I Love to Write Day: 30 Prompts for Book Lovers

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If you’re a book lover, you’re already a writer. You just haven’t been caught.

You’ve scribbled “NO.” in a margin with real feeling. You’ve drafted a furious text about a cliffhanger at 1 a.m. You’ve mentally recast an entire movie adaptation in the shower, and your version was better. Reading and writing have always been the same habit, wearing two different cardigans.

November 15 is I Love to Write Day, a grassroots holiday that Delaware author John Riddle started in 2002 to get people writing. The goal isn’t to write well. It’s just to write. A poem, a letter, a grocery list with emotional depth. All of it counts.

So put your bookmark in (a proper bookmark, please, not a receipt or a slice of cheese). Here are 30 prompts made for people who think in chapters.

How to Use These Prompts

Pick one. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Don’t edit, don’t erase, and don’t stop to check whether a semicolon belongs there (it probably doesn’t). If a prompt bores you, skip it. If one grabs you, keep going past the timer. Nobody’s grading this. This is the one piece of writing in your life with no deadline, no word count, and no editor sighing over it.

Warm-Ups for Margin Scribblers

1. The coverless book. Write the first line of a book you’d love to find on a library shelf with no cover and no title. Then write the second line, which is always harder.
2. TBR geology. Describe your to-be-read pile as if it were a rock formation. Name the strata. Identify the fossils. Pay your respects to the paperback from 2019 that has turned into sedimentary rock.
3. Villain’s review. Write a one-star review of your favorite book from the point of view of its villain. “Protagonist is insufferable. Ending is rigged. Would not be defeated again.”
4. The morning after. Pick the last book you finished and write the scene that happens the day after the final page. Who does the dishes?
5. Page 50 Books. Write an ad for a used bookstore that only sells books people gave up on at page 50. Make the reader want to shop there.
6. That smell. Write about how one particular book on your shelf smells. Not “old book smell.” That book’s smell, and where it takes you.

Letters You’ll Never Send

7. Coffee and elevators. Write a letter to the fictional character you’d most like to have coffee with. Then write one to the character you’d least like to be stuck in an elevator with.
8. A DNF apology. Write a sincere apology to a book you didn’t finish. Was it you? Was it the book? Was it the 40-page description of a whaling knot?
9. Minor character, major complaint. Write the letter a background character would send their author demanding more scenes, better lines, and a name that isn’t “the innkeeper.”
10. Flashlight kid. Write to your younger self, the one reading under the covers with a flashlight. What would you tell them? And which books won’t you spoil?
11. Thank you, book pusher. Write a thank-you note to the librarian, teacher, sibling, or friend who handed you the book that changed everything.
12. It’s not you, it’s book nine. Write a breakup letter to a series that went on too long. Be kind. Be firm. Keep the first three books.

Rewrites, Remixes, and Literary Revenge

13. Flip the ending. Take a famous ending, retell it in your own words so the opposite happens, and then defend your choice like you’re on trial.
14. Genre swap. Retell a beloved romance as a heist, a Gothic tragedy as a cozy mystery, or an epic fantasy as an office comedy.
15. The waiting room. Put two characters from two different books in a dentist’s waiting room. Who talks first? Who regrets it?
16. Setting speaks. Narrate a key scene from the point of view of the place where it happens: the haunted house, the ship, the windswept moor that has seen things.
17. The group chat. Write the group chat for the cast of a classic novel. Who leaves people on read? Who sends way too many voice memos?
18. Promote the sidekick. Give the loyal best friend the lead role and write the first page of their book.

Your Reading Life, Examined

19. The lie. Confess to a book you’ve pretended to have read. How long have you kept it up? Who knows?
20. Five-book biography. Tell the story of your life in five books, one for each era of you.
21. The nook. Describe your ideal reading spot down to the blanket, the lighting, and the snack that won’t leave grease on the pages.
22. Right on time. Write about a time the right book showed up at exactly the right moment.
23. Lending policy. Write the official rules for borrowing books from your shelves. Include a list of banned borrowers. You know who they are.
24. Then and now. Write about a book you hated once and love now, or the other way around. What changed, the book or you?

For the Brave (and the Slightly Caffeinated)

25. Only you. Write one page of the book only you could write. Not the one you think you should write. The one that’s actually yours.
26. Meet the author. Write the scene where you finally meet your favorite author and say something completely mortifying.
27. Jacket copy. Write the back-cover description of your memoir, plus three blurbs from fictional characters. (“Riveting.” — Sherlock Holmes, probably.)
28. Page 117. Grab a book, open it to page 117, and point at a random word without looking. That word is the title of a story you now have to write.
29. After hours. Write a story of exactly 100 words that happens inside a bookstore after closing time.
30. The dedication. Write the dedication page for a book you haven’t written yet. Then sit with it for a minute and decide whether you’re going to write the book.

The Last Page (For Now)

We spend so much of our lives inside other people’s sentences, and that’s a gift. But every so often it’s worth turning the page around and seeing what’s on our side of it.

This November 15, write something. Write badly if you have to. Write in the margins, on the back of a bookmark, or in the notes app between chapters. The books we love were all blank pages once, and so is whatever you write next.

Which prompt are you trying first? Tell me in the comments, and if you’re brave enough, share a line or two. I promise I’ll only scribble “YES!” in the margins.

Happy I Love to Write Day, book geeks.