dystopian creative writing essay

Writing Prompts

56 Dystopian Writing Prompts

Escape to a dark, disheartened world with these 56 dystopian writing prompts .

Mass poverty, cruelty and fear cover a dystopian world. From the shelter-like homes to the dark, broken streets. Life is hard. When writing a story set in a dystopian world you need to describe the harsh reality of this world in great detail. Make the reader fear this world. Think about the leaders who have control. This control might be significant, where harsh rules are made to keep the peace. Alternatively, there could be a rebellion, where leaders have no control and civilians are running havoc. See our master list of world-building questions to help develop a believable dystopian world.

A dystopian world is a world in shatters and ruins. How did it become this way? What rules and regimes do civilians follow, if any? What type of crime is most prominent in this world? These questions will help you create a realistic and powerful dystopian world for your readers.

Looking for some name ideas for your new world? Check out this world name generator . You might also find this list of Earth day writing prompts and this list of over 110 sci-fi writing prompts .

Dystopian writing prompts

To help you create a powerful story about a society in crisis, here are our 56 dystopian writing prompts:

In the year 2,121, sea levels have risen at an extreme rate. 98% of the Earth is now underwater. The remaining 2% is made of small islands scattered across the Earth. With resources at a scarcity, the islands must work together if they are to survive.
A virus has wiped out 95% of humanity in the future. The only survivors are machines and a group of secret underground warriors who rebelled against technology for centuries.
In the future, a virus has caused some humans to mutate into ravenous troll-like beasts. While the remaining humans have to learn to survive in the world with these beasts.
The life expectancy of people has dropped drastically in the future. At the age of 18, humans start to deteriorate and slowly pass away. The ruler is an arrogant 14-year-old kid.
Scientists have combined robotics with human tissue to increase the life expectancy of humans. Apart from the vital organs, such as lungs and heart, as well as parts of the brain, humans are mostly robotic. Eventually, humans start losing control of their bodies to machines.
From the moment a human is born to the day they die, humans are connected to the internet. Everything they need to know about life is on a screen to which they are connected. One day, a technology outbreak completely wipes the internet. Humans are switched off. What happens next?
Scientists have found the secret to endless happiness. They create a new pill that needs to be taken once a day to remain happy. But is this new pill all as it seems?
To promote equality in the future, humans have to dress the same and talk the same. Any inappropriate English and slang words are banned. All around the world, everyone must speak English. If these rules are broken, the rule breaker will be sentenced to prison or even death.
With the brand new Cloner 3000, cloning is just a button press away. Clone your cat, your dog and even yourself if you dare. What are the potential dangers of cloning yourself too many times?
Law and order is destroyed in the future. People are free to do whatever they want without any consequences. Until a group of vigilante heroes decide to recreate the law.
There are two types of people, the rich and the poor. The rich have an extreme amount of money and power. And the poor are living on the streets and undergrounds, struggling to get by. A poor orphan girl is adopted by a rich family and discovers a deadly secret about how the rich become rich.
The excessive use of technology and social media has meant that 95% of the world suffers from extreme social phobia. The slightest human interaction results in mass panic attacks. One brave human decides to create a group where people can meet face to face regularly to help them overcome this fear.
Crime has become such a huge issue in the future, that every home in the world has become a prison cell. Prison guards patrol the streets and provide prisoners with the essentials. One guard feeling guilty that his family is locked behind bars, tries freeing them, and soon things get out of control.
Oxygen is the new currency in the future. Instead of money people buy, earn and sell little canisters of oxygen. Continue this dystopian story…
Desperate to create the perfect world, the government provides every person with a free virtual reality headset. Once worn, the person is transported to a tranquil utopia. Meanwhile, the government secretly has other plans in the real world.
A virus has turned every tree, plant and flower on earth into flesh-eating monsters. The only way to survive is to kill all plant life on Earth, but how will the planet survive?
A new mobile app in the future tells people when to eat, sleep, drink and essentially live. Without the app, humans would be lost, confused and clueless. A group of cyber hackers, hack this app to gain control of all humans.
Being the main cause of social disorders and suicides, the internet is banned in the year 2,098. With the ban of the internet, people slowly resort to the old ways of living before the internet ever existed. Until a group of individuals find a way to bring back the net.
Bored of old-style video gaming, humans resort to sticking chips inside prisoners. Once a prisoner is chipped, they can be controlled like a video game character.
Desperate to be beautiful and young, rich people resort to stealing the actual skin and facial features of ordinary people. These extreme surgeries soon start to have a weird effect on humans.
The Earth has been destroyed by a huge asteroid. A few humans that survived by living underground finally emerge to start a new life on Earth.
With the Earth’s population at an all-time high, it’s time for every human to prove their worth. After the age of 16, humans must take a test every year. If they fail the test, they are killed immediately. One young adult scores incredibly high on the test making them the ‘chosen one’.
Due to the lack of resources on Earth, all luxury items have been banned. People survive on basic rations of bread, rice and beans each month. No vanity items, such as jewellery or make-up are allowed. One day a group of civilians discover that luxury items do exist, but only the leaders can use them.
