentleman makes an explosive offer to build you a time machine if you’re willing to pay the price.
• You go into the past for revenge. You find the one who wronged you. But instead of killing him, you use your time machine to digitally record and forward the exact moment he wronged you to thousands of other people, causing them all to wrong you equally in the same way. Are you satisfied with how you dealt with it?
• You’re having dinner with your favorite celebrity in their time machine.
• Three men in black suits approach you saying they’ve seen you around town and they want to talk.
• Your great-great-grand-daughter gives you a tip that turns you into a successful person.
• A boy from the past arrives in your present using his time machine. You try to help him find his way home, so you can go to the future.
• Your son is sent years into the future because of nobody’s fault.
• A person appears from a distant era stating they need your help to avert a disaster.
• Your time machine is destroyed and the universe is collapsing so you have to rely on wormhole technology to escape but this accelerates time – the world is now like it was many years in the future.
• The inventor of the time machine is not a quantum physics expert, but an expert in transportation.
• A strange room appears from within your time machine.
• You are revealed to have been the only man on Earth at one time in the future.
• You travel back in time and find yourself on the battlefield of Gettysburg – the American Revolution.
• You arrive in the past and taught primitive man how to talk and perform acts of kindness.
• The one particular day of your life ends up being constantly repeated. You decide to go back in time and stop the one specific incident from happening.
• Your time machine malfunctions and places you in the wrong time and place.
• Paranoid, you only go forward in time and when you see what the world will look like, you decide not to go through with time travel at all.
• You think you’ve seen Hitler’s greatest secret, so you’re about to go back in time to stop him.
• You freeze your dead dog and toss it in a machine that digitizes it, uploading the data to a computer in the future in order to reanimate it.
• An Amazonian tribe recruits you to fight off enemies with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you to the Middle Ages.
• A future version of yourself uses a time machine to travel to the past to meet his younger self.
• You travel back in time using a computer wormhole. A female version of you shows up and asks you on a date.
• The ability to travel in time inspires a new form of entertainment called the killing-spree industry.
• You witness yourself from the past use your time machine. Describe the moment.
• You’re visited by your future self. Present day you describe something to the future you that once happened today. Future you doesn’t believe you.
• You begin to tell your friends and family what a great writer you are.
• A young woman is being chased by her angry ex. Your time machine is the only place of refuge.
• You create another time machine so you can stay in a romantic relationship with a person from the future.
• The universe is about to explode, and you have a time machine. There’s a way to fix the impending annihilation of the universe, but you require too many pieces of a very rare material which will be completely destroyed in the destruction of the universe. Luckily, you have a time machine.
• The characters travel back in time a few days to stop a gunman from shooting President McKinley.
• You think you’ve made a huge discovery when you find an advanced civilisation in the past.
• Machines from the future started hunting humans and they are almost completely wiped out, except for you and 1 million others. The future reveals that there were 2 evil versions of you, which was the reason behind the machines hunting you down. You have the option to choose which of the 2 versions of you will live. What do you do?
• While traveling with your time machine, you look into the night sky and see a constellation that hasn’t been formed yet.
• Someone steals your time machine.
• Your time machine lands in a purgatory inhabited by creatures that love humans.
• A paranoid inventor of a device that controls the weather starts World War 3.
• Having found a better time machine you visit the future of the time machine maker.
• There’s a man on the street corner yelling at people. He tells you that you must go back to your own time or else risk setting in motion an apocalyptic chain of events.
• A voice from your time machine says to you “Remember that the time machine is your friend!”
• You use your time machine to commit a murder that goes unsolved.
• You invent a time machine and later realize an evil dictator has constructed one as well. And he plans to use yours to travel back in time and change history. What do you do?
• Your time machine malfunctions and you visit an alternate reality instead.
• You challenge your alternate-self to mortal-combat in the arena of time.
• After discovering a time machine, you travel back in time to tell yourself something that isn’t so random.
• You plan to bring someone back from the past as a souvenir as a joke, but they change everything and almost cause disaster.
• A machine on your desk malfunctions and you’re flung back in time with a chance to prevent all the horrible things that’s been happening to you lately. Everything else is the same except for one small detail. Who do you hug the moment before you go back in time and what was about to happen the next moment?
• In a modern country, Neanderthals have survived.
• A lowly future version of you appears out of nowhere and warns you that if you do not change your current course of action that the world will come to a horrible end.
• You’re informed by the government that your time machine is a security threat and decide to hide it in an impregnable location – and you haven’t gotten it back ever since.
• You go back in time to prevent your great, great, great, great grandfather’s murder
• Your time machine transports you to the same place over and over until you stop it.
• The three of you begin arguing about existence and end up destroying yourselves and your time machine forever.
• While visiting the past, you are prevented from returning to the future by some future familiar to you covering the time machine.
• You decide to become a time traveling law enforcement officer.
• You reveal to the public the existence of time travel.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you back to a pivotal time in history.
• Your future self is a lot different than what you imagined.
• A time travelling stranger gives you advice that changes your life and allows you to benefit from it in the present.
• While on another planet you come across a giant cave filled with artifacts. A pedestal on the far side is handing a vial containing a dark green liquid.
• You’ve armed your time machine with a newspaper that predicts the outcome of the great war.
• Your time machine malfunctions and throws you directly into your own childhood, before you have a doubt of what the future is like or imagined you would create the time machine.
• You worship an entity known as Time. All your technological advances flow from this belief.
• You discover an enigmatic time wand on the beach. Presumably bought by tourists in ancient times.
• You travel back in time to the day your parents were born.
• There is a contest to see the most interesting person in the universe, and the winner goes to the moon.
• A time-traveler from the 22nd century tells you a disturbing tale.
• You were dead all the time. You just didn’t remember. But remember at the end when you wanted to take a look at yourself so you used a time machine only to look at yourself when you were dead in the present.
• A savant that you’re visiting tells you that you shouldn’t have been born.
• A meteorite devastatingly knocks you and your time machine off course, before landing in prehistoric times.
• Your time machine crashes, and its inner mechanisms are revealed.
• You travel into the future but your time machine malfunctions and sends you to a different century than you a…
• You crash into the west gate of ancient Rome on the day that Titus unites it. What is the result of you introducing yourself to the people?
• The time machine needs to be regularly recharged with a special potion invented by you.
• A lone traveller arrives in your time and says he’s from the much distant future, asking for food and shelter.
• Your dog travels to the far future with your time machine, which is now ineffective.
• In an attempt to go back and change the past something goes wrong and brings you face to face with yourself.
• You visit a future where time travel doesn’t exist, yet you are still alive.
• You design a time machine capable of taking you into the future instead of the past.
• You are living your life again and again.
• Werewolves.
• You’re standing at the end of a platform waiting for a train, when a time machine whisks you off for a quick visit in the past.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the past, just after the dinosaurs became extinct.
• After travelling to the future, you stay there for a year and return to your original timeline. How does the world differ?
• Your two best friends discover your time machine and use it to sabotage your projects in life. A rich madman offers to help you in your work. You only find out later that he intends to use you to take over the world. A better looking, richer guy offers to help you deploy your time machine. Turns out what he wants to do is use it for his own social engineering projects.
• An elderly man walks into your time machine office.
• Would the past and the future ever meet?
• You explore the future as an old man.
• You decide to visit your future self. What do you do there?
• This time machine has a few suspicious features which you’ve never noticed before. You walk over to it and . . .
• One of your friends has a time machine. It malfunctions and sends you back in time. What happens?
• A mad man with a torch opens the lid of the time machine where you and your son are. What do you do?
• You find that you cannot see the future as it is happening as easily as you thought.
• The laws of physics completely break down and the flow of time ceases to exist.
• You’re on your way to a job interview and your time machine breaks down in the present.
• The enigmatic figure you collided with comes from the future to ask you a question.
• People have discovered how to travel back in time and undo the events of the Second World War. That means you must disappear from the face of the Earth. How do you do so? Your visit to 2016 prompted you to start a student revolution.
• You kill your past self with your time machine, hoping to shape your destiny.
• Once you return from the past, and you look around where you live. It has changed…if only a little.
• You travel back in time before you were born. You must stop yourself from being conceived.
• What do you say to yourself when you meet yourself in the future?
• With your time machine, you go back in time and do something to prevent a tragedy.
• You travel back in time to witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
• You’re engaged in a dicey battle with a mad scientist. Your time machine malfunctions.
• Your time machine malfunctions while on a trip to Paris.
• What would you say to your future self when he sees you?
• A sci-fi “tech noir” game inspired by film noir, smog, and Blade Runner…
• You attempt to modify a time machine, hoping to find a way to return to the past.
• You are sent back to the stone age, your time machine is destroyed and you must find a way to go home.
