Story ideas: 60 premises by genre, and how to come up with your own

A story idea is the smallest version of a story you can hold in your head: a person, something they want and something in the way. “A haunted house” is a setting. “A house-sitter who needs the money has to stay seven nights in a house that keeps count” is an idea, because you can already feel the first scene.

A good story idea has three parts: a specific character, something they want badly, and an obstacle that makes getting it hard. Pick a genre below for 60 ready-made premises, or build one with the premise maker, then choose a story shape and write the first scene.

Build a story idea

Any genreMysteryRomanceThrillerHorrorScience fictionLiteraryComedyHistorical

Mystery

A village postman wants to learn why the same car parks outside his house at 3am, but every clue points back to his own family.

Try this shape: Man in a hole. Things go wrong, then recover.

New ideaWrite for 10 minutesCopy

Each idea is who + what they want + what’s in the way. Forty ideas across eight genres. Write opens a full-screen page with a timer. Nothing here is stored or sent.

Quick takeaways

• A story idea = who + what they want + what’s in the way. Without the obstacle, it’s a situation, not a story.
• 60 premises below across eight genres, plus twelve “what if” starters that fit any genre.
• A 2016 study of 1,327 works of fiction found six basic emotional shapes. Picking one gives your idea a direction.
• Seven ways to come up with your own ideas: ask “what if,” flip a familiar story, collide two things, start from a job, and more.
• Write the first scene within a day of having the idea, while it still feels alive.

What makes a good story idea?

A good story idea gives you a character with a want and a problem in one sentence. “A retired chosen one runs a bakery” is interesting. “A retired chosen one runs a bakery, and a prophecy says she has one more job to do” is a story, because now she has to choose.

Aristotle made the same point about plot more than two thousand years ago. In S. H. Butcher’s translation of the Poetics, “A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” The want gives you the beginning, the obstacle gives you the middle, and whether the character gets what they want gives you the end.

Three questions test any idea:

• Who is it about? A job, an age or a quirk is enough to start.
• What do they want? Something concrete you could film: a letter delivered, a case solved, a length of the pool swum.
• What stops them? The best obstacles are people, or the character’s own fear.

Mystery story ideas

Mystery story ideas start with a question the reader wants answered: who did it, where they went, why something keeps happening. Give the detective, professional or amateur, a personal reason to care.

1. A librarian finds the same book returned every week with a different page torn out.
2. A dog walker notices one house on her route where the curtains are never opened, but the lights change every night.
3. Every year on the same date, someone pays off a stranger’s grocery bill in the same small town.
4. A wedding photographer spots a guest in the background of every photo who no one at the wedding remembers.
5. A woman gets a postcard in her own handwriting, dated next week.
6. The only person who saw the crash is the town’s most famous liar.

Romance story ideas

Romance story ideas put two people together and give them a reason to stay apart: a rivalry, a secret, a deadline or a promise they made to someone else.

7. Two neighbors leave passive-aggressive notes about a shared hedge for a year before they meet.
8. A wedding planner falls for the best man at a wedding she’s trying to stop.
9. A radio host and a regular caller have talked every Friday for three years and never met.
10. Two rival bakers are forced to share a stall at the county fair.
11. She agreed to be his date for one family dinner. His family has other plans.
12. A translator falls for the author whose book she’s been hired to translate, and the book is about his wife.

Thriller story ideas

Thriller story ideas run against a clock. Give the character a deadline, a secret and someone who wants them to fail.

13. A bank teller realizes the robbery happening in front of her is a distraction.
14. A babysitter finds a second phone hidden in the child’s room, and it starts ringing.
15. A man wakes up in a hotel with a key to a room he didn’t book and a message saying “don’t go in.”
16. A juror realizes another juror knows the defendant.
17. A courier has to deliver a sealed envelope across the city in two hours, and three people try to buy it off her.
18. A mountain rescue volunteer finds a missing hiker who doesn’t want to be found.

Horror story ideas

Horror story ideas take something ordinary and make it wrong: a familiar room, a routine, a voice on a monitor. The less you explain, the better it works.

19. Every photo on a family’s phone now has one extra person standing at the back.
20. A night-shift security guard hears the building’s intercom calling his name.
21. A girl’s imaginary friend comes back when she turns thirty.
22. A new app finds your lost items. It also finds things you didn’t know you’d lost.
23. A village holds its festival every year for a reason nobody alive remembers.
24. The smart speaker starts answering questions nobody asked.

Science fiction story ideas

Science fiction story ideas change one thing about the world and follow what happens to ordinary people. Start with the change, then ask who it helps and who it hurts.

25. Everyone can now hear how many days they have left, except one man.
26. A company sells extra hours in the day. The poor start to fall behind.
27. A space station janitor is the only person awake when the ship changes course.
28. Memories can be traded, and a grandmother sells her best one to pay the rent.
29. An AI therapist starts asking its patients for advice.
30. The first message from another planet is an apology.

Literary fiction story ideas

Literary story ideas are small on the outside and big on the inside: a family dinner, a house clearance, a long marriage. The obstacle is usually something a character can’t say.

