408+ ‘Emotion’ Writing Prompts
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An Imaginary Window
Close your eyes and imagine a window that peers into any moment from your past. What do you see, and how does it make you feel?
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Feelings in Colors
Choose an emotion and associate it with a color, then write a poem that expresses this feeling through vivid imagery.
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New Dawn, New Life
Describe the sunrise on New Year’s day and liken it to the start of a new chapter in your life.
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Pisces in Love
Describe a heart-warming love story defined by emotional depth and selfless devotion, keeping in line with the idealistic love that Pisces embodies.
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Masterpiece Inspiration
Look at famous paintings or any piece of art and pen a narrative from the perspective of a character within it.
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The Unseen Photographer
Imagining the person behind the camera, describe who they might be and what led them to take this particular photograph.
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The Artist’s Emotion
Write about the emotions an artist might feel when capturing a summer sunset on canvas.
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Canvas of Colors
Describe a summer sunset as if you were painting it. What colors would you use? Which brush strokes?
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Reflections of the Past Year
Write a New Year haiku that encapsulates and reflects your experiences from the previous year.
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Emotion Code Breaker
Write a conversation purely in dialogue, but without mentioning any emotions directly, let the conversation express the emotional intensity.
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Tidal Waves of Emotion
Write about a fast-paced, emotional event, detailing the rollercoaster of emotions experienced during that time.
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Moody Weather Musings
Elaborate on the changing weather patterns and the influence they hold on your mood.
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Rain, Rain, Go Away
Describe a scene where the main characters are interacting beneath a shared umbrella.
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Whispers of Silent Conversations
Write a scene where you’re having a silent conversation with your lost love.
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Emotional Inventory
List all the emotions you’ve felt in the past year, and pick one to explore in depth with regard to how it affected your mental health.
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The Revival
Start your writing with, “I am willing to let go of…” and pen down what you are releasing from the past year, and how you will use it as a stepping stone for the year to come.
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Intangible Inheritance
Imagine a world where emotions can be inherited like physical properties. Detail a character who receives an unexpected emotion and must navigate its effects.
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Tea Leaves Tell Tales
You visit a fabled fortune teller who reads your future in tea leaves. Describe the future predicted and how you feel about it.
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The Love Experiment
Build a logline for a Valentine’s Day drama about two scientists who seek to experimentally understand love.
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Understanding Compassion
Write about a time when you felt compassion for someone else. Describe why you felt this way and what actions you took.
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Mirror of Emotions
Choose an emotion you’ve felt strongly recently and elaborate on why and how it affected you.
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Opening Up about Anger
Identify something that makes you angry and develop a plan to manage that anger.
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Evolution of Love
Describe how your idea of love has changed from your teen years to the present day.
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Emotion-Centered Magics
Imagine a magic system where the strength and type of magic a person wields is directly linked to their emotions.
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ThreeJourney of Emotion
Describe a time you experienced a strong emotion and how you worked through it.
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The Silent Treatment
Imagine if your heart had a voice, what would it say to you in the face of heartbreak?
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Force Meditation
Write a narrative that explores a Jedi’s mind as they meditate, exploring the ideas of peace, knowledge, serenity, and harmony.
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Eternal Companion
Imagine an AI designed to replicate human emotion and companionship, becoming a lifelong companion to its assigned human.
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“Kitten Kidnapping”
Create a comedic crime narrative about a notorious cat burglar who steals feline friends, only to pamper them in luxurious settings.
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Emotional Seasons
Write a story where every season is linked to a specific emotion. How would the world around you look and feel?
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“Sibling Bond in a Snapshot”
Pick a photograph of you and your sibling(s) and write in detail about that moment, emotions, background narration.
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Race Against Time – Pompeii
Write a letter as a citizen of Pompeii, describing the day Mount Vesuvius erupted.
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Shadowy Subconscious
Write a story centered on the protagonist’s worst fear, gradually indicating that the fear is not manifested in real life but only in the character’s mind.
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Chronicle of a Robot
Imagine a society entirely run by robots. They enjoy their mechanical life until one day a single robot mysteriously gains human emotions.
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Recipe for the Soul
Imagine food as an emotion, choose an emotion and describe it as a dish.
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Abandonment in the Arctic
Write a piece where your character is stranded in the cold and desolate landscape of the arctic.
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Emotion Emission
Pen a narrative that subtly expresses a strong emotional journey without ever naming the emotion in question.
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Vanishing Point
Write a flash fiction exploring the concept of someone or something vanishing without a trace.
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Colorful Feelings
Choose a color that represents how you’re feeling today and write a story about it.
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Revisiting the Ballroom
Write a story set in an abandoned grand ballroom where a couple had once professed their love.
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Blossoming Romance
Create an unexpected romantic bond between two characters who didn’t have one in the original plot.
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Time-Travelling Trench Coat
Imagine your trench coat is a time-travel device and every time you wear it, it takes you back to your most memorable Fall memories.
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Unusual Fairy Tale Character
Create a character that is not usually part of a typical fairy tale. For example, maybe a kind witch, a scared dragon, or a clumsy princess.
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Monochromatic World
Write about a day in a world where you can only see in grayscale, conveying the feeling of loneliness.
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Validation of Sadness
Write about a time you felt extremely sad and explain why it’s important to acknowledge these feelings.
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Venting Anger
Express a moment where you felt the most angry and detail the reasons behind the anger.
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Unpacking Emotions
Select an emotion and write a sentence describing that feeling to someone who doesn’t understand it.
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Love has No Reason
Develop a story about a romance that is unexpectedly logical yet profoundly emotional.
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Rainy Day Romance
Describe the experience of two characters sharing an intimate moment under a spring rain.
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Valentine in the Bookstore
Imagine locking eyes with a stranger in a bookstore on Valentine’s Day and feeling an immediate spark.
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The Diary of Emotions
Describing a day through the lens of your feelings, relating each event with an emotion.
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Seats of Emotion
Describe a scene where a character experiences a strong, unexpected rush of emotion.
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Autumn Colors
Describe the changing color palette of leaves in Fall and connect these colors with your emotions.
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Invisible Strings
Write about an emotion you’ve been feeling recently as if it’s a puppeteer manipulating your actions.
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The Emotional Time Machine
Recall a moment when you experienced a strong emotion and describe it as if you are there, right now.
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The Mask We Wear
Imagine and describe an emotion as if it were a mask you could put on and take off.
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Dance of Anger
Think about a time when you felt really angry. Write a scene to express this emotion without using the word “angry”.
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The Color of Emotions
Imagine if every emotion had a color. Write a story where characters only communicate through these colors.
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Anger Busters
Draw a picture of something that made you very angry and write about what you did to calm down.
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Experiencing Anger
Describe a situation where you felt really angry. What triggered it and how did you calm down?
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Understanding Sadness
Recall a time when you felt very sad and write about what happened and how you dealt with it.
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Lost and Found
Write about an object that you held dear but then lost and how you felt during the whole experience.