I’ve been in the trenches teaching writing for over twenty years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: the actual writing? That’s just labor. The real beast is finding a concept that actually has teeth. I’m talking about the kind of idea that makes you ditch your friends, ignore your phone, and sit staring at a screen until your eyes bleed because the story just won’t shut up.
That’s high-concept. Period.
Forget the fancy textbook definitions. High-concept is just a punch to the jaw. It’s a premise so sharp you can pitch it to some producer in a bathroom line and watch their brain start spinning before they even wash their hands. It’s a “What if?” that you’ve pushed past the point of sanity.
Honestly, I put this list together because I’m bored. I am flat-out tired of the same recycled garbage—the “amnesiac hero” or the “mismatched buddies on a trip to Vegas.” We’ve seen it. A thousand times. It’s filler. We need something raw—new, jagged ways to look at the trainwreck of being human.
These 100 prompts exist for one reason: to stop you from overthinking and start you typing. Some of these are dark as hell. Some are just plain weird. A few might even make you squirm. Good. If a premise doesn’t scare you a little bit, it probably isn’t worth the ink.
Do me a favor: don’t be precious with these. Treat them like a junkyard. Strip ’em for parts. Smash two of them together. Take a sci-fi hook and set it in the 1800s. Your job isn’t to be a “storyteller”—it’s to be a goddamn architect of the strange.
So, look through. Find the one that makes your gut twist. Then, quit the scrolling, open your software, and slap down FADE IN.
Everything else is just noise.
Time & Memory
Time’s the one thing nobody can cheat—or so we thought. These prompts mess with causality, memory, and the illusion that yesterday actually stays in yesterday. If you’re into stories where characters are trapped, looping, or watching their lives split into a thousand different “what ifs,” this is your playground. Time travel’s been done to death, sure, but when you make it personal—when it’s about losing yourself in the rewind—that’s when it gets interesting.
- The world’s memory resets every 48 hours, but one person remembers everything and has been living the same two days for 10 years.
- A time traveler keeps preventing their own parents from meeting, but they keep finding each other anyway.
- Someone discovers that every time they fall asleep, they wake up one day further in the future—and they can’t stop sleeping.
- All mirrors suddenly show your reflection from 10 years in the future. Everyone sees something different.
- Someone discovers they can pause time, but they age normally during the pause—and they’ve been pausing time for years.
- A quantum physicist accidentally creates a machine that shows you every decision you didn’t make and how your life would have turned out.
- Every person gets assigned a “life editor” who can cut and rearrange events in their past. Someone just got a new editor who’s making terrible choices.
- Time moves at different speeds based on your heart rate. Someone with a heart condition experiences time completely differently than everyone else.
- A drug allows people to experience time in reverse for short periods. Someone gets stuck rewinding.
- A service lets you experience any historical event firsthand, but you risk getting stuck in that timeline.
- Someone discovers that every coincidence in life is actually a failed attempt by your future self to communicate with you.
Technology & Digital Reality
We’re already living half our lives online, so why not push it until it breaks? These ideas take our phone addiction, our social media obsession, and our tech dependence and crank them until something snaps. If Black Mirror taught us anything, it’s that the scariest future is the one that’s only about five minutes away from right now. These prompts live in that space—the place where convenience turns into nightmare.
- Social media likes become literal currency, and someone just discovered how to counterfeit them.
- Everyone receives a notification on their phone showing their exact death date—except one person whose phone says “Error.”
- A glitch in simulation software allows one person to see the “code” behind reality, written in a language they’re starting to understand.
- A new app shows you the location of your soulmate in real-time, but the closer you get, the further they move away.
- An AI designed to predict crimes starts predicting impossible ones—crimes that haven’t been invented yet.
- Photos now show what will happen five minutes after they’re taken instead of what just happened.
- A social experiment pays people to live without any technology for a year, but halfway through, the outside world goes dark.
- A glitch in the matrix causes one person to receive everyone’s deleted text messages before they were deleted.
- Society implements a system where your internet search history determines your insurance rates, job prospects, and dating pool.
- A social media filter that makes you “perfect” becomes permanent for anyone who uses it more than 100 times.