• The same prompt is posted in four different places scattered about the house, each written in a different hand. Given no knowledge of the others, how do you spot the fifth?
• You find a perfectly working time machine and go back in time to give yourself advice.
• You discover an alien machine that looks like a time machine.
• You ask yourself to lend you a book, but your future self never responds and you never see the book again.
• Returning to the present with a lot of sweat and tired muscles, you’re greeted by your friends. “I’ve spent time in the future”, you say.
• A time traveler approaches you and asks to borrow your time machine.
• Your time machine just landed.
• You ask someone from the past for a light.
• An old woman pleads for you to turn up at her great-granddaughter’s birthday party.
• You attempt to travel back in time to the era of pirates to explore their treasures, but you end up in jail instead when you’re mistaken for a stowaway.
• You’re trekking and you discover a puddle of a gooey substance, you set off a time machine in the past and it arrives with a man who is calling himself a god.
• Your pet has been taught how to use a time machine.
• You become lost from your time machine and can’t find your way back home.
• Buy the entire Time Machine Story Bundle!
• You wish you were smart enough to invent a time machine.
• A tragic accident occurs and you only have 10 minutes to decide how to react.
• Someone is murdered, but you found a time machine to arrive on the crime scene three minutes before the murder occurs. You find yourself immediately confessing to the crime, even though the victim is still alive! Explain why so in the comments section.
• Lightning strikes the time machine momentarily giving you superpowers.
• What did you say to your past self?
• You’re part of a time machine tourism agency and you pick up two groups of famous people.
• You’re plagued by your jealous friend who travels to the past to alter your history.
• You’ve investigated some disturbances in time and need to ask your future self just one question to give you a nudge in the right direction.
• You go back in time and see what would have happened were your parents to elope.
• Time travelers observe your humble offering in the desert.
• You use your time machine to “visit” the afterlife.
• Delaware is hit by a nuclear bomb targeting Foggy Bottom in 1986 but you and your friends survive because your time machine had you surfing on your backyard pool.
• You travel back in time and take over the life of your great grandfather before he met your great grandmother.
• You use a time machine to save a person from committing suicide.
• Your time machine malfunctions, and you are sent back to World War I.
• According to multiverse theory there are an infinite amount of copies of you travelling through time. One day you meet one who is a detective running around with a gun trying to catch the crook.
• Inherited your great-great-grandfather’s time machine.
• The holy book tells you that the most important task of man is to perfect time machines. With the first time machine built, the chronoknights arrive from the 21st century.
• You land a time machine on your wedding day. Your future self tells you that you picked the wrong suit.
• The world is on the brink of total annihilation and only you have a time machine that can save humanity.
• Upon landing, you wake up in bed. It is the next day.
• An impossible time paradox rears its perplexing head and makes you question your own existence.
• Captain Picard and the Enterprise encountered time nexus points in the The Next Generation episode “Remember Me”.
• You decide to introduce the concept of the time machine to society. You do, and then everything changes.
• Someone from the future takes your time machine and sends you far in the past.
• You’ve found another time machine. Describe how you show it off to your friends.
• Adventure game design frequently revolves around avoiding death. The game could feature a serious subject line or a tongue in cheek title. Games recently released or popular with the Quest studio are listed below along with a few of us from the Quest team who could possibly run/lead a game. If you sign up and someone from Quest leads or runs your game, you will also receive a coupon for a $5 discount off any future Quest games.
• Every part of the time machine malfunctions and then breaks after just a single use.
• You’re supposed to go to a party but decide to hit a baseball instead.
• While wearing your time machine, you bump into a friend you went to high school with and have to convince them that it’s still you. Tell us how that went down.
• You find a time machine. How do you feel?
• You’re in a writing slump and pick up a book about time travel. It seems to have the answers you’re looking for, but to write your own ending, you must follow the rules of the book.
• You go back in time and stop a tragic life event that was about to happen.
• One day you wake up to your alarm and find that even when you look at the clock it’s broken.
• You find a time machine belonging to your schoolmate. She never knew it would belong to her.
• You’re in charge of the time machine department of a big corporation and you think you’re about to be replaced by a more junior employee.
• You and your friend take your time machines to the test track. What if everything isn’t quite as you thought?
• You learn that tomorrow will be the last day of your life. Tomorrow. What do you do?
• You meet Shakespeare.
• You’re the only person left in town because everyone else was killed in a time machine experiment gone wrong.
• Your family desperately needs money in order to keep the house, but due to unfortunate circumstances, you cannot make any more money.
• You, and all of your ancestors are seated in your living room after you purchased your first time machine.
• Your time machine traps you in the past.
• Someone’s taken your time machine from you and is playing pranks on your family and friends.
• What if your time machine changed the world as you knew it, and can never be used again? What did you see?
• You’re hurriedly trying to put together the pieces of a time machine when suddenly, a 10-foot-tall cock speaking in backwards sentences appears.
• You travel back in time and meet your one great great grandfather.
• Make one dream or nightmare come true with your time machine.
• King Arthur’s time machine was reportedly recovered from the peat bogs and is on display today.
• Supersonic jets are invented in your 30’s, ushering a new age of travel and intercontinental entertainment.
• You’re trapped in a timeless escapism reality and you must escape.
• Your father accidentally tampers with history, creating havoc.
• Your sister comes over for tea and tells you a story about how the two of you, when younger, would drive your parents crazy by fighting for control of the time machine.
• You accidentally travel back in time and change something, altering your future.
• Until the Whale Comes Inker Productions presents …
• Tomorrow you are going on holiday to the past. How do you convince your boss that this is a wonderful investment, besides of course for the fact that it’s your duty to the company to get the much needed experience.
• You steal one of the time machine parts from your former friend who claimed ownership of the time machine.
• People are chasing you and you run into a time machine and escape.
• Your dog has been run over. You build a time machine to go back in time to save Fido.
• You meet yourself in the future and regret the mistakes you made in the past.
• Time goes backwards while you are using your time machine.
• You get into an argument with yourself from the past future.
• Suddenly, the world’s most benevolent dictator comes to power while you are in your time machine. What’s your next move?
• After that you want to ask some specific questions.
• You want to know the cause of your future world but the future you are scared to tell you.
• You are approached by a maniac suffering from amnesia who insists he comes from the past.
• A strange metal object falls from the sky. When you touch it, it transports you into an unrecognizable land.
• Your time machine, on a non-specific spring night, takes you to the future on your birthday the day before you plan to celebrate.
• You travel back in time to meet your parents as teenagers.
• You’re racing a motorcycle to New York from LA, while your loved one is in labor.
• Someone asks you about time travel and you explain your point of view on the subject.
• You’re given the opportunity to travel back in time to your first big break.
• Your future self gives you advice that betters your life.
• A time machine is stolen from you and you must chase after the culprit.
• A time-traveler from the future appears to you and asks for help in saving the world.
• The future where you come from is a horrible dystopia ruled by mutant abominations.
• When you visit yourself you do so as a mouse living under the stairs.
• You ran over a beautiful antelope. You effortlessly summon forth your time machine to go back in time and replace the antelope with a live one.
• You’ve had a time machine all of your adult life. There’s one glaring evil you could have done to change history as we know it.
• Using this time machine, you can perform altruistic duties, like saving a loved one’s life.
• You come across a photo showing yourself in a familiar but future place.
• Global warming has changed everything.
• You can bring one article of clothing with you into the future. What do you choose?
• You are given a mission by an enigmatic wizard. He says only a sentient time machine will be able to do it.
• Your team raises enough money to develop a time machine and have it manufactured. The first thing you do with it is to time travel to Ancient Greece and conquer the cradle of civilization. When asked why you want to do this you reply that, “All will be answered in time.”
• Someone steals your time machine, dipping into all sorts of mischief while you’re trying to get it back.
• You visit the future expecting a good time. What happens instead?
• You are trapped in a room with no doors or windows with  one person and a time machine. Your best friend/killer/killer. Two of the buttons on the time machine are ‘go back 50 years’ and ‘go forward 10 years’. You can’t go back in time further than around 1949 or go further ahead in time than September 22nd of the year you are born in. Your only hope is to turn your friend/killer/killer into your slave. What do you do?
• You’ve been asked to stop time-travellers from ganging up on your time machine and destroying it.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the Viking age. You communicate with the locals by writing.
• You see a modern sewer tunnel morphs into a tunnel from the past.
• Aunt May is visiting and accidentally steps on your time machine which sends her to the beginning of the universe.
• After using your time machine you realise you now know something no one else does.
• A time traveller appears out of nowhere telling you of your secret origin before disappearing again.
• You have the power to either go back in time or forward. You can’t use the same power twice in a row, so pick wisely.
• You meet a mysterious time traveling inventor who offers to tell you their secrets, but it may have consequences for your present day.
• “The Time Machine” still ranks as one of the greatest science fiction novels. What’s your opinion?
• You tricked your grandfather into stepping into your time machine and now regrets it.
• You’ve aged one hundred years and no longer remember what you named your time machine.
• You travel to the Stone Age but you aren’t able to build a fire and end up as a human meal.
• You enlist the help of Albert Einstein to help devise a time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you end up five billion years in the future.
