For five minutes, write everything a character notices while waiting for a text that does not arrive.
18 Five Minute Writing Exercises Prompts
These prompts create a starting constraint, question, or situation. Use one as written, combine two, or change the audience, setting, objective, or limitation to make a new exercise.
Write continuously about one object you have owned for more than five years, moving from description into memory.
Invent a disagreement between two people who are both partly right.
Describe a place from memory, then spend the final minute listing what you may have remembered incorrectly.
Write a mini-scene that begins with a request and ends with a refusal.
Draft as many specific verbs as possible for one ordinary action such as walking, looking, or holding.
Write a character’s internal monologue while they perform a task they know extremely well.
Explain a difficult idea to a curious ten-year-old without using jargon.
Write from the sentence “Nobody had asked who the bag belonged to.” without planning first.
Describe a meal only through sound and movement.
List ten questions you would ask a stranger who owns an unusual object, then answer one as fiction.
Write one page in which every paragraph contains a different kind of sentence opening.
Argue for a minor opinion you genuinely hold, using one example and one counterpoint.
Write a memory in present tense, then use the final minute to note what the tense changes.
Describe the moment before a character makes a decision, ending before the decision itself.
Write a paragraph that becomes more specific with every sentence.
Turn a boring instruction—wash dishes, reset a password, pack a bag—into a scene with stakes.
Write about something you changed your mind about without using the phrase “I changed my mind.”