- A tech company creates an AI therapist so effective that human connection becomes obsolete. One programmer realizes what they’ve done.
- A phenomenon causes everyone to become the person they pretend to be on social media for one month.
- Every person’s “main character energy” becomes quantifiable, and society reorganizes around who has the most.
- Someone creates an algorithm that can predict your next friendship, romance, or enemy with 100% accuracy.
- A glitch in virtual reality causes people to bring one object back from the game world into reality each time they play.
- A universal translator is released that translates the “intent” behind words instead of the literal meaning.
- Humans no longer need sleep, but the government mandates an 8-hour coma where they use your brain for data processing.
Dreams, Mind & Consciousness
What happens inside your head when nobody’s watching? These prompts dig into the space between awake and asleep, between thought and reality. The mind’s the last frontier we haven’t fully colonized yet, and these ideas treat it like hostile territory. If you want to write something that makes people question what’s real and what’s just firing synapses, start here.
- Humans can now record and trade dreams. The black market for nightmares is booming.
- A sleep study reveals that one participant has been living entire lifetimes in their dreams. They’re starting to confuse which world is real.
- Someone discovers that every time you have a nightmare, you’re actually experiencing a parallel version of yourself’s reality.
- A new therapy allows people to physically enter and explore their own subconscious, but some people are finding doors that lead to other people’s minds.
- A breakthrough allows humans to “install” skills like software downloads, but every skill installed erases a random memory.
- You can “overclock” your brain to master any skill, but for every hour of genius, you lose a year of childhood memories.
- A new therapy allows people to physically fight their inner demons in a controlled environment. Some demons are winning.
Memory Manipulation
Our memories make us who we are—which means if you screw with someone’s memories, you’re basically rewriting their soul. These prompts explore what happens when memory becomes a commodity, a weapon, or just another thing that can glitch out and ruin your life. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind scratched the surface. These go deeper.
- A company offers to erase your worst memory, but they accidentally erase your best one instead—and won’t say which one it was.
- Every wish made on a birthday candle comes true, but only after you’ve forgotten what you wished for.
- A company offers to 3D print copies of deceased loved ones using AI and DNA, but the copies start remembering things the originals never knew.
Body & Physical Transformation
Body horror isn’t just about gore—it’s about losing control of the one thing that’s supposed to be yours. These prompts take our physical selves and make them negotiable, tradeable, or just flat-out wrong. When your body stops being your sanctuary and starts being a prison—or worse, a rental property—that’s when the real terror starts.
- Technology allows people to “trade” physical attributes for 30 days, and the black market is out of control.
- People can now “lease” their bodies to others while they sleep. Someone wakes up to discover what their body did last night.
- A virus causes people to physically transform into whatever they’re most afraid of for 72 hours.
- A mysterious phenomenon causes everyone to swap bodies with the person they hate most for 48 hours.
- A phenomenon causes people to physically merge with whoever they’re thinking about at midnight, creating temporary hybrid beings.
- A virus causes people to physically manifest their emotional baggage as actual luggage they must carry everywhere.
- A new law requires everyone to live one day per year as the opposite gender. Society begins to shift dramatically.
- People can now “rent” other people’s talents for 24 hours, draining the original person while the renter uses their skill.
- People can now “transfer” their hangovers, headaches, and pain to others for a price.
Death & Mortality
Death’s supposed to be the one universal constant, right? These prompts say “screw that” and imagine worlds where death is optional, reversible, or just another transaction. The catch is, immortality always costs something. These ideas explore what happens when we finally get what we’ve always wanted and realize we should’ve been more careful what we wished for.
- People can now purchase extra years of life from those willing to sell theirs, creating a new class system.
- A tech billionaire creates “life insurance” that brings you back to life once—but you come back as your 16-year-old self with all your memories.
- People can now “save” their current life and start over from birth with all their knowledge intact, but you can only do it once.
- Someone invents a device that lets you experience the last 60 seconds of a deceased person’s life. Black market “death experiences” become addictive.
- People start aging backwards one day per year, and society must adapt to adults becoming children again.
- Every person gets three “rewinds” for their whole life. A black market emerges for people selling their unused rewinds.
