I'm Fwoosheye and these are my writing prompts. The big majority of them are fanfic based, but there are some general prompts too, as well as some writing advice, tests and exercises. No credit is needed (though appreciated) but it would be great if you could leave a link to your fic in the comments or a reblog of the prompt you did so I can check it out :)
Hello! This blog is for my writing prompts and tips (moved from my fanfiction profile), and while the big majority of prompts are fanfiction-based there will also be other prompts tagged #general prompt.
After the Keep reading you will find indexes of this blog’s four categories:
Fandoms (Links to respective fandoms can be found after the keep reading!)
Writing Advices
Writing Exercises
Writing Tests
BTW: Regardless if you use a prompt for a fanfic or original project you do not need to credit me, but I would appreciate if you could post a link in the comment of whichever you was inspired by so not only I but others who would enjoy reading it can find it, thank you! <3
Bonus prompt for ANY story:
Make it LGBT+. Maybe have a non-binary character? An asexual or demi one? Someone whose sexual and romantic attraction aren't aligned? It doesn't need to be the main character(s) or have the plot revolve around their attraction/gender itself - peoples lives don’t revolve around being queer after all. Just include some non-staight and/or non-cis characters that aren't tokens.
And to any troll that might try pull the pedophile/beastiality card: Children and animals CAN'T GIVE CONSENT, therefore pedophiles are NOT a part of the LGBT-community no matter how much bullshit-propaganda might claim it is.
Fandoms:
General promts / Non-specified fandoms
All fanfiction-based prompts
Crossover prompts
Addams Family
Artemis Fowl
Asterix / Asterix and Obelix
DC (Batman, Aquaman)
D. Gray Man
Disney / Pixar (Sword in the Stone, Princess and the Frog, Wall-E)
Dreamworks (Shrek)
Fullmetal Alchemist / FMA / FMAB
Good Omens
Harry Potter all potter-related prompts should be modified or deleted now, but I'm leaving the link for now just in case i've missed one and (and if I have please drop a comment on it so I can fix it, thank you!)
Hobbit
Legend of Zelda / LoZ XX (AL, ALBW, ALTTP, BOTW, HW, LA, MC, MM, OOT, SS, ST, TP, WW)
Lord of the Ring / LotR
Marvel / MCU (Avengers, Hulk, Iron Man, Spiderman, Ant-man)
M*A*S*H
One Piece
Persona/Persona 5
Silent Hill
Spyro
Tintin
Some prompts are (or can work as) crossovers and will be tagged with #crossover too.
Undertale
*Regarding the Harry Potter prompts... I, as many others, are pissed off at rowling's due her treatment of the Trans Community. I might be cis myself but she have hurt a lot of people. There are a few (as in very few) HP-fanfics I still read but those are mostly crossovers because I enjoy seeing how people handle the mash-up, and/or because they are tackling problematic issues better than many officially published works do.
I’m trying to go through all HP-based prompts I have posted, to see which can be turned into a general/other fandom prompt and so on, but if I can’t figure out how to make it that I’ll still leave them up in case it can inspire you for some other fandom fics (or make a HP fic that’s really “FU rowling”). It is, however, a v e r y slow going.
Writing advice:
Just some general advices about writing
Active vs. Passive voice, what is it?
Descriptions, or no descriptions? That's the question
How advanced should your language be?
Original Characters (OC:s)
Paragraphs
Phrases/idioms and language barriers
Point of View (PoV)
Prejudices
Romance
Soulmates (this one will get prompts to challenge you to improve the trope)
Stereotypes
Summaries
“Write what you know”
+ Occasional reblogs from others with good tips and resources!
Writing Exercises:
Some exercises I've found useful or think others might find helpful
Crossovers (character building)
Dialogue - Lies (show don't tell)
No kissing (romance/show don't tell)
Pregnant, mood, location (show don't tell)
Writing Tests:
Not sure if "tests" are the best way to describe them but they're various tools to check how well rounded characters are etc.
Aila test (indigenous women)
Anti-freeze test/Thor's min rule (women)
Bechdel test (women)
Checkov's friend (where did they go?)
Chávez-Perez test (people of colour)
Finkbeiner test (female scientists)
Furiosa test (the "misogynimeter")
Mako Mori test (women)
Russo test (LGBT+)
Roxane Gay test (revised Bechdel)
Sexy lamp test (usefulness)
Smurfette principle (male-female ratio)
"Strength is relative" (complex women)
Tauriel test (competent women)
List of triggers:
Subjects in prompts that might be triggering for people. In the tags they all start with "tw"
Abuse
Betrayal
Broken bones
Burns
Chloroform
Drugs
Faulty accusation
Fight
Gambling addiction
Illness
Injury
Hostage
Kidnapping
Lethal injury
Murder
Murder attempt
Poisoning
Rape (only mentioned briefly in writing advices/tests!)