• Someone visits you with their own time machine and convinces you to go back in time in your own life to kill Hitler or to invent something that will change the world.
• You discover an autonomous time machine that you didn’t build.
• Little Miss Naughty of the Year starts taunting your sex life using time travel, and gives you an ultimatum.
• A prophetic dream leads you to build a time machine, but the journey into the future shows you the doom of the world.
• The first time machine malfunctions and destroys the world. You are the only one who knows it existed. Can you and will you tell everyone?
• You’ve been fired and lost all your money. What entry-level job are you considering doing in the future?
• You use the time machine to alter the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg.
• A time machine is an impossible construct–yet someone has demonstrated the concept. Who could it be and where is it being kept?
• You encounter a Weeping Angel when using your time machine.
• You ride a time machine into the past so that your grandparents fall in love.
• You’ve been studying your great-great-grandfather’s family history. They decided to immigrate to the United States in the mid-18 century. You can travel back and bring one of them back with you. Who do you choose?
• This list of five becomes ten then 30…
• Your best friend mysteriously moves away. How do you get them to come back?
• A dog barks at your time machine while you’re setting it up.
• Your time machine breaks down and you get stuck in prehistoric times.
• An ex-girlfriend appears to you with a time machine and asks you to travel with her for a quick trip into the future.
• You time machine malfunctions and you inadvertently destroy the world. What will you do now with your time machine?
• The Earth and the solar system have been destroyed by a past version of yourself. What do you do?
• A science fiction writer from the country of your nationality visits you and says he comes from the future. Is he lying or telling the truth?
• The more years you spend in the future, the younger you get.
• A mad scientist kidnaps you, but you manage to escape with your time machine.
• You and your mentor build a time machine together, but anything you try to bring back is always incinerated by the hot time winds. However, your mentor has no problem.
• A group of people steals your time machine and visits another era with it.
• Your friends discover your time machine and decide to play some pranks on people from the past. Who do you prank?
• You become good friends with Richard Nixon.
• You’ve just got back from the future with an answer to the question that made your career a success, after all it won’t be long until it’s published. When you return you find nothing has changed – why?
• You find a sentient time machine with the ability to make alterations.
• You meet a mysterious man in a bar who says he comes from the past.
• You’re given a time machine to jump from the past to the present. What do you do?
• You take a long awaited fishing trip with a beloved relative and can’t seem to catch anything.
• Different people from different times try to understand the concept and use it.
• Someone sends you a time machine and you decide to play pranks on all your friends.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into World War II.
• Your boss tells you to choose a vacation spot today or be fired in the near future.
• You’re actually from the future – and have traveled back in time to warn yourself, even though you know you’re going to dismiss what you’re about to say.
• Your time machine has artificial intelligence which is outright malevolent.
• A co-worker discovers your time machine and wonders what he’ll do with it.
• Traveling through time becomes a fad. Do your friends or family members try to go back in time to make different decisions?
• Your time machine breaks and suddenly you’re trapped in an airport. Later, you learn your fiance is soon to marry someone else.
• Which of your ancestors will you visit next using your time machine?
• Your time machine lands you just a few minutes before the start of the Battle of Hastings.
• You wake up in your time machine travelling through time.
• You cross paths with your future self.
• A futuristic robot approaches you. He tells you his time machine has malfunctioned and wiped out humanity in the year 3303. The robot asks for your time machine to jump back in time dimension and fix the situation. You already knew the robot was trying to trick you, so you destroy the robot.
• Your deceased grandma approaches you from the past through your time machine and advises you on your life.
• You decide to clean your time machine to perfection. You are so anal about it that you end up killing the person you were supposed to save. Explain.
• You’ve developed a cure for the common cold. Along with time travel, your amazing invention could eradicate a global health concern. Could you do it?
• The timer malfunctions and you are transported back a second before the machine is activated. The situation is exactly the same, except you remember how devastating the consequences will be.
• You ask people what they were like in the past and they respond.
• You use your time machine to save yourself a long time back.
• You return through your time machine to a year before you were even born, and must decide which of your parents get to have you, and which parent abandons you.
• A tachyon signal has been found from the Age of the Dinosaurs that you accidentally travel to.
• You are trapped in a situation that will only happen in the future.
• Try to explain time travel to a 10 year old.
• You use your time machine to look up the love of your life.
• You reveal a time machine to friends and yourself step inside, never to  be seen again.
• You disobeyed the laws of time and went fifteen years back in time. What are the consequences? Your family is not rent with grief? You returned home fifteen years ago and there was no change?
• You’re given tickets for two to a Broadway show in the past. Two of you arrive, but there’s only supposed to be one.
• Your time machine harnesses dark matter, but will these butterflies unleash a terrible plague into the future?
• A Martian approaches you on a lonely road and says he could use a good time machine, like yours. What happens?
• Your time machine drops you off at a random time in history.
• Three characters meet and discover that each of them has a time machine.
• The future you saw yourself in turns out to be false after your return.
• You’re kidnapped by a mad psychopath who threatens to kill you unless you take him back to the stone age.
• You use the time machine to film a music video.
• A future self arrives in a time machine to give you advice.
• You give your future self very specific instructions.
• Your time-travelling partner retrieves something from the past. However, on returning to the present, you discover that not as long ago, you had done the same thing.
• You are a marine archaeologist. Find me a time machine!
• You land in the future where all machines are now organic.
• Travel back to the time of the Sumerians.
• Your time machine ravages the universe by transporting matter in and out causing the universe to collapse on itself.
• A bunch of marauders are after you. They crash a bunch of ships everywhere and one of those ships gets sent messages back in time to when the Mayans were building Machu Picchu. They run around Machu Picchu and you’re pissed off the brand new structure is going to get destroyed before you can see what happens. Then you get transported to the future. What’s the first thing you do?
• There is a being on Earth that was made using your DNA and they’re behind your disappearance.
• You prepare to go into the past and visit the place you grew up in. The only problem is that you…
• Your first stop on your time travel vacation is the dawn of civilization.
• The world throws a festival inviting people from different time periods to the same party for the first time. Which moment do you visit?
• You find you already settled the argument that has plagued you since high school.
• You travel back in time in order to teach yourself how to design a time machine.
• Time travel is about to completely obsolete the Internet.
• A guy from the future shows up at your door with a time machine and says you will have a child together that will be a great writing talent.
• You are visited by your future self with a time machine and warned to stop what you’re doing.
• You’ve finally figured out how time travel works. But a new paradox makes all your efforts useless.
• You cannot help laughing maniacally all of a sudden for no reason. What had happened?
• You travel all the way back to the prehistoric period and have to fight a leaping T-Rex.
• Returning from another time, you find we’re all gloriously happy.
• You inherit a time machine from your grandfather. He has one condition for you to receive it, that is never use the machine. You can’t resist and ride the machine into the past. You witness a traumatic event in your past which changes your life completely. Where to place your time machine when you live in a one-room apartment.
• You receive the mysterious invitation to visit a rich stranger in the future.
• An old beggar woman approaches you saying she is your grandmother who was flung into the future for loving a beggar man.
• Your favorite celebrity says they can invent a time machine and wants you to be a history consultant. Do you take the job?
• You accidentally witness yourself die in the future.
• You’re robbing the house of someone you hate and time-travels back to kill you before you rob them.
• You find a time machine that was abandoned in a field with a hastily written note on a nearby rock.
• You get yourself lost in a time of your past which was exactly like your present. You’re getting accustomed to living in that age. But despite being in such a vivid age, you feel like something is missing. Your phone does not work, you don’t know what a word processor is, and cars are nowhere in sight. And what’s worse is that you can’t stop thinking about your future and your family. You spend the whole day crying. What has happened? Is this some sort of paradox? Your future has been erased.
• You realize that you’ve traveled back in time and no longer have your music player or cell phone.
• Someone steps into your time machine and begins travelling wildly through time.
• You travel back in time and encounter your favorite historical figure.
• You use your time machine regularly to celebrate your birthday every year. Will you continue to do this even if you turn 1000?
• You’ve just made a hot discovery in your lab. You run out to inform your chief. At this most opportune moment, your time machine malfunctions and you vanish. What are the reflections of your chief on the mystery of your disappearance? Returning to the present to process further on your discovery, you cannot believe the change. How do you return to the past? When you’re done remember to wipe away the five minutes of writing. This kind of writing involves only simple writing in which you have to develop your attention to specific subjects. Your approach differs when you develop a new take on an existing idea and allow your thoughts run like a river. Writing prompts about material interests and desires elicit this kind of writing. By looking at the mind’s deeper, wheeling thoughts leads to rousing writing reveals a lot of your personality. It enables you to bring forth your ideas with breathtaking results for you or someone else depending on your area of interest.
• Technology from your time machine deteriorates as it ages.
• You can leave your body out to die and let it move on when you don’t need it anymore, or at least try to.
