Prompts & Exercises

Secret societies, ancient libraries, forbidden knowledge, and the brooding intellectual obsession at the heart of the genre. Thirty prompts to pull you into the shadows.

Voice is what readers recognize and least reliably describe. Twenty-five exercises in perception, syntax, memory, and silence — the details that make a narrator unmistakably themselves.

A strong first line isn't just a hook — it establishes the narrator's relationship with the world. Thirty opening lines to borrow, adapt, or let ignite something entirely your own.

Villains are not born from evil but from circumstance, belief, and the slow erosion of alternatives. Twenty-eight prompts for writing antagonists who are right about something — and wrong about the cure.

Gothic fiction finds dread in domestic spaces and beauty in decay — and its true subject is always the past refusing to stay past. Thirty prompts for writers who want to go somewhere shadowed.