Dark, Difficult and Disturbing Writing Prompts: Volume 1

by Scaylen Renvac

A collection of 100 beautifully colored writing prompts to inspire your stories, including 25 never before available anywhere else!

Introduction: I get my writing prompt ideas from many different places. Some of the more familiar seeming ones probably come from books I’ve read or movies I’ve watched, and I’ve tried to put my own twist on them. Others are from my own stories. They are more generalized questions of the ones that are behind my own writings. Some of the more surreal ones are from my dreams. I have no end of strange and unsettling dreams to draw upon for odd scenarios to find oneself in. Lastly, the truly vague or random-seeming ones are likely from an idle, nonsensical thought that crossed my mind at some random point, and I wondered what people would make of it.

For most of my prompts, I deliberately attempted to keep them as vague and as undetailed as possible, avoiding genders, races, and anything that might point a writer to a specific solution to the scenarios. I don’t want to give people a specific story to write. I want to give them a question to ponder that will allow them to create their own stories from their own unique experiences.
So look at the prompts and answer them however you want. If you write comedy, answer them humorously. If you write dark drama, then answer with worst-case scenarios. If you write romance, try and figure out how two people could fall in love under those circumstances. If you’re into historical writing, try and find examples in history of when someone might have faced a similar challenge.

Or if you’re like me, ponder them with all the seriousness of a life-changing decision, regardless of what genre of story the answer that comes out may fall under. Wonder how a person could come to that place in their life, what life experiences would drive them to make the decisions they did, and when you have an answer, then ask yourself what would have made them choose to do the exact opposite, or what would happen if a different decision had been made. Do this even if the answers you find make you uncomfortable. Do it especially if they make your skin crawl and your stomach turn, and then let your characters rationalize to you their craziness, madness, insanity, desperation, and fear.


Some examples of what you'll find inside!

Ghost Apocalypse: The apocalypse happens, everyone dies. Now the planet is full of ghosts wandering a wasteland of a destroyed planet. What happened, and what does it mean about the afterlife?

Look-shifting: Technology has evolved to allow us to change our entire appearance whenever we want, with convincing reality. Skin, hair, eyes, height, body shape, gender, everything. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this?

Superstitious Gods: Every superstition is a god. They wander the earth, affecting those people who worship them by upholding, or failing to adhere to, their requirements. Some are friendly, others mischievous, some downright malevolent. Which god or gods do you worship?

106 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 16, 2019

About the author

Welcome. You’ve found the home of a strange creature indeed. It is a creature trained for work in logic and practicality that has despite that, managed to maintain it’s youngling sense of wonder and creativity, and craves above all else to explore the many oddities of the world it lives in and the strangeness of others of its kind. It seeks to understand both the logical and the illogical, the cold, hard facts, and randomness of artistic expression.

The creature that lives here was fed nothing but good things while it grew from hatchling to fully-winged adult, but it wonders constantly about the darkness it has never tasted, hence that is where its mind wanders for its stories, exploring the many facets of the world of which it knows little, trying to learn of them, and better understand those who have experienced such darkness.

But to be able to explore such topics, one has to be willing to have the unpleasant experience of entertaining disturbing and unsettling thoughts. It’s difficult and heavy questions that plague this creature, ones that often have no right answer, but many possible ones, all valid in some way, depending on how one views the world and how they think it should function.

Will you come fly with me, and explore the many dark possibilities that the mind can spawn into a fantasized existence, ideas that can be mimicked, in their own way, in actual reality?

Find more about me on the sites below:
DeviantArt: www.deviantart.com/scaylen
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ScaylenRenvac
Instagram: www.instagram.com/scaylen.science.art...
Facebook: www.facebook.com/scaylenrenvac/
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/scaylenrenvac/
Tumblr: www.scaylenrenvac.tumblr.com
Wattpad: www.wattpad.com/user/Scaylen
Mix: www.mix.com/scaylen
Flickr: www.flickr.com/people/scaylenrenvac/
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/MysteryOfTheMalwatch/