Suicide / Suicide attempt
Terrorizing
Torture
Violence
The list will be adjusted as needed. If you discover I’ve missed something please let me know!
A Hobbit and Lord of the Ring crossover (kinda) idea, where Thorin, Kili, Fili, and one more of your choice, who all fell in the Battle of the Five Armies, are reborn as hobbits. But not just as any hobbits — they're reborn as Frodo, Sam, Pippin and Merry.
Who else fell at BoFA? Another member of the Company? Bard? An elf or an OC perhaps?
Who is reborn as who? Personally I would have Thorin be reborn as Frodo because I like the flashback potential of Thorin witnessing Bilbo going kinda gold sick for a ring and almost attacking him, and then Kili and Fili as Pippin and Merry respectively because of their vibes. Sam I would probably let be the reincarnation of Dwalin or something, though Gloin could also be fun considering Gimli, but there are many potential candidates for the post.
When do they start remembering their previous lives, and how does those memories affect their "new selves"?
New LoZ AU (or Linked Universe AU?) idea (feel free to steal/adopt it, just please send me the link if you post anything):
The Hero of the Four Sword, upon returning the blade to its pedestal, does not merge into Link — they merge into Shadow. So now we have a Link with Shadow Powers and the colors are chatting in the back of his mind, sometimes taking over the control when he needs their expertise. Shadow is just as confused as everybody else over how this happened
A The Hobbit and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) crossover, where Smaug didn't come to the Lonely Mountain, but instead from a cave within the mountain which had been barricaded away from everyone but himself by the orders of a gold sick King Thror. Where witnesses could hear the King's scream be drowned out by that of a dragon, which after killing the King then attacked the mountain and its inhabitants. However, that's only partly true: King Thror, in his Gold Sickness, decided that the only way to ensure the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone, wasn't stolen was to swallow it. But what he didn't know was that the Arkenstone is a Secret Stone, and thus turns into a Dragon with Gold Sickness when he swallows it.
So essentially:
The Arkenstone is a Secret Stone like in TotK, it just looked a little different and was never found by the Zonai
King Thror swallows the Stone and turns into Smaug
This Smaug is probably less coherent than in canon and unable to talk (unless?), but he still has the Gold Sickness
If any Zelda character who is in the know of the Secret Stones and the Draconification process becomes involved, will they connect the dots?
If so, will they try to reverse the effect? How? Will they succeed? How would that affect things?
Is Princess Zelda there to help? Does she look fully human or does she have dragon features left? How would that affect things?
Will Thorin (or somebody else in the Company, e.g. Kili or Ori or even Bilbo maybe) awaken as a Sage? Of which element in that case? Earth maybe? Something else?
Essentially this is a result of me pondering on various LoZ AU-ideas in random the Hobbit settings, and remembering that both the Arkenstone and the Secret Stones are glowing rocks, which in turn resulted in this prompt/challenge. It's one o'clock in the morning as I'm writing this and I take no responsibility for what my brain cooks up at these hours
Some of the biggest fantasy worldbuilding fails that I see, in no particular order
Gods without religion. The Gods are real and a known historical fact, but virtually nobody is religious.
Cultural racism/discrimination without structural racism/discrimination. Discrimination that exists only in microagressions or mean comments, without existing in any sort of structural way.
Secret history with no clear reason for it to be secret and no clear method for maintaining that secrecy. Major parts of the world's history are kept entirely secret, even though there's not an obvious reason to do so and even when history has shown this is virtually impossible to enforce (especially in a world with any movement or communication across borders).
Large, homogeneous countries. Even without immigration, virtually no country larger than the Vatican will be fully homogeneous in terms of culture, dialect, beliefs, traditions, etc., much less a large one with limited communication technology as is often seen in fantasy. The Planet of Hats problem.
Racial/species accents instead of regional accents. Like listen I know “all dwarves are Scottish” but a dwarf who is raised in the Underdark is not going to have the same accent as a dwarf who is raised on the surface a hundred thousand miles away in the literal exact same way that being white doesn’t mean having a Texan accent
Polytheism as monotheism with a phone book. (I will never shut up about this.) A polytheistic religion actually specifically means that there is more than one deity, so you offer prayers and offerings to the one who best suits your needs AT THE TIME… not that you pick your favourite one from a list and that’s Your God who You Worship and the only one you interact with. You do not pray to Odin to bring in a good harvest (but Thor, Freyr, Freya, or Frigg are all good options)
No one has ever heard of magic before. Now this is specifically if magic is explicitly included in the world, but as a general rule, if your MC has magical abilities that they have recognized and been able to hone with help from a mentor, or there’s a formal system like a sorcery guild or wizard school, people just might suspect that your MC knows magic when something implausible happens. Especially basic beginner magic - creating a shower of sparks in a world without electricity probably only has one cause, so they’ll look for a mage before “ooh what could possibly be causing that oh no!”
