50 Original Writing Prompts

Suffering from writer's block? While trying to find some inspiration recently I came up with a few ideas, although I wasn't immediately inspired to use any of them I thought they were quite interesting. So I made a list, and then thought, why not keep going until I reach a nice round number, like 50? So I've included some situations that appear in some of my books, stories and works-in-progress and others that simply popped into my head while writing the list, as if they were meant to be there. 

So who knows, perhaps one of them might form the basis for my next best-selling novel... or yours.

1. A person is trapped in a snow globe.
2. The statue he brought back from Africa moved by itself.
3. An old man has to give up a souvenir from his honeymoon because there is no room for it in the nursing home.
4. A tooth fairy with a phobia of the dentist.
5. Siblings clearing out the attic of a dead relative find a mysterious object.
6. Investigators at the scene of a plane crash find a souvenir that one of the victims was taking home.
7. A figurine falls from a shelf and breaks, setting free the spirit that was trapped inside it.
8. There was a break-in - but the only thing stolen was a seemingly worthless souvenir from Blackpool.
9. An unlikely friendship.
10. A young man joins a sleeper terrorist cell in a suburban street, but finds himself falling in love with the girl next door.
11. A demon from hell who would really prefer to be an angel.
12. Or vice-versa.
13. "We'll pretend we haven't seen her."
14. A woman lies on her CV in order to get her dream job. She gets it, but six months later, she's given a task which will expose the lie.
15. A pair of identical twins are overheard speaking to each other in a strange language.
16. A young and enthusiastic female vicar arrives at a very conservative church with an ageing congregation.
17. In a future world where everyone has contraceptive implants from birth, and must go through stringent tests before they are granted the right to have the implant removed and have a family, a woman's implant fails and she becomes pregnant without authorisation.
18. "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."
19. On a deserted off-piste run, a skier comes across a set of ski tracks which stop abruptly, in otherwise virgin snow.
20. A skier gets on to a chair lift he can't see the top of because of fog. As he ascends into the mist, he realises that something is terribly wrong.
21. A disused oil rig is turned into a luxury hotel. Guests are enjoying their holiday there when disaster strikes.
22. A man falls asleep on a long-haul flight, and awakes to find that all the passengers and crew have vanished - but the plane is still in the air.
23. All the pigeons mysteriously vanish from London overnight.
24. Once every hundred years, a city mysteriously appears out of the ground. It remains for one day before sinking out of sight again.
25. A group of weedy and socially inept nerds find they have been transported into the game of Dungeons and Dragons they are playing and are facing an army of orcs for real.
26. A woman hesitates before crossing a bridge.
27. A woman holds a cut-throat razor to a man's neck.
28. In an office on the 100th floor, a woman with wild eyes looks out at the skyscrapers, her finger hovering over a button on a keyboard.
29. You are in a small rowing boat drifting towards a cave. Above the cave's entrance there is a large carving of the face of a Greek god. Inside the cave, you can see eyes, glowing in the darkness.
30. A modern woman waits on a quayside with her suitcase by her side and a mobile phone in her hand. A Viking longship is gliding serenely towards her.
31. A woman wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to her window. There are three moons in the sky.
32. The house was sparsely furnished with no ornaments other than a row of elaborate African masks on the wall.
33. An old lady is home alone on Christmas Eve.
34. A child runs her hand along a white tiled wall, leaving a trail of blood from her fingers.
35. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
36. At a cocktail party, a man glances at a large granite statue on his host's patio. He is convinced the statue just winked at him.
37. The six richest people in the country meet in secret to discuss a way of determining which of them is the most successful.
38. Every Christmas Eve, the ghosts of all the former residents walk the corridors of an old mansion.
39. A group of students are on their way to a lecture when a huge UFO casts a shadow over the campus.
40. He came back from lunch late, with a flower stuck in his hair - a kind that only ever grows on the other side of the world.
41. In an orphanage, a fat boy sits in the corner reading comics when prospective adoptive parents come around, because he knows he will never be chosen.
42. Two children travel back in time to save their parents from being killed in a disaster.
43. She rummaged in her bag to find her camera so she could photograph the ruins. She looked up to see that the ruins had miraculously been restored to how they would have looked when newly built.
44. The day after the solstice, a druid is found murdered in the centre of Stonehenge.
45. A gang of children return to their tree house after the winter to find someone is living in it.
46. She was sure the older woman was hiding something.
47. A famous supermodel discovers that if she covers up her distinctive hair when she goes out, people no longer recognise her.
48. 100 people receive an anonymous invitation to a very special event, but they are not told what it is, just that they need to pack their best clothes and show up at the airport at 9am on Saturday.
49. A government employee discovers that she and all her colleagues are being followed by government agents.
50. The pen began to move on its own.