For the sake of human evolution, scientists have turned the small town of Whitefish into a huge science experiment. No one is allowed to enter or leave the city unless they are told so. Every now and then, a new stimulus is introduced, so that scientists can record the human reactions for a research paper.
Write a story about the aftermath of World War 5. Who was at war and who lost it? What devastation did the war create on Earth?
In the far future, robots are responsible for creating human life. They carefully program each human when they are born to do certain tasks in life. One human realizes that they don’t need to follow the orders programmed in them and fights for freedom.
After a huge asteroid hits Earth, the last two survivors have to find a way to recreate life. It’s a modern, dystopian Adam and Eve story.
World leaders ban religion and talk of God in the future. A man discovers a secret church up in the mountains where people secretly believe in God.
Due to animal cruelty, people are no longer allowed to have animals as pets in the future. All pets live out in the wild without any human masters. One homeless teenager finds a hurt dog in the wild and takes care of it. Eventually, authorities find out about this forbidden friendship.
A bored scientist dedicates his whole life to recreating popular monsters like vampires, werewolves and Frankenstein in real life. He finally masters the procedure and offers it to rich people at a price.
Tired of the rat race and busy city-living, people move to the country to live a peaceful and calm life. Eventually, cities like New York City become a playground for criminals and runaways.
When the human population on land reaches an all-time high. One man goes on a quest to create the ultimate underwater city for humans. Continue this story.
In the year 2,121, 100% of the population becomes vegan. Eating any sort of animal product is considered cannibalism. Farm animals realize that humans will no longer eat them, so decide to plan their revenge.
Cyber-pets become a huge thing in the future. Technology advances so much that people would rather buy robotic pets inside of real ones. This results in more stray animals on the streets. With no human love, the pets turn into savages attacking both humans and the cyber-pets.
Humans have left Earth for a better life on Mars. One day, thousands of years later, a space astronaut from Mars lands on Earth to find…
In the future, the majority of jobs have been taken over by robots. The only way to earn money is to take part in a series of games and challenges created by the rich for their entertainment.
Everyone on Earth has experienced some sort of mutation in the future. This mutation has made humans powerful and troll-like. As the only pure human (with no mutations), your character’s daughter is kidnapped by a group of mutants who want to use her blood to make humans human-like again.
Imagine you are the last human survivor on Earth. What would you do alone on Earth?
Describe a future where all humans are either deaf or blind.
You and your family live underground away from all the technology. Write a series of diary entries about life underground.
Sugar is banned completely in the future. Even fruits that taste sugary are no longer available. You are the leader of a secret underground group that creates your own homemade sugar. However since humans haven’t tasted sugar in a long time, the results become very dangerous.
Since Earth has been destroyed, every family lives in their own spaceship homes floating around the galaxy. Every now and then you need to protect your home from space invaders, pirates and of course black holes.
Write a story about one boy, his dog and a group of robots living on Earth as the only survivors.
Lying dormant deep at the core of the Earth, dragons finally awake. After a series of powerful earthquakes, they burst through the ground one by one.
With surveillance cameras watching everyone. A new TV show called, ‘Did They Really Do That’ airs across the nation showing the most embarrassing moments of civilians living in your area. You then go on a mission to destroy all surveillance and destroy the TV show.
One man’s dream to swim with the dolphins is taken to extremes, as he genetically modifies a group of humans, so that they can swim underwater. Unknowingly these humans turn into monstrous mermaid-like creatures.
Huge floating islands are created all over Earth to cope with the increase in the human population. These floating islands become new countries on the map with their own rules and way of life.
In the year 3,021 world peace is finally achieved. Everyone lives in perfect harmony. But how was this world peace achieved? One curious civilian makes a shocking discovery.
Write a news article about the latest riot happening in your town in the year 2,899. Why did this riot happen? Who was involved? Where did it happen? What exactly happened before and during the riot?
You are a lab assistant for a company that creates genetic make-up for humans. The make-up keeps humans looking young for their entire lifespan of 180 years. One day you discover something shocking…
Cats and dogs have evolved into human-shaped beings. They now rule Earth and treat humans like pets.
Due to natural extinction and the threat of disease, all animals are gone in the future. You and your family have created a secret underground zoo, which holds the last remaining animals on Earth.
Write a story from the perspective of a servant robot who wants to be the mayor of the city.
Scientists have learned to extract emotions from humans and contain them in jars. At a price, you can remove negative emotions like anger, sadness and fear. You can also sell and buy positive emotions like happiness. To obtain a new emotion, you simply inhale the emotion directly from the jar. In a special clinic, over 10,000 jars of emotions are contained, until one day…
The Earth is a massive video game for advanced aliens living on a distant planet. They randomly spawn monsters whenever they feel like, and can control any human they like. One day the aliens are so bored that they create a big scary boss monster for a town of people to fight.
In an effort to create a better world, all humans must take a personality test. If your personality does not meet the criteria set by the government, then you are sent to work camps. People at the work camps live a horrible life of abuse, torture and endless hard work for 18 hours a day. Imagine that your main character fails the personality test, and is sent to one of these camps.