• You accidentally take yourself back in time with your time machine.
• A little child finds your time machine and gets stuck in the past.
• A time-travelling visitor tells you to bring him food and water that you somehow do not already have. What do you do?
• You and your arch nemesis are fashion time machines. You race each other into the past.
• You can go to any era, real or fictional, what do you pick and why?
• You receive a text message from your future self with a date and time. You realize this is the time you will die.
• You accidentally travel into the future before developing a time machine and can never get back to your time to recreate getting the time machine.
• We have free time travel. What do we do with it?
• Comment below and let me know how your writing session “went”.
• The only weapon that will destroy the world’s oldest man.
• You’re taking a walk when you find yourself and your time machine inside a giant interdimensional transition wormhole.
• You want to take revenge on your last unrequited love by inviting her to your wedding.
• One day you decide to take a time machine journey, but you end up with the wrong time.
• You’ve been cryogenized in the future and brought back to now for spare body parts.
• You accidentally kill yourself in your time machine.
• You have the opportunity to make a wish in front of the church where 5 black crows are perched. What will it be?
• You use your time machine to prevent your childhood accident and thus erase yourself from existence.
• A crazed traveler from a different dimension destroys a nearby town before you realize he is on a misdirected time tour to the future.
• Your girlfriend is on her way to your house and if she doesn’t find you at home she’s going to dump you. You call yourself in the future and ask your future self to stall her.
• You visit the future.
• Your grandfather offers you a chance to tell him about the future.
• The Titanic sinks and your time machine gets destroyed as a result of the collision. You are now stranded in the past where you see the Titanic crash, as you try to swim away from the sinking wreckage you hear faint coughing.
• Your time machine goes haywire, and you travel back in time, helpless until you return to the present.
• The time machine you designed turns out to be a major disappointment.
• You meet your twenty six year old clone and become jealous.
• Elemental Powers is a new superhero, the first ever to gain their powers from all the elements. What do you think about the first superhero?
• When something morally wrong happens, you use your DIY time machine to erase it.
• Your time machine makes your mom give birth to you when you were born.
• You and a really old guy with wild hair are the only two humans left alive in giant ruins of the Time Machine construction facility.
• By flying through different eras, you have found a time machine blueprint in the Age of Dinosaurs. You return to the present and share this information with the World.
• You have arrived in Pompeii moments before Mt. Vesuvius erupts.
• Mother Nature takes your time machine on an adventure through time and space.
• While you were spying on your enemies with your time machine, you had it malfunction and you were stuck in their house.
• Time travel is so common now that you take it for granted. You get frustrated with tourists who visit the past just to marvel at what’s used to be.
• You invent a charming device that instantly transports the user to any point on the globe. The device is available commercially. What happens?
• You’ve inherited a time machine that was developed by your eccentric uncle.
• You invent a time machine and start fixating on specific time periods and lose track of the present.
• Your family builds a time machine to join you in the future.
• The clock you’ve invented, freeze time.
• You challenge Doc Brown to a race in your time machine.
• You try to use your time machine to send a letter back in time.
• You discover that someone from the future has been stalking you everywhere.
• You discover yet another time machine.
• While traveling through time, you encounter a paradox and manage to screw up the whole world. What stupid thing did you do to cause this?
• You meet up with a famous inventor, have dinner together, and then, the next morning, you tell them the invention they’ll be known for came from you.
• An abused kid asks you for a ride in your time machine to visit his rich self in the future and expose all the lies told to him.
• Wonderful, now the machine’s broken and you can’t go home.
• You get transported into the past and see yourself kill your grandparents.
• You discover a time loop in the time machine you used.
• As a time travel researcher, you receive an alarming report.
• You invent a time machine and use it to steal money from your own bank account yesterday.
• Your dead friend Willis returns from the future to visit you on your birthday… as a zombie.
• Unplug your time machine to find several copies of yourself waiting to use it. The more you witness the same event, the more this world vibrates with events before your eyes and waits to be witnessed. In this world, are you the original? Do you move on from one world to the next? To what end? Time travel continues indefinitely…
• Your time machine gets stolen.
• You get stranded on the moon. You have no supplies and only the moon’s supplies to survive. What do you eat and how do you avoid getting ill?
• What do you decide to do about the people who ruined your life?
• The time patrol says that you have changed time and now they have to destroy you.
• You approach a special cabinet in the basement of a museum and open it. You are not seen, though, and you enter it…
• A friend asks to borrow your time machine to travel to the future to read tomorrow’s newspaper.
• Come up with a famous use of time travel in a novel, a movie, a TV show, or a video game, and describe how it resolves.
• How would you describe your past life to someone else.
• You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the best thing about it? You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the worst thing about it? Time Machine fashion shows are popular. A time capsule opens. You forgot to include any clothes. What do you do?
• You find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with your time machine.
• Someone invents a time machine before you, and when you find out who it was you wish you had invented it.
• You have the opportunity to set people free from the 9 to 5 rut from the past by reviving communism. You do this by walking into the time machine and doing it manually.
• Undesirable elements from the past come back to wreak havoc in the future.
• You visit the year you were born in with your time machine. Perhaps your parents spent their first anniversary with you or perhaps it’s the day you were born.
• The spaceship you were travelling in crashes on a remote planet in the past.
• Your primary mission is now accomplished but you’ve been unconfident in accomplishing your secondary mission.
• You invent a magic wand that lets you transport anywhere in time. So where are your favorite places in time that you would visit?
• Against your better judgment you use your time machine to head back into prehistory. The trip is a complete and total failure and you end up in 1000 A.D.
• You go back in time and watch yourself fall in love with the man or woman of your dreams.
• Your girlfriend tries to get you in on a time travelling threesome with you and another version of you from the future.
• You sell your time machine to the government for a large sum of money only to be told the government has also built a time machine.
• After speaking to the future you realise you’re destined to marry your favourite celebrity.
• You tune into the secret signal for time travellers and are transported as a spy from one war to another.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you end up back in time.
• You witness the Time Traveller.
• You win a Nobel Prize for designing the first time machine.
• The detective tries to reason with the professor to no avail and threatens to have his time machine seized.
• Using time travel, you’ve corrected an old mistake you made.
• You’ve just traveled back from the future, and before you arrive in the past you drop an important item. When returning to the past, you realize that you must give the object away to yourself, in the past.
• A time-traveling serial killer is on the loose.
• You accidentally take your time machine with you and wind up in the future—the far future.
• The last person on Earth is in a deep sleep. Using your time machine, you move him to the present day.
• You have the ability to travel to any time period you choose. You have arrived at a crucial period in history and need to contact friends about something really important.
• Inventors of a time machine grow rich and famous from fortune where they become controlling tyrants.
• You overhear two acquaintances plotting to kill your self in the future.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you double wound yourself. What else goes wrong?
• You find yourself at the moment of conception.
• You are stranded in a G major universe.
• Your time machine is on the fritz and you have a party with your future self.
• You find you can travel into the past and become your ancestors. Why do you immediately think of helping yourself? Does it make you feel ashamed regardless?
• You find out you’re destined to commit murder in six days.
• You discover two unknown time portals in your city, one leads to the past, the other to the future.
• You’ve traveled through time to a future date and discover that people living in that era already have time machines and can travel through time. How do you feel about this?
• A time traveller from the future travels back and asks you for one chance to save his family.
• The future you show you in a time machine is awful in many ways but exactly how you predicted.
• You’re a time traveller. A frightened young woman on the run takes shelter in your home while her pursuers are looking for her in the wrong direction.
• You use your time machine to go back in time and catch a murderer.
• You are trapped in an empty black room with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and unleashes Skynet into the world.
• Your time machine sends you decades into the future, but when you return your machine remains where it was.
• Unable to return to your own time, you use your time machine to tour the ages.
• A beam of light from a time machine appears overhead. You realize that you are stuck.
• You’re visited by a man and woman in the future, claiming they are your kids.
• A dog tags along with you when you’re testing the time machine. 20 years later, the time machine malfunctions and returns you and the dog to the present. The dog has then aged 200 years.
• Visiting yourself in the future goes wrong, but you get to keep the time machine.
• Someone suggests you save Hitler.
• The army of the future has time machines at their disposal.
• You’re jumped by a gang and wish yourself to be in your own time machine’s storage place to retrieve a weapon so you can defend yourself.
• A time machine is built based on your design, but you’re found dead, slumped against the time machine. You are declared a martyr.
• You find a time machine on your nose.
• While in the distant past, a saber tooth tiger appears out of nowhere.
• Your pet accidentally gets sent to the future. You have to be content with a slightly evolved animal.
• The person you love ends up marrying someone else. You journey all the way back into time to stop this from happening.
• You use your time machine to track someone across alternate universes. What happens next?

