1000 Writing Prompts for Gong'an

You want to write Chinese court-case fiction: the magistrate at his bench, the body in the well at dawn, three witnesses lying and a whole county waiting on the verdict. What you don't want is to build every case from a blank page, or to get the world wrong.

1000 Writing Prompts for Gong'an hands you a thousand cases with the hard part already done, each one grounded in how these courts actually worked, from the coroner's examination of the body to the confession the law demanded before a sentence could stand. Every prompt is a complete scenario with the crime already on the page, tagged by era, tone, and length so you can pull exactly the case you want. Open the book, choose a case, and write. No warm-up, no research first.

Whether you write gong'an, wuxia, xianxia, silkpunk, or historical mystery, you will find:

•1,000 prompts across 50 case types, from the village poisoning to the capital faction trial
•Settings from the Tang and Ming to Republican treaty ports and the modern forensic lab, so one book fuels a whole career in the genre
•Cases of every kind: murder, fraud, poison, corruption, ghost evidence, and wrongful conviction
•Ten worked examples that carry a single prompt from premise to verdict, so you can see exactly how a case is built
•A magistrate's toolkit: verdict language, interrogation scaffolds, an evidence casefile, and the real sources worth raiding

From Imogen Blake, author of more than 140 books on the craft of writing, including the Master Plotter series.

Pick a prompt. Open the case.