99 Horror Prompts

99 Horror Prompts is a short collection of writing prompts to inspire horror writers.
Where do you get your ideas from?

It’s a question we’re often asked and, personally, I can only answer it half of the time.

Sometimes I’m inspired by something I overhear in a conversation. The notion for Raven and Skull, my horror novel set in diabolical offices, was inspired by an elderly relative telling me that she was scared that people died every time she knitted something for them. I suppose my response of writing a novel (rather than offering reassurance) suggests I’m not a particularly nice person. But I’m a writer and, whilst it would be lovely to be a nice person, I can’t imagine such a lifestyle inspires many good story ideas.

Sometimes I’m inspired by a happy coincidence of thoughts. My novel Death by Fiction, a thriller narrated by five different detectives, came about when I was thinking about the differences in detective fiction. Miss Marple had a different approach to solving crimes from the thuggish mobsters of Martina Cole’s narratives and these were different to the approaches of the femme fatales that populated the pages of Raymond Chandler’s stories. All of those characters were equally different from a typical police procedural, or a psychological thriller with a flawed main character. What if, I wondered, the same crime was being independently investigated by all those individuals?

However, and this is the reason why I can only answer the question on rare occasions, I’d have to say most of my inspiration is stolen. This is not an admission of plagiarism: stealing another writer’s words and passing them off as your own is an obscene crime. What I’m talking about here is stealing inspiration. Sometimes I’ll watch a film and think, “That was OK: but what if event X had happened to Y?” Sometimes I’ll watch a TV show and think, “That worked for the main character, but what if that had happened to a minor character?”

These variations on what Stephen King calls the “What if…? question” have been inspiring writers for millennia. This list of potential prompts is here to help provoke your imagination into producing something new.

Some of the prompts below are straightforward “What if…? questions.” Others are intended to suggest a mood or scene that might inspire an idea. Some might sound like ideas from stories that already exist. Others might sound like the ramblings of a lunatic. But all of them are worth considering as a potential springboard for creativity.