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Several Time Travel Story Ideas

• Posted on 14 Feb, 2020
• Leave a comment

I’ve been working on my novel a lot lately, which is a time travel mystery/thriller. I’m currently about 200 pages in, and I’m satisfied that I’ve avoided a lot of sci-fi tropes so far. It’s a complicated sci-fi subject with a lot of moving parts.

If I’m being honest, the 7 ideas below are insanely weak. I’ll revisit this post sometime later this week. But if you’d like some better ideas, I’ve got a better list here:  10 time travel ideas.

Here are 7 sci-fi ideas…

• A man travels to the past solely in order to create a duplicate of himself. But the duplicate has an evil side and forces the man to swap places, taking his life in the future.
• An entire family time leaps to one hundred years into the future, only to find earth has been evacuated.
• A man travels back in time in order to murder someone who ruined his life, knowing he’ll have a great alibi.
• A man finds a time machine that a time traveler has hidden in the shed behind his house. He inadvertently damages it and the time traveler shows back up to the broken machine.
• A time traveler travels back in time in order to leave a hard drive with the richest man on earth, full of technological designs and secrets he knows the man has the resources to develop, much earlier than they were originally developed.
• A time traveler from far into the future (a few million years) shows up in present-day New York City. He’s surprisingly alien in appearance and has powers that we could have after a million years of evolution.
• A scientist invents the first time machine and immediately shows up to warn himself not to use it.

Let us know what you think about our ideas! Comment below to give us your opinion, add onto an existing idea, or submit one of your own!

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How to Write a Time Travel Story Without Paradoxes

The concept of time travel has long been a popular theme in fiction and film. Traveling back in time to alter the course of history is an alluring idea that has enthralled not just fiction writers but scientists as well. Yet, if you've ever seen or read a time travel story, you're aware that time travel is a tricky concept to grasp. It might be challenging to stay faithful to your worldbuilding concepts while simultaneously incorporating suitable temporal paradoxes.

For this reason, we will explore different paradoxes and go through various tips to help you write a time travel story without the risk of paradoxes.

Where does the idea of time travel come from?

Traveling across time is a shared universal dream. But where did the fascination with time travel begin, and why does the concept appeal to so many people? The lure of time travel has deeper origins. Appearing in some of our oldest stories , it is woven into the very fabric of our language and imagines a world without constraints of time and space. Its roots may be traced back to ancient tales of time travel found in numerous civilizations throughout the world, giving the notion its distinct characteristics derived from different cultures.

We come across time travel stories in ancient cultures throughout the world , although we cannot claim to know where the concept originally came from and who pioneered it. However, we can observe that the genre rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. From this time period comes Charles Dickens' classic novella A Christmas Carol , in which Ebenezer Scrooge travels both ahead and backwards in time. Around the same period, H.G. Wells popularized time travel in literature with his timeless novel The Time Machine , which featured the concept of a "time machine," which featured a vehicle that could travel purposefully and selectively in time. Inspired by this emblematic icon, many beloved time-travel stories published after this have incorporated some form of the time machine. Such is the famous TARDIS in the long-running BBC classic series Doctor Who , a blue box that can transcend time and space. Doctor who interestingly explores time travel paradoxes, with time paradoxes taking a center stage for many of its episodes.

Time travel paradoxes

There are many logical contradictions when it comes to time travel. Here are some of the major paradoxes:

Bootstrap paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time travel that arises when an object transported back in time becomes locked within an unending cause-effect loop. This occurs as the travel in time takes place as a response to a specific event.

Consistency paradox

Consistency Paradoxes , such as the Grandfather Paradox , or the Hitler paradox , a type of timeline mismatch that arises from the prospect of changing the past. These paradoxes change history in such a way that time travel into the past, which caused such action in the first place, is no longer possible. To simply illustrate the paradox, in the film The Time Machine , a protagonist builds a time machine to travel back in time in order to save his fiancé from death. Her rescue, on the other hand, would lead to a future in which the machine never existed since her death was the direct motivation for its creation. But then, how is it you can go back and save your fiancé if her death hasn't given you the push to create the time machine? It results in a paradox. The timeline is no longer self-consistent.