Everyone is human in a modern/urban fantasy. Fuck you put elves in your Starbucks.
Yeah it’s one of the clearest flags of being raised in a monotheistic society and not actually thinking all that deeply when “changing” religions
(I mean really, trading SkyDaddy for Dishonourable War Berserker Daddy is painted as a direct one to one but Odin only became relevant after the vikings found England he’s just not the specialist we need)
There’s a whole concept in classical Greek culture specifically called sophrosune, which means “The Gods Will Kick Your Ass If You Play Favourites”
It was considered dangerous and bad to praise one god to the point of denigrating another, and the god you praised would be the one to kick your ass for trying to start shit
I wish people would just. Just learn one little thing. Before trying to put it in their worlds and games. Just open a book. Just look at history.
People have been people since the beginning of time and we always will be, but that is not the same as saying “and there’s no real difference”
Some motherfucker on here wrote a beautiful story about Odin welcoming people into Valhalla as warriors for fighting cancer and shit like that and listen
It was beautiful. It was touching. It was a wonderful story.
It was fucking bullshit there was SPECIFICALLY a place for every single person who didn’t get shanked bloody on a battlefield to go and it was Niflheim or Niflhel
(This was why Odin would deliberately and intentionally turn on his best heroes at their moment of greatest need to make sure they died violently)
Hel will welcome you with open, slightly frosted arms, and the Lady of Comfort did nothing whatsoever to deserve to be slighted like that
Also, Freya again. Goddess of death and magic and making sure warriors were reunited with their lovers in her hall of Fólkvangr because not everyone was into Valhalla but they still needed to not be scared to die in battle
But no, see, if we want Direct Christian Parallels, Odin ended up ruling the Æsir so he gets to play SkyDaddy because he’s got that old patriarchal Look, and well Hel, it’s in the name, and that’s also why Hades was a villain in Disney’s Hercules
(He also did nothing to deserve this he kidnapped one single person EVER, and was such a wifeguy that there were whole cults worshipping her to make sure they got a good afterlife
The Eleusinian mysteries, one of the few “mysteries” we do actually know something about because, well, they were fucking huge and widespread because people have always worried about what happens when you die)
If you want to worship a deity you should probably do a LOT more research than just to build a fantasy world and I will not be the one who dies on this hill but I will make it taller with as many bodies as necessary
Summaries can be tricky, so here are my tips on how one might improve on it:
Don’t write that you’re bad at summaries. That will definitely drive away your readers.
Don’t just write “Full summary inside” and nothing more. Most people will ignore that. If your summary is really long, it’s better to write a small part of it and then tell the full one is inside.
Remember that, in a way, a summary is often the preview of the first change-triggering event, the thing that get’s the ball rolling.
One way is to think “if this was a short prompt, what would it look like” and then possibly replace the “what if” with “where” depending on your style. Compare “What if Link thought Poison Ivy was a Great Fairy?” vs. “Where Link thinks Poison Ivy is a Great Fairy”. The upside with the former is that you can easier add stuff like “After leaving Termina Link finds himself in Gotham, in a very special Greenhouse, filled with what looks like Deku Babas…” but the other one might suit your specific tone better.
You can also copy a small part of the dialogue or a scene in lieu of working together a summary, just remember that the chosen part ought to reflect the over all plot and/or tone of your story.
Look at your basic plot-line. If you remove all the subplots and stuff, what do you have left? This is probably what you should use in the summary.
If your story is very complex with many turns, focus on the main-plot of where things first start rolling. You don’t need to tell the reader what the midpoint or climax of your story will be (as a matter of fact, that should be probably be avoided). What you need to do is to lure them in with the promise of massive change early on.
If you feel your summary is too short, you can use a few key-word to compliment it with to give your reader an extra clue of what ahead, e.g. “kidnappings, sassy minions and a one-eyed dog”. Be careful with using too many however, as that might imply the story lacks a consistent red thread. 3-5 “points” is usually enough, if you make sure you pick carefully. Ask yourself this: Which important event(s)/unique vip character(s) can be written vaguely enough it won’t spoil the story yet still make the reader curious enough to pick it up and not be disappointed when they reach your baits?
if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.
There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom. A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship. That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon. Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.
The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence. The lack of safety. The lack of freedom. The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust. They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing. They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.
That doesn’t work. That is not how it works.
Lives cannot be characterized by negative space. This is a statement about writing. It’s also a statement about life.
You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there. Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail. A silhouette. The gaps are real but they're not the point.
If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there. Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety. Safety is relative. There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day. Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.
If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?
Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety. Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.
What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone? It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end. It’s not just a void.
The absence of safety is the presence of fear. The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision. The lack of love feels like self-loathing. The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.