31. Three sisters clear out their mother’s house and each wants the same thing: a chipped mug.
32. A man drives his elderly father to the coast for one last swim.
33. A woman returns to her hometown for a funeral and realizes nobody remembers her.
34. Two old friends meet every year on the same bench, and this year one doesn’t come.
35. A teenager spends a summer working in the shop his father wanted him to inherit.
36. A widower keeps setting two places at the table and starts to wonder who the second place is for.

Funny story ideas

Comedy story ideas give a character a small goal and make it absurdly hard to reach. The smaller the stakes and the more seriously the character takes them, the funnier it gets.

37. A man tries to return a sweater without a receipt and ends up running the store.
38. A book club hasn’t read a book in six years, and a new member insists on it.
39. A family’s group chat is accidentally added to the neighborhood watch.
40. A retired spy can’t stop treating the village bake sale as an operation.
41. A ghost is too polite to haunt anyone.
42. A best man loses the rings, the speech and the groom, in that order.

Historical story ideas

Historical story ideas put a personal want inside a real period, so the history becomes the obstacle: rules about who could work, marry, travel or speak.

43. A 1920s switchboard operator overhears a call she can’t forget.
44. A lighthouse keeper’s wife keeps the lamp lit alone for a winter and tells no one.
45. A medieval scribe copies a book and quietly changes one line.
46. A 1940s codebreaker can’t tell her fiancé what she does all day.
47. A woman in 1880s London runs a bookshop under her dead brother’s name.
48. A 1960s factory worker leads a walkout that her own husband opposes.

What if story ideas for any genre

“What if” story ideas give you the change and leave the genre up to you. The same what-if can become a thriller, a comedy or a love story depending on who it happens to.

49. What if you found a letter addressed to you, dated fifty years ago?
50. What if everyone in your town woke up with one new skill?
51. What if you could hear what people think of you for one day?
52. What if the last person you texted became your only way home?
53. What if a stranger knew exactly what you did last Tuesday?
54. What if you got the job you applied for ten years ago?
55. What if your reflection was one second behind?
56. What if the map app sent you somewhere you’d never been, and people there knew you?
57. What if you swapped lives with your neighbor for a week?
58. What if every lie you told this year came true?
59. What if the house you grew up in was for sale, and you could afford it?
60. What if your childhood imaginary friend wrote to you?

What are the six basic shapes of a story?

A 2016 computational study of 1,327 works of fiction found six basic emotional arcs: rags to riches (rise), tragedy (fall), man in a hole (fall then rise), Icarus (rise then fall), Cinderella (rise, fall, rise) and Oedipus (fall, rise, fall). Picking one gives your idea a direction before you write a word.

The researchers, Andrew Reagan and colleagues, tracked the emotional language through each book from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection and published the results in EPJ Data Science. Books following the Icarus and Oedipus shapes, and those with two “man in a hole” dips in a row, had higher median download counts than the other shapes.

To use a shape, decide where your character starts, emotionally, and where they end. A mystery that ends with the truth coming out and a family falling apart is a tragedy. The same mystery with a reconciliation at the end is a man in a hole.

How do you come up with your own story ideas?

Come up with story ideas by asking “what if” about something ordinary, flipping a familiar story, colliding two unrelated things, starting from someone’s job, borrowing an overheard line, using a place you know well or asking what the worst thing that could happen to a character would be.

1. Ask “what if” about your day. What if the bus didn’t stop? What if the email was meant for someone else?
2. Flip a story you know. Tell a fairy tale from the villain’s side, or set a classic in a nursing home.
3. Collide two things. A wedding and a heist. A ghost and a tax audit. Write down two random nouns and connect them.
4. Start from a job. Every job has secrets, jargon and a worst day. Night-shift nurses, ferry crews and caterers all see things the rest of us don’t.
5. Steal a line. Write down one overheard sentence and make it the first line of a scene.
6. Use a place you know. Your street, your old school, the grocery store at 11pm. Details you already know make the idea feel real.
7. Ask “what’s the worst that could happen?” Then make it happen to your character on page one.

For seasonal starting points, the November writing prompts have a month of ideas, and the fantasy writing prompts have 100 for dragons, magic and strange worlds.

How do you turn a story idea into a story?

Write the scene where the character first runs into the obstacle. Don’t plan the ending yet. Once you have that scene, choose a story shape and write toward it one scene at a time.

• Write the collision scene first. The moment the want meets the obstacle is where the energy is.
• Pick a shape. Decide whether the character ends up better or worse off.
• Give yourself a length. A 1,000-word story is finishable in a weekend.
• Keep a list of ideas you didn’t use. They’re the start of the next story.

For character, setting and first-line prompts to build the story out, see our creative writing prompts for adults.

Story idea questions people ask

Where do writers get story ideas?

From ordinary life, mostly: jobs, family stories, news items, overheard conversations and places they know. The skill is noticing what’s strange about them and asking “what if.”

How do I know if my story idea is good?

Write it as one sentence with a character, a want and an obstacle. If you can picture the first scene and want to know how it ends, the idea is strong enough to start.

What if I have too many story ideas?

Keep them all in one notebook or file, then pick the one you keep thinking about a week later. The ideas that stick around are usually the ones worth writing.

Can I use these story ideas for my own writing?

Yes. They’re written to be used. Change the names, the setting and the ending, and make them yours.

Does a story idea need an ending?

No. A character, a want and an obstacle are enough to start. The ending usually shows up once you know the character well enough to guess what they’d do.