Butterfly effect

The Butterfly Effect is based on Chaos Theory , which states that seemingly minor changes may have massive cascade responses over extended periods of time and that even minor changes can fundamentally reshape history. The name "Butterfly Effect" originates from Ray Bradbury's short tale " A Sound of Thunder ," in which a character in prehistoric times walks on a butterfly, causing massive changes in the future.

How to avoid these paradoxes

The self-healing hypothesis.

Writers seeking to escape the paradoxes of time travel have devised a variety of inventive methods for presenting a more consistent picture of reality. The self-healing hypothesis is one of the most basic solutions to any time travel paradox, implying that no matter what is changed in the timeline, the principles of quantum physics will self-correct to prevent a contradiction from arising and sustain the existing flow .

Because events would adapt themselves, a paradox would not occur. So, changing the past will trigger another alternative chain reaction that will keep the present unaltered. This effectively states that the likelihood of a paradox arising in any given circumstance is zero. The self-healing hypothesis simply indicates that no matter what a traveler has done in the past, the end outcome is the same in terms of global conditions. This does not rule out the possibility of changing the past, but it does eliminate the prospect of minor changes having the power to generate massive ones. Most crucially, as an author, you are not obligated to describe the particular events that repair time. It is enough to affirm that they take place and ensure that your event sequences and their conclusion are consistent.

Time traveling monitor

Another way to avoid temporal paradox would be creating the time traveling monitor that would follow the timeline protection hypothesis , which posits that any attempt to create a paradox would fail to owe to a probability distortion. The monitor would adjust the probability in order to avert any damaging events occurring, which would also give you free rein to come up with creative scenarios. Nonetheless, to prevent an impossible event from taking place, the universe must favor an improbable event occurring.

Balancing the timeline

The paradoxes themselves are intertwined and they can as well occur simultaneously. No one knows if a real-life paradox would result in a large-scale timeline alteration, or if the closed-loop is kind of automatically self-correcting since everything works out equally in the end. Going back to the Consistency Paradox, yet another approach to avoid it is to acknowledge, regretfully, that you can't and shouldn't attempt to change the past. That is unless you can rule out any chance of a bad domino effect as a result of your activities. In this manner, you can attempt to alter the past while keeping the chronology intact. This means following up the time-change event with another change that balances out the activities and ensures that the outcome remains the same despite the intervention.

The notion of a time loop is one of the most prevalent strategies to get away with time travel in science fiction. You may travel through time here, but any changes you make are predetermined. For example, suppose you were pushed out of the way of a car one day. You return to your timeline from the future and realize that that person was in reality you.

Paradoxes are avoided with this method of time travel, but everything is predetermined. If you wish to prevent a tragic incident from occurring in your past, there's nothing you can do since even if you could, it would still happen in the time loop. Whatever you did, the key events would just re-calibrate around you. This could be the solution for the Grandfather Paradox — that would mean that the event propelling you back in time would happen regardless of your actions, providing your younger self with the incentive to go back and stop it. To put it another way, a time traveler could make adjustments, but the original conclusion would still occur — perhaps not exactly as it did in the initial timeline, but near enough.

Parallel universe

There is also another possibility: creating a parallel universe . The future or past you visit might become a parallel reality. Consider it as a huge fortress where you may construct or demolish as many castles as you like, but it has no bearing on your primal stronghold. When you travel back in time, the future is gone, it never happened, and the universe will evolve anew, even if you do nothing to influence it. It does not affect the future you experienced, but it does affect the future of the reset world. That can entail creating a scenario in which the protagonists travel to the past and discover themselves in a parallel world or multiverse, with no change to their original chronology.

Countless science fiction stories have examined the conundrum of what would happen if you could travel back in time and do something that would jeopardize the future. Please note that you are free to make your own rules for it. This is your work of fiction. The universe will be as you will design it in your story. If the paradoxes do not exist in your story, then you may make up your own rules around it. You can as well bypass the rules your worldbuilding has established if you have a valid cause for doing so and if this is what your writing demands.

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Time Travel Writing Prompts

This fun digital download includes 20 time travel-themed writing prompts in three different formats; 1) a one page list, 2) a set of large cards, and 3) a set of small cards. These prompts cover four types of writing styles: expository, persuasive, descriptive, and narrative. They’re perfect for literacy centers, writing folders, daily free writing, unit studies, and more. As a bonus, you also get time travel-themed journal pages, as well as a half-page word list that can provide learners with inspiration and spelling help.

You can use this writing pack in a variety of teaching situations including classrooms, after school programs, homeschools, co-ops, and more. It’s lots of time travel fun!

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100 Creative Writing Prompts for Middle & High School – 2024

April 15, 2024

Some high school students dream of writing for a living, perhaps pursuing an English major in college, or even attending a creative writing MFA program later on. For other students, creative writing can be useful for school assignments, in English and other subjects, and also for preparing their Common App essays . In a less goal-oriented sense, daily freewriting in a journal can be a healthy life practice for many high schoolers. Not sure where to start? Continue reading for 100 creative writing prompts for middle school and high school students. These middle/high school writing prompts offer inspiration for getting started with writing in a number of genres and styles.

Click here to view the 35 Best Colleges for Creative Writing .

What are Creative Writing Prompts?

Similar to how an academic essay prompt provides a jumping-off point for forming and organizing an argument, creative writing prompts are points of initiation for writing a story, poem, or creative essay. Prompts can be useful for writers of all ages, helping many to get past writer’s block and just start (often one of the most difficult parts of a writing process).

Writing prompts come in a variety of forms. Sometimes they are phrases used to begin sentences. Other times they are questions, more like academic essay prompts Writing prompts can also involve objects such as photographs, or activities such as walking. Below, you will find high school writing prompts that use memories, objects, senses (smell/taste/touch), abstract ideas , and even songs as jumping-off points for creative writing. These prompts can be used to write in a variety of forms, from short stories to creative essays, to poems.

How to use Creative Writing Prompts

Before we get started with the list, are a few tips when using creative writing prompts:

Experiment with different formats : Prose is great, but there’s no need to limit yourself to full sentences, at least at first. A piece of creative writing can begin with a poem, or a dialogue, or even a list. You can always bring it back to prose later if needed.

Interpret the prompt broadly : The point of a creative writing prompt is not to answer it “correctly” or “precisely.” You might begin with the prompt, but then your ideas could take you in a completely different direction. The words in the prompt also don’t need to open your poem or essay, but could appear somewhere in the middle.

Switch up/pile up the prompts : Try using two or three prompts and combine them, or weave between them. Perhaps choose a main prompt, and a different “sub-prompt.” For example, your main prompt might be “write about being in transit from one place to another,” and within that prompt, you might use the prompt to “describe a physical sensation,” and/or one the dialogue prompts.  This could be a fun way to find complexity as you write.

Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School Students (Continued)

Write first, edit later : While you’re first getting started with a prompt, leave the typos and bad grammar. Obsessing over details can take away from your flow of thoughts. You will inevitably make many fixes when you go back through to edit.

Write consistently : It often becomes easier to write when it’s a practice , rather than a once-in-a-while kind of activity. For some, it’s useful to write daily. Others find time to write every few days, or every weekend. Sometimes, a word-count goal can help (100 words a day, 2,000 words a month, etc.). If you set a goal, make sure it’s realistic. Start small and build from there, rather than starting with an unachievable goal and quickly giving up.

100 Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School Teens

Here are some prompts for getting started with your creative writing. These are organized by method, rather than genre, so they can inspire writing in a variety of forms. Pick and choose the ones that work best for you, and enjoy!