For more gritty ideas, check out our guide on what is dieselpunk plus story ideas .

What do you think of these dystopian writing prompts? Which one is your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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Imagine a world where exploration is forbidden, and write a story about a character who defies this rule to satisfy their innate curiosity., write a story imagining 'what if' one historic invention had never happened. how would our world be different now, set your story in a world where time travel has been perfected, and people can use it to hop between alternate timelines — but at a cost., set your story in a society where everyone is constantly aware of unwanted surveillance., set your story in an unfiltered world, where people are always honest about how they feel..

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Write about the end of the world… of Atlantis.

A mobile app tells you the amount of time that you have left to live. One morning, this time on everyone's phones syncs to the same number.

The last ragtag group of humans on earth meets the last ragtag group of zombies on earth..

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Write a story about two enemies who must band together to survive the aftermath of the end of the world.

You are a clone designed to mimic your human's every movement and habit so that you can seamlessly take over after the apocalypse starts, but there's just one problem: your human is the weirdest human being ever.

It's one hour before the end of the world. what do you do with that time.

Write a story about a group of zombie friends who go adventuring together after the apocalypse.

No one left on Earth knows what the color blue looks like… until one day, the great fog parts and the sky appears for the first time in a millennia.

In the form of diary entries, write a story from the perspective of the last remaining person in the world., in the end, it wasn't humankind that destroyed the world. it was (fill in the blank)., set your story in a town that’s teetering on the edge of something dark, literally or metaphorically., your character, by chance or habit, peers through a telescope. they see something unusual — what is it, set your story in a silent house by the sea., win $250 in our short story competition 🏆.

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The best dystopian writing prompts

We're living through strange times — but they could always get stranger. Dystopian literature allows us to project ourselves into the distant (or not too distant) future, and imagine what we might find. Perhaps a post-apocalyptic landscape ravaged by war, a nightmarish government who are in absolute control of its citizens, or a human race that has merged with technology. The possibilities are endless, and we're here to provide some more inspiration.