- A phenomenon causes people to age one year for every lie they tell. Politicians are suddenly very old.
- People can now experience a preview of their own funeral to see who shows up and what they say.
- When someone dies, you don’t inherit their money; you inherit their remaining physical illnesses and injuries.
Love, Romance & Soulmates
Love’s already complicated enough without adding technology, cosmic forces, or supernatural mechanics to the mix. These prompts take romance and twist it—sometimes dark, sometimes weird, always complicated. If you’re tired of the same meet-cute garbage and want relationships that actually have stakes, these will give you somewhere to start.
- A dating app matches people based on their fears instead of their interests, claiming it creates stronger bonds.
- Every person is born with a specific song only they can hear, and when you meet your perfect match, you finally hear their song too.
- One person discovers they can see the exact moment when someone falls in or out of love—and they just saw their spouse fall out of love with them.
- Every person has a “relationship credit score” visible to everyone. The main character’s just dropped to zero overnight.
- A dating service matches people based on their ideal break-up scenario, claiming these relationships last longer.
- Someone creates an app that shows you how many times you’ve walked past your soulmate without knowing it.
- Someone discovers that every time you ghost someone, a literal ghost of yourself haunts them until you reach out.
- People no longer have reflections; instead, they see the person who is currently thinking about them the most in the mirror.
Truth, Lies & Consequences
We lie every single day—to others, to ourselves, to the world. These prompts imagine what happens when lies become visible, when truth becomes currency, or when the stuff we hide gets dragged into the light whether we like it or not. This is the category for stories about exposure, shame, and what happens when we can’t hide anymore.
- Every lie someone tells becomes temporarily true for exactly 24 hours. A compulsive liar just won the lottery.
- Everyone’s “internal monologue” becomes audible to others for one week, and society begins to collapse.
- A new currency is based on secrets—the bigger the secret you reveal, the more you earn. Everyone’s broke.
- People’s most embarrassing moments play on loop above their heads, visible only to strangers.
- People’s karma becomes a visible score that updates in real-time above their heads.
Perception & Reality
Reality’s just a consensus we all agreed to, and these prompts break that agreement. When the rules of physics, perception, or basic existence stop working the way they’re supposed to, characters have to figure out how to navigate a world that’s fundamentally broken. These are great for stories where nothing is what it seems and nobody can be trusted—including the narrator.
- Gravity reverses for one random person each day. Today it’s the President during a live address.
- One city block gets stuck in a time loop. Everyone inside knows it—they just can’t escape.
- One person wakes up to discover they’re the only one who can still see color in a world that’s turned black and white overnight.
- Society discovers that déjà vu moments are actually glimpses of parallel timelines bleeding through. Someone figures out how to control it.
- People’s emotions become visible as colored auras. Someone’s aura just turned a color that’s never been seen before.
- A phenomenon causes people to speak only in movie quotes for varying periods. Doctors can’t explain why.
- Sound travels at different speeds for different people based on their social status; the poor hear news days after it happens.
- A global phenomenon occurs where people can only see things within 50 feet; anything further is a total white void.
Parallel Dimensions & Alternate Realities
What if the life you’re living is just one of infinite possibilities? These prompts explore the multiverse, the road not taken, and all the versions of yourself you’ll never meet. It’s existentially terrifying and narratively rich. Use these when you want your characters to confront the ghosts of who they could have been.
- Someone discovers that every time you say “I’m fine,” a version of you that actually is fine splits off into a parallel universe.
- Someone discovers that every fictional character ever created actually exists in a parallel dimension. The portal just opened.
Supernatural & Strange Phenomena
Sometimes you don’t need to explain why something weird is happening—you just need it to be weird enough to matter. These prompts embrace the inexplicable, the magical, and the just-plain-wrong. Shadows with minds of their own, rain that only falls on the grieving, wishes that backfire. This is where folklore meets modern anxiety.
- People’s shadows start acting independently, and one person’s shadow is trying to warn them about something.
- Every time someone uses the phrase “I wish,” it comes true—but only for the person standing closest to them.
- A meteor strike gives a small town collective telepathy, but only with people they’ve never met before.
- Shadows stay behind when people leave a room, acting out the secret desires the person suppressed while they were there.