Prompts using memories

• Begin each sentence or group of sentences with the phrase, “I remember…”
• Describe a family ritual.
• Choose an event in your life, and write about it from the perspective of someone else who was there.
• Pick a pathway you take on a regular basis (to school, or to a friend’s house). Describe five landmarks that you remember from this pathway.
• Write about your house or apartment using a memory from each room.
• Write an imaginary history of the previous people who lived in your house or apartment.
• Write about an ancestor based on stories you’ve heard from relatives.
• What’s your earliest memory?
• Who was your first friend?
• Write a letter to someone you haven’t seen since childhood.
• Write about yourself now from the perspective of yourself twenty, or eighty, years from now.
• Write about the best month of the year.
• Write about the worst day of the year.
• Rant about something that has always annoyed you.
• Write about the hottest or coldest day you can remember.
• Visualize a fleeting moment in your life and as though it’s a photograph, and time yourself 5 minutes to write every detail you can remember about the scene.
• Draw out a timeline of your life so far. Then choose three years to write about, as though you were writing for a history book.
• Write about a historical event in the first person, as though you remember it.
• Write about a memory of being in transit from one place to another.

Objects and photographs as creative writing prompts

• Describe the first object you see in the room. What importance does it have in your life? What memories do you have with this object? What might it symbolize?
• Pick up an object, and spend some time holding it/examining it. Write about how it looks, feels, and smells. Write about the material that it’s made from.
• Choose a favorite family photograph. What could someone know just by looking at the photograph? What’s secretly happening in the photograph?
• Choose a photograph and tell the story of this photograph from the perspective of someone or something in it.
• Write about a color by describing three objects that are that color.
• Tell the story of a piece of trash.
• Tell the story of a pair of shoes.
• Tell the story of your oldest piece of clothing.

Senses and observations as creative writing prompts

• Describe a sound you hear in the room or outside. Choose the first sound you notice. What are its qualities? It’s rhythms? What other sounds does it remind you of?
• Describe a physical sensation you feel right now, in as much detail as possible.
• Listen to a conversation and write down a phrase that you hear someone say. Start a free-write with this phrase.
• Write about a food by describing its qualities, but don’t say what it is.
• Describe a flavor (salty, sweet, bitter, etc.) to someone who has never tasted it before.
• Narrate your day through tastes you tasted.
• Narrate your day through sounds you heard.
• Narrate your day through physical sensations you felt.
• Describe in detail the physical process of doing an action you consider simple or mundane, like walking or lying down or chopping vegetables.
• Write about the sensation of doing an action you consider physically demanding or tiring, like running or lifting heavy boxes.
• Describe something that gives you goosebumps.
• Write a story that involves drinking a cold glass of water on a hot day.
• Write a story that involves entering a warm house from a cold snowy day.
• Describe someone’s facial features in as much detail as possible.

Songs, books, and other art

• Choose a song quote, write it down, and free-write from there.
• Choose a song, and write a story in which that song is playing in the car.
• Choose a song, and write to the rhythm of that song.
• Choose a character from a book, and describe an event in your life from the perspective of that character.
• Go to a library and write down 10 book titles that catch your eye. Free-write for 5 minutes beginning with each one.
• Go to a library and open to random book pages, and write down 5 sentences that catch your attention. Use those sentences as prompts and free-write for 5-minutes with each.
• Choose a piece of abstract artwork. Jot down 10 words that come to mind from the painting or drawing, and free-write for 2 minutes based on each word.
• Find a picture of a dramatic Renaissance painting online. Tell a story about what’s going on in the painting that has nothing to do with what the artist intended.
• Write about your day in five acts, like a Shakespearean play. If your day were a play, what would be the introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution?
• Narrate a complicated book or film plot using only short sentences.
• Read a short poem. Then write a poem that could be a “sister” or “cousin” of that poem.

Abstract ideas as creative writing prompts

• Write about an experience that demonstrates an abstract idea, such as “love” or “home” or “freedom” or “loss” without ever using the word itself.
• Write a list of ways to say “hello” without actually saying “hello.”
• Write a list of ways to say “I love you” without actually saying “I love you.”
• Do you believe in ghosts? Describe a ghost.
• Invent a mode of time travel.
• Glass half-full/half-empty: Write about an event or situation with a positive outlook. Then write about it with a miserable outlook.
• Free-write beginning with “my religion is…” (what comes next can have as much or as little to do with organized religion as you’d like).
• Free-write beginning with “my gender is…” (what comes next can have as much or as little to do with common ideas of gender as you’d like).
• Write about a person or character that is “good” and one that is “evil.” Then write about the “evil” in the good character and the “good” in the evil character.
• Write like you’re telling a secret.
• Describe a moment of beauty you witnessed. What makes something beautiful?

Prompts for playing with narrative and character

• Begin writing with the phrase, “It all started when…”
• Tell a story from the middle of the most dramatic part.
• Write a story that begins with the ending.
• Begin a story but give it 5 possible endings.
• Write a list of ways to dramatically quit a terrible job.
• Write about a character breaking a social rule or ritual (i.e., walking backwards, sitting on the floor of a restaurant, wearing a ballgown to the grocery store). What are the ramifications?
• You are sent to the principal’s office. Justify your bad behavior.
• Re-write a well-known fairytale but set it in your school.
• Write your own version of the TV show trope where someone gets stuck in an elevator with a stranger, or a secret love interest, or a nemesis.
• Imagine a day where you said everything you were thinking, and write about it.
• Write about a scenario in which you have too much of a good thing.
• Write about a scenario in which money can buy happiness.
• Invent a bank or museum heist.
• Invent a superhero, including an origin story.
• Write using the form of the scientific method (question, hypothesis, test, analyze data conclusion).
• Write using the form of a recipe.

Middle School & High School Creative writing prompts for playing with fact vs. fiction

• Write something you know for sure is true, and then, “but maybe it isn’t.” Then explain why that thing may not be true.
• Write a statement and contradict that statement. Then do it again.
• Draft an email with an outlandish excuse as to why you didn’t do your homework or why you need an extension.
• Write about your morning routine, and make it sound extravagant/luxurious (even if it isn’t).
• You’ve just won an award for doing a very mundane and simple task. Write your acceptance speech.
• Write about a non-athletic event as though it were a sports game.
• Write about the most complicated way to complete a simple task.
• Write a brief history of your life, and exaggerate everything.
• Write about your day, but lie about some things.
• Tell the story of your birth.
• Choose a historical event and write an alternative outcome.
• Write about a day in the life of a famous person in history.
• Read an instructional manual, and change three instructions to include some kind of magical or otherwise impossible element.

Prompts for starting with dialogue

• Write a texting conversation between two friends who haven’t spoken in years.
• Write a texting conversation between two friends who speak every day and know each other better than anyone.
• Watch two people on the street having a conversation, and imagine the conversation they’re having. Write it down.
• Write an overheard conversation behind a closed door that you shouldn’t be listening to.
• Write a conversation between two characters arguing about contradicting memories of what happened.
• You have a difficult decision to make. Write a conversation about it with yourself.
• Write a conversation with a total lack of communication.
• Write a job interview gone badly.

Final Thoughts – Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School & High School 

Hopefully you have found several of these creative writing prompts helpful. Remember that when writing creatively, especially on your own, you can mix, match, and change prompts. For more on writing for high school students, check out the following articles:

• College Application Essay Topics to Avoid
• 160 Good Argumentative Essay Topics
• 150 Good Persuasive Speech Topics
• Good Transition Words for Essays
• High School Success

Sarah Mininsohn

With a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sarah is a writer, educator, and artist. She served as a graduate instructor at the University of Illinois, a tutor at St Peter’s School in Philadelphia, and an academic writing tutor and thesis mentor at Wesleyan’s Writing Workshop.

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Team Wanderlust | 12 June 2020

13 travel writing prompts to inspire you.

Use these travel writing prompts, initially created as part of the Wanderlust Writing Challenge, to help inspire your writing, dream up new story ideas, or simply get your creative juices flowing...

Welcome! You've landed on Wanderlust 's travel writing prompts. Hopefully, you're sat at your laptop (or have your pen in hand) and are ready to write.

Originally created for the Wanderlust Writing Challenge, these prompts are designed to help you flex your writing muscles. All of them will help you to explore past travels as something to write about, and hopefully spark a few ideas for future stories, articles and journal entries.