To get you started, here are our top ten dystopian writing prompts:

Write a story about a character who is certain the world is going to end today.
In the end, it wasn't humankind that destroyed the world. It was (fill in the blank).
You are a clone designed to mimic your human's every movement and habit so that you can seamlessly take over after the apocalypse starts, but there's just one problem: your human is the weirdest human being ever.
A mobile app tells you the amount of time that you have left to live. One morning, this time on everyone's phones syncs to the same number.
No one left on Earth knows what the color blue looks like… until one day, the great fog parts, and the sky appears for the first time in millennia.

If you're looking for some more help writing your dystopian story, check out this free resource:

The Ultimate Worldbuilding Guide (free resource) — To write a dystopian story, you need to understand the world you're creating, inside and out. What kind of resources are available? How has society changed? Is there crime, or poverty, or has the world left its issues behind — or at least the government claims it has? Our worldbuilding template will ask the questions you need to find this information.

Want more help learning how to write a dystopian short story? Check out How to Write a Short Story That Gets Published — a free, ten-day course guiding you through the process of short story writing by Laura Mae Isaacman, a full-time editor who runs a book editing company in Brooklyn.

Ready to start writing? Check out Reedsy’s weekly short story contest , for the chance of winning $250 , plus potential publication in our literary magazine, Prompted ! You can also check out our list of writing contests or our directory of literary magazines for more opportunities to submit your story.

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100 dystopian writing prompts

November 23, 2023 by Richard Leave a Comment

Imagine chilling futures where emotions are suppressed, memories are hacked, nature is walled-off, and totalitarian regimes control everything from relationships to the weather. Welcome to our 100 dystopian writing prompts.

Let your creativity run wild envisaging sinister agencies, social manipulation, banned contraband, restricted freedoms, underground resistance, and daring escapes.

Buckle up for a thrilling ride into menacing speculative worlds where you’ll encounter thought police, memory black markets, mandated cryogenic freezing, sinister surveillance, climate totalitarians, and other dystopian threats.

In this comprehensive prompt collection, you’ll find 100 disturbing, tantalizing scenarios captured through cliffhanger “write about…” cues guaranteed to spark new realms of suspense, conflict and tension.

From emotion-suppressing drugs to memory-recording devices gone wrong, mandated matchmaking by genetic compatibility to expiring at a certain age, these prompts zoom in on rebellious individuals fighting corrupt power structures for a second chance at passion, self-determination and a future they define.

Let these dystopian sparks ignite stories of defiant resistance, dangerous flaw-exposing exposés, tense psychological operations, off-the-grid escapes into the wild, and other bold tactics to undermine oppression. Can truth and justice prevail? That’s for you to decide…

Now, enter these speculative dystopian worlds and let your imagination run wild! Where will these 100 dystopian writing prompts take you?