- In a certain town, it only rains on people who are grieving, creating a visible map of the broken-hearted.
- You discover you can talk to inanimate objects, but they are incredibly judgmental and won’t stop gossiping about your life.
- Everyone is born with their “True Name” tattooed on their wrist; if someone says it aloud, they gain complete control over you.
Alien & Cosmic
We’re probably not alone in the universe, and if we are, that’s somehow even more terrifying. These prompts take the cosmic perspective—what happens when humanity realizes we’re not the main characters in our own story? Great for satire, existential dread, or just good old-fashioned “what the hell is out there” paranoia.
- Humanity discovers that Earth is actually a reality show for aliens. The season finale is next week.
Economy & Society
Capitalism’s already weird; these prompts just make it weirder. What happens when luck, childhood, or consequences become things you can buy and sell? These ideas explore class, inequality, and what happens when the market decides to commodify the things we thought were sacred. If you want social commentary with your sci-fi, start here.
- A lottery system randomly selects one person per day to have absolutely no consequences for their actions for 24 hours.
- People can now “donate” their good luck to others. A support group forms for people who’ve given all theirs away.
- Every person is assigned a “life genre” at birth (comedy, tragedy, romance, horror). One person just got reclassified.
- People can now sell their “firsts” (first kiss, first love, first heartbreak) to those who want to experience them.
- The government implements mandatory “empathy shifts” where you experience someone else’s life for one week per year.
- People’s childhoods become tradeable commodities. A black market emerges for “perfect” childhoods.
- A city’s layout changes every night based on the collective mood of its residents. Someone is trapped in a “depression” cul-de-sac.
Life Control & Manipulation
We spend our whole lives trying to control the narrative—our image, our trajectory, our legacy. These prompts imagine worlds where that control becomes literal, mechanical, or just another thing that can be hacked. They’re about agency, identity, and what happens when someone else gets to edit your story.
- Someone invents a button that skips to the “good parts” of life. An entire generation has missed their character development.
- A machine can show you the exact moment your life peaked. A support group forms for people who’ve already seen theirs.
- Every person gets a notification one hour before something life-changing happens, but it never says if it’s good or bad.
- Someone invents a mirror that shows you how you look to your harshest critic versus your biggest fan.
Medical & Pharmaceutical
Pills that let you see through your dog’s eyes. Drugs that swap your memories with strangers. Medicine’s supposed to heal us, but these prompts turn it into something stranger and more dangerous. This is body horror meets corporate greed meets “I probably shouldn’t have signed that waiver.” Perfect for stories about unintended consequences and playing god with chemistry.
- A pharmaceutical company creates a pill that lets you experience other people’s memories, but the side effects are someone else experiencing yours.
- Someone creates a pill that lets you experience your pet’s perspective for one hour, revealing what they really think.
Look, if you’re still scrolling and haven’t picked an idea yet, you’re procrastinating. Plain and simple. I’ve given you 100 different ways to break the mold—some are high-tech nightmares, others are just weird biological glitches—but none of them matter if they just sit on this webpage collecting digital dust.
An idea is just a spark. It’s cheap. What’s expensive is the sweat it takes to turn that spark into a 90-page draft that actually makes sense.
Maybe you’re worried the idea you picked is “too weird.” Or maybe you think you can’t pull off a “code in the simulation” story. Let me tell you a secret: every great writer felt like a fraud during their first act. The difference between the people who own the writers’ room and the people who just talk about writing at bars is that the pros finish the damn script. Even if the first draft is a total disaster, it’s a disaster that exists. You can’t edit a blank page.
So, here’s your marching orders. Take that one prompt that made your skin crawl or your heart jump. Pull it into your world. Infuse it with your own brand of trauma, humor, or whatever weirdness you’ve got rattling around in your head. Don’t write what you think a producer wants to buy—write the movie that you’d be pissed off if someone else wrote first.
The industry is full of people playing it safe. Don’t be one of them. Take the big swing. Use the “What if?” to break something open.
Now, close this tab. Turn off the notifications. Stop looking for more inspiration and start being the inspiration. Go put some words on the page and don’t stop until you hit FADE OUT.
I’ll see you on the other side of the draft.
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