Don't forget to let us know if you've used one of our writing prompts. Tell us  @wanderlustmag on Twitter , or on Facebook . To find about the Writing Challenge, and when the winners will be announced, head here . 

Explore your senses

Nothing like the sight - and sound - of a lion on safari (Shutterstock)

For your first prompt, let’s open up the senses. Write no more than three sentences about one of your favourite destinations. Include all five senses in your description.

What can you see, hear and smell? Was the sun shining, and did you smell crisp, clear fresh air? Were cars whizzing past in a bustling city centre, or were you struck by the wild roar of a lion on safari? What did you eat while you were there – how delicious (or not-so-delicious) did it taste? Did you touch anything – how did it feel?

Save your sentences in a safe place, like a Notes folder or a Word Doc, so you can refer back to them.

Describing people

Practice writing about people (Shutterstock)

Often, our travels involve meeting kind strangers or quirky characters. Before you write about them, it might be easier to describe someone you know. Pick someone you’re close to – be it a travel companion, a friend at home, a family member, etc – and write out 10 words you’d use to describe them.

Think about their personality, the way they walk and talk, their laugh, not just their physical appearance. Now take two or three of those descriptors, and use them in a line or two about the person.

Reflect: Looking back, do you think you chose the best adjectives? Have any others popped into your head today, maybe that would be suited to describing the people you met on the road? Write them down and keep them somewhere you can look back on.

A picture tells 1,000 words

Today's prompt requires reflecting on travel photographs (Shutterstock)

Whether print or digital, pull out your last (pre-lockdown) travel photo. Take a good long look at it – what’s happening in the shot?

Write a short account of that experience, just before and just after you snapped the photo. As much as you like, but a few lines is more than enough. What was it like? What were you doing? How do you feel about that experience looking back now?

Don’t worry about trying to make it sound ‘fancy’ – instead, imagine you’re recounting the experience to a friend or fellow traveller.

Reflect: Did you find it easier to write when you imagined telling the story to someone? Or harder? It’s great to journal and record travel experiences for yourself, but your entry at the end of the challenge is about writing a story for other people – friends, and fellow travellers – read and enjoy.

Sentence starter

Not sure where to begin? Try this sentence starter (Shutterstock)

As  we've learned , an engaging first line and paragraph is important for hooking the reader's attention. Especially when it comes to travel writing. So, h ere's a sentence starter to get you going.

Try starting a piece of writing with the sentence:  Of all the things that could have gone wrong, this could only happen to me.  You'll need to revisit a trip that didn't quite go to plan to make it work.

Conversations

Inside a market in Fes, Morocco (Shutterstock)

When we're travelling for ourselves, we don't often think to make a note of the conversations we have, though professional travel journalists and authors will often take a notebook and note conversations, times, dates and places.

For the latest prompt, try to write up what you remember of an interaction with a local, or a fellow traveller, from any past adventure you've been on. Where were you: haggling in a market? Meeting at a restaurant? What do you remember them saying, exactly? Can you only remember the outline of what they said? If so, jot it down.

What was it about? How did they describe things? Did you learn something from the conversation, and if so, how would get that across subtly in your writing, without saying it outright? Imagine how you'd recall the conversation to a friend or colleague, and try to write it that way.

Write as much or as little as you like. Keep your writing somewhere safe, so you can refer back to it.

Highs and lows

Kayaking through Lan Ha Bay? Definitely a high point (Shutterstock)

On any trip, no matter how spectacular, there'll be high points and low points. You may be ticking off a bucket list adventure, or enjoying one of the world's great wonders, but nobody is immune to the annoyance of a delayed flight or missing suitcase.

Ups and downs are still part of our travel experience, whether we like it or not. So, decide which trip you'd like to write about (surely, when you think of a 'low point', one springs to mind?) and try to take your reader on a short journey, starting with the lowest point.

The purpose? To help you write a knockout ending - with the 'pay off' being the absolute highlight of the trip. What went wrong, and how did you get past it? Was it all worth it in the end?

What's the weather?

A rather angry-looking Sydney lightning storm (Shutterstock)

Picture the worst weather you’ve experienced on your travels: biting cold, stifling heat or endless flurries of rain. How did it feel? Did you get drenched? Maybe it was so severe you had to seek shelter, or find a water supply?

Write as much or as little you like for this prompt, but you must start with a straight-into-the-action description of the weather around you.  See where that takes you.

If describing the weather doesn't come naturally, make an attempt to one instance of pathetic fallacy. It's a writing technique where you attribute a human emotion or feeling to something in nature, like an animal or, indeed, the weather. Here's an example: The sandstorm raged on.  Often, it mirrors the narrator's own feelings.

Sentence starter #2

What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you? (Shutterstock)

No pressure to remember conversations or practice literary techniques for today’s prompt! Phew . Today, we just want to focus on the kindness of strangers, which was also our theme for the  Wanderlust Writing Challenge.

Simply begin a short (or long - up to you) piece of writing about your life, leading on from:   The kindest thing anyone has ever done for me is…

Reflect: How did this prompt go down? And was your experience connected to travel, or was it something that happened in your home life? We'd love to know, tell us on Twitter , Instagram or Facebook

Pack your bags

Write about packing for a trip (Shutterstock)

Wherever you travel, however you travel, and no matter how long you travel for - packing for your trip is essential. Today's prompt is all about turning that unavoidable constant into something a bit more creative. It's simple: write as much or as little as you like about a packing for a recent trip. 

Ever packed for a long weekend the night before, and argued with your travel companion about a misplaced passport? Felt overwhelmed by a to-do list for a trek or three-month expedition, and forgotten most everything on it?

How do you feel when you pack: are you calm and excited for the adventure ahead, or do you feel wistful as you come across old plane tickets and paper maps, as you re-pack your trusty travel case? Perhaps you simply hate this part of travel, and want to (comedically) vent your frustration. Put it all down on paper, and see where that takes you.

Sentence starter #3

Where did you last land? Time to tell the story (Shutterstock)

Keeping it simple with another sentence starter. Write as much or as little as you like about a travel experience, following on from: As soon as I landed in... 

A seafood barbecue by the Mediterranean Sea (Shutterstock)

Foodie travellers, rejoice! This prompt is for you. Your challenge is to write a few lines, a short paragraph, about a particularly enjoyable foodie experience you've had.

A  region or country's cuisine is part of its culture, and for lots of us, a big part of our travel experience. So, aim for lots of vivid detail: what were your surroundings? Was it made by a local chef?  What did you eat? What ingredients could you taste?

Was when you ate it important (say, after a challenging hike), and how did it make you feel? And important, did you dare to try the national tipple after your meal? 

The Simien Mountains in Ethiopia (Shutterstock)

Describe the most breathtaking, awe-inspiring landscape you've ever witnessed, putting our travel writing tips into practice.

Don't fall into the trap of over-fluffing your descriptions, with fancy words you'd never use in daily life. At the same time, make a real effort to avoid these  all-too-common travel writing phrases . Time to stretch your vocabulary. Write as much or as little as you like, but aim for at least a few lines.

Reading your work

An Arctic village. Will you describe the people, the food, the landscape - or all three? (Shutterstock)

Your writing prompt today isn't about writing. It's about reading, which is incredibly important if you want to be a travel writer. Not just the work of others, but your own work, too.

Firstly, give yourself a pat on the back if you're here and you've used some of these prompts – challenging yourself to write when you're just starting out or are starved for inspiration isn’t easy! 

Secondly, read through what you've written based on these prompts. Choose your favourite piece of writing and continue it - write the full story, flesh it out and see where it takes you. Enjoy.

P.S. Do let us know if you would like us to keep updating this article with more prompts. W e always love to hear from you  at [email protected].

More travel writing inspiration to enjoy:, how to describe people in your travel writing, 10 classic (and expert) writing tips for travel articles, related articles, looking for inspiration.

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