Halloween Writing Prompts
(October 2020)
1. Write a story where a jack-o-lantern is the main character. How does it affect the lives of the people around it?
2. You come home to find a ghost sitting at your kitchen table. Who is it? What does it want? How do you react?
3. On Halloween morning, your reflection climbs out of your bathroom mirror. What do you do? What happens next?
4. Write a story about someone who removes something he or she shouldn’t have from a graveyard and sets off a series of unfortunate events. What happens as a result? How do they resolve—or not resolve—the problem?
5. Write a story about someone who wanders into a strange and mysterious place on Halloween and has to find a way to get back home before it’s too late. What makes this place so unusual? Is there, perhaps, a series of unusual tasks the person must perform? Something he or she has to find?
6. Write a story about someone who moves into a haunted house. How does the character find out the house is haunted? Who or what is haunting the house? Do they learn to live together somehow, or does the character end up moving away again?
7. Something strange appears in your yard overnight. What is it? What happens next?
8. When you get home after trick-or-treating, you find something strange mixed in with the candy in your bag. This leads to the most unusual Halloween night you’ve ever had. What happens?
(October 2021)
1. Choose a monster or other supernatural character (i.e., a vampire, a werewolf, a ghost, an angel, etc.) Write a day in this character’s life.
2. Invent a magical snack and write a piece advertising it. What is it? What does it do? Who would want to buy it? (Or, if you’d prefer, try writing a piece that warns customers away. What makes the amazing thing this snack can do actually bad?)
3. Someone buys a Halloween decoration that turns out not to be what it seems. What was it, and what did it become? What happens at their house that Halloween evening?
4. Scarecrows were originally created to help scare crows away from farmers’ fields. Write about someone designing something meant to scare some kind of monster away in order to protect something precious.
5. Let’s say humans aren’t the only ones who leave ghosts behind. Write about the ghost of an object, plant, or animal. What caused it to become a ghost?