You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better. You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.
This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too. Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security. Your character is full. They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world. They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there. It’s always there. You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child. You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another.
People who are abused make choices. In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again. People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.
They’re not little lost children. They’re not empty. They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.
Don’t tell me about gaps. Tell me about what’s there instead.
In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.
What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)
Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.
The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.
writing advice for characters with a missing eye: dear God does losing an eyes function fuck up your neck. Ever since mine crapped out I've been slowly and unconsciously shifting towards holding my head at an angle to put the good eye closer to the center. and human necks. are not meant to accommodate that sorta thing.
other things I'm bitching about but which could still be useful as writing advice for 1 eyed characters:
2. they're going to favor their sighted side, obviously, but it doesn't always manifest in the way you think. when I walk down a hall I walk much closer to the wall on my sighted side than on my blind side. which is the opposite of how it might seem logical to do that bc it means the world at large is on your bad side, but the reason is I can't fucking See the wall if it's right next to me in the blind side and I end up knocking into it.
3. door frames and poles are my enemy. If your character is smart this will not be a problem but for me it is. I am King of walking into shit I could absolutely see but couldn't tell how far away from me it was. on this note, their blind side hand is getting bashed into every jutting out thing in a 5 mile radius.
4. having 0 depth perception is less of a big deal than you'd think it is. Especially with driving. I've become a Much safer and more wary driver because I can't tell how far the other cars are from me. however I fucking suck at parking now. because I can't tell how far the lines are from me either.
5. you know how people who lose limbs get phantom pains? that happens with eyes too but like. phantom sights. for me it's like. a lot of bugs. like every so often my brain will just put something suddenly skittering beside me there. hate that.
6. it is completely possible to "get stuck" somewhere because your ability to tell how wide a space is is just Gone. shopping isles especially where bumping something or Someone is matter of embarrassment or potentially breaking something. it can be legitimately paralyzing and also irritate everyone around you because they can tell there is Plenty of space for you to get your cart through even if you can't.
7. if the eye is still in their skull it can still be the normal kind of painful. Glares off of shiny surfaces causing weird sharp pains you can't figure out the cause of are genuinely one of gods greatest tests of my patience.
I was going to make this a tagging game & include my taglist, but it's pretty involved and I don't want anyone to feel pressured to do it if it's a chore/they don't want to/it's not helpful to them.
Below are some exercises I find really, really useful for pulling brand new characters out of my ass. Barring that, they're fun to do for existing characters as well!
Paint a picture of a character by describing their bedroom while they’re not in it.
Whip up a new one right now, fall back on a tried and true OC. Or a canon character; I’m not the boss of you.
Shuffle a playlist on your music player of choice. For whichever song plays, describe what you “see” with your imagination.
For those of you who struggle to “see” imagined things, just tell me what’s goin’ on in that beautiful noodle of yours. Also, please tell me the song so I can listen to it while I read this part!
Describe a character by turning out their pockets.
what has it got in its pocketses?
An abandoned and unlocked phone (or wallet, if you wanna go back a coupla decades) has been discovered in a ratty little diner bathroom. What’s in there? What does it tell us about its owner?
Think photos, payment methods, notes, messages, Internet searches, receipts, etc. If cell phones and Waffle Houses aren't things in your character's world, pretend they are.
If you do all or some of these, please tag me because I would be overjoyed to read them!
In A Link to the Past, there's a glitch that have resulted in there being a few "ghosts" in the swamp Misery Mire in the Dark World, who cannot hurt Link but in certain conditions can be hurt themselves. The ghosts are a bunch of Ku (aka Dark World Zoras), so what if Link encountered one/several...
Why are the ghosts of those Kus lingering in the Swamp?
How did they die? Did they get stuck in the shallow water and suffocated or something (based on them only appearing in deep water in ALttP)? Or if they can live in short water (based on ALBW logic where they can run on land), was there something else going on?
Can Link see those ghosts, or did he discover their existence on accident while using e.g. the Bombos Medallion? If the latter, does he figure out what they are on his own through old fashioned detective work (e.g. talking to people about the history of Misery Mire and learning there was a battle there or that there used to be a prison there or something), or does he find an item (such as the glasses in ALBW or the Lens of Truth in OoT/MM) or a friend (a witch or a medium perhaps) that reveal the truth to him?
Can (and will) Link help the ghosts move on?
Can be used with various AU:s (e.g. a Links-meet-AU, modern AU, or a crossover) if you want to!
This video explains the what, how, and whys behind this glitch (it was very interesting actually to see what those weird "ghosts" were and how they function), but in short it's because the Ku-ghosts' "spawning area" is only on shallow water, but their code only permits them to (successfully) spawn in deep water, resulting in them trying over and over and over again to resurface but never being successful.
I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.
Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!
Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)
And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)
