Dialogue prompts inspire writers to write conversations between their characters. Even the best writing can fall flat without good dialogue, so experimenting with how your characters’ voices interact with each other is an important exercise for any writer.
This article includes 105 dialogue prompts
Need more help writing dialogue? Try QuillBot’s free AI dialogue generator. You can also use the tool to create conversation-style dialogue prompts tailored to your characters.
Journaling is a simple yet powerful way to reduce stress, cultivate mindfulness, and track personal growth. A collection of thought-provoking and unique journal prompts makes the experience even more rewarding and productive.
Journal prompts are questions or statements that inspire you to write about specific goals, memories, and scenarios, such as “Describe a time when you were the best version of yourself.” They provide focused opportunities for self-reflection and motivate you to make journaling a consistent practice.
The 75 prompts in this collection cover a variety of meaningful and engaging topics that will help you uncover new insights and pathways for growth.
Looking to add even more variety to your journaling routine? Ask QuillBot’s free AI Chat to show you journal prompts on any topic you want to write about.
High school and college writers grow more confident when they practice regularly, which is why many teachers rely on daily writing prompts and other low-pressure assignments. The best writing prompts for students spark curiosity, activate prior knowledge, and invite personal reflection, while focusing on familiar topics.
If you’re seeking fresh writing prompts that do all of these things, look no further. This article includes over 100 writing prompts on engaging, informal topics that are perfect for 10–15 minute warm-ups, quick in-class activities, or low-stakes homework assignments.
QuillBot’s free AI Chat can also help you brainstorm writing prompts on a wide range of motivating and thought-provoking topics.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words—and for writers, it literally can be. Pictureprompts (also called picturewritingprompts) use images to spark creativity, inspire storytelling, and overcome writer’s block.
Picture prompts can spark imagination, whether you’re a teacher helping students practice picture story writing, a writer looking to exercise your creativity, an artist who wants to work with the written word, or an English learner aspiring to improve your writing.
This article rounds up 130 pictureprompts, plus story starter ideas for each. If you want to create your own pictureprompts, try QuillBot’s AI image generator.
A second-person point of view is a narrative technique where the writer uses the pronoun “you,” directly addressing the reader. This turns the reader into a character or even a protagonist in the story. Although uncommon in fiction writing, second-person narration often appears in video games, tabletop games, recipes, and instruction manuals, where giving direct instructions or choices makes sense.
Second-person point of view exampleYou wake up on a small wooden raft drifting down a wide, muddy river. Your clothes are damp, your pack is half-open, and your companions are still asleep. Up ahead, the black shape of a ruined fortress rises through the fog, its gates creaking open as if waiting for you.
A third-person point of view is when the narrator stands outside the story and refers to the characters by name or with pronouns like “he,” “she,” or “they.” This perspective offers a broader view of events, since the narrator knows what different characters think and feel. A third-person point of view can be limited or omniscient, depending on how much of this knowledge the author wishes to relate to the reader.
Third-person point of view example “I couldn’t care less,” she said, turning her gaze toward the window. Her hands clasped the pen tightly.
A first-person point of view (also known as first-person narrative or perspective) is when a story is told from a character’s own perspective using pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us.” This type of narrative technique lets the audience “see” the story directly through the narrator’s eyes, creating intimacy and immersion. First-person narrators are common across literary genres, especially in detective novels and memoirs.
First-person point of view example: Dracula“I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.”
You’re deep into the first pages of a gripping novel, completely absorbed into the world the author has built. The plot races forward, the characters feel genuine—until someone opens their mouth:
“Hello, Margaret. How are you feeling today? I am concerned about your well-being because yesterday you seemed quite distressed about the situation with your employment.”
You blink. Read it again. Nobody talks like that. Real people say things like, “Hey, you okay? You seemed pretty upset about work yesterday.” The spell is broken. You’re no longer in the story—you’re painfully aware you’re reading one.
Bad dialogue is like a speed bump in your reader’s mind. It jolts them out of the fictional dream and reminds them they’re holding a book, not experiencing a world. Great dialogue, on the other hand, disappears completely. Readers don’t even notice they’re reading words on a page because the characters feel so alive and their conversations so realistic that you become an invisible observer in their world.
Whether you’re figuring out how to write dialogue in a novel or even incorporating dialogue into an essay, the challenge remains the same: writing conversations that feel authentic to your setting and characters.
This guide will walk you through everything from proper formatting and punctuation rules to the secrets of making your characters sound like real people, not like they’re reciting from a textbook.
NoteIn British English, dialogue is the standard spelling for conversations in writing. In American English, dialog is mainly used in computing contexts, like a “dialog box” in software, though “dialogue” is still more common for everyday writing.
Tone and mood shape how we experience a story emotionally, but in different ways. While tone describes the author’s or narrator’s attitude, mood refers to the reader’s emotional response.
In this article, we’ll break down what tone and mood mean in literature, explain how they differ, and show how each works through clear examples.
An unreliable narrator is a literary device used by authors for a number of possible purposes. Such a narrator can cause mystery or confusion in the reader’s mind (e.g., in Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) or emphasize the gulf between the narrator’s and reader’s worldview (e.g., in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).
If you’re not sure if the text you’re reading or studying has an unreliable narrator, then ask QuillBot’s free AI chat for an explanation!
Unreliable narrator in literature exampleIn Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, we see an example of a novel with an unreliable narrator. Pip, the protagonist and narrator, muses on his ability to deceive himself, to be a “self-swindler,” thereby highlighting for the reader the inherent unreliability of the restricted point of view of a first-person narrator.
“An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!”—from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