A device is invented that allows the government to control people’s thoughts and actions. Write about someone trying to escape this fate.
Strict laws are passed limiting how many children families can have. Tell the story of a family faced with an impossible decision.
A catastrophic event wipes out most of humanity. Write about a small group of survivors banding together.
All books and writings from history are burned. Write about an effort to preserve or recreate knowledge.
A virus spreads causing infertility. Follow individuals desperate to have children in this dire world.
The population is segregated into zones based on genetic engineering marks. Write from the perspective of someone yearning for the outside world.
Water becomes extremely scarce. Write about the lengths one teen goes to in order to save their community.
A company develops AI androids used for manual labor. Tell the story of an android developing forbidden aspirations for freedom.
Citizens’ use of language is restricted and simplified. Write about a group secretly communicating in metaphors and code.
Memories and dreams are recorded as digital data. Write about a hacker who accesses people’s intimate memories illegally.
The government mandates that certain emotions must be suppressed. Write from the perspective of someone struggling with this.
Time travel is invented but strictly forbidden. Write about someone risking it all to change past atrocities.
The population is herded into city centers while the wildlands are off limits. Write from the view of someone escaping to experience natural life.
A virus spreads that removes facial features. Write about the fear and identity issues that arise in afflicted society.
The government replaces school with endless VR propaganda simulators. Write about an underground effort to preserve free thinking.
A strict rating system quantifies each citizen’s worth. Write about someone striving to boost their rating or hide their true selves.
The population is forced to take pills that alter perceptions of reality. Write about someone slowly realizing the deception.
Strict beauty standards are set by genetic modification. Write about someone pursuing dangerous underground procedures for a boost in status.
The elderly are exiled once past working age. Write about someone hiding an elderly relative.
A curfew is set banning unauthorized night activity. Write about a group of youths planning secret late night events.
Population growth is restricted through mandated cryogenic freezing at certain ages. Write about someone fighting the system or going on the run as their freeze date approaches.
A pandemic requires protective gear covering the body and face, removing unique identifiers. Write about someone desperate to see a loved one’s uncovered face before they are frozen.
The government tracks every move of citizens through mandatory chips. Write about a man who tries to live off the grid, undetected.
A tiered citizenship system is based on serving in civil or military duties for years at a time. Write from perspective of a low-tier citizen dreaming of elevation in status.
Failure to take your mandated medications results in banishment to lawless outlands. Write about someone hiding mental clarity without chemicals.
The natural landscape outside congested urban centers is off limits behind walled boundaries. Write from the perspective of someone who escapes to experience freedom in nature.
A company owns the patent to a synthesized formula needed for human health and jacks up the prices, causing suffering. Write about activists trying to recreate it.
The government controls the weather and all climate conditions. Write about a group that wages weather terrorism demanding natural variability.
Corporations run sovereign city-states. Write about a skilled worker trying to break their never-ending contract.
A virus makes most animals extinct. Write about underground efforts to save remaining species.
The government mandates matchmaking based on genetic compatibility. Write from view of someone struggling when they fall for the “wrong” match.
The ability to reproduce has become allocated to only certain designees. Write about a black market for illegal conceptions.
A pandemic requires everyone to live in isolated pods. Write about someone fighting sensory deprivation to stay sane.
Lifespans are significantly cut short at a certain age through mandated termination procedures. Write from view of someone approaching their expiry trying to fight it.
Write about the invention and consequences of a device that can record and play back memories.
Only ultra high-IQ individuals are allowed in leadership roles. Write about identity struggles for a character judged unintelligent by mandated measurements.
Write about teams competing in a post-apocalyptic city for scarce resources needed to survive decaying conditions.
Write from the perspective of a hacker who works to take down an authoritarian technocracy from the inside.
Write about someone forced to become an “information specialist” manipulating news and data feeds to serve ulterior motives.
Write about a pandemic leading to development of advanced robotic caregiver technology that goes awry.
Write about a protest against emotion-suppressing drugs led predominantly by teenagers seeking freedom and passion.
Write about a survivor banding groups together to restore culture in a controlled dystopia that has erased past artifacts and identity.
Write about black market dealers who smuggle banned physical books to those yearning for lost knowledge and history.
Write about a student who discovers long-suppressed writings revealing troubling truths about their society’s history.
Write a conversation between an elder and a young person who yearns to experience fundamental rights and choices stripped from society, like childbearing.
Write about a small group that escapes into the wilderness and attempts to build an equitable utopia outside dystopian constraints.
Write about someone fighting the system through graffiti symbolizing hope and metaphorical messaging to incite revolution.
Write a debate between a rebel faction leader and authoritarian regime loyalist on freedoms vs order.
Write a prison narrative about inmates alternating virtual reality experiences to mitigate their sentences through psychological manipulation.
Write a tale of genius inventor who creates wondrous technology in secret that could undermine authoritarian control or elevate freedom if revealed.
Strict sleep quotas are enforced via brain implants that monitor REM cycles to maximize productivity. Write from the perspective of someone suffering from sleep deprivation who secretly changes their schedule.
In order to improve worker compliance, the government has developed a chemical to make citizens enjoy menial labor tasks. Write about a janitor who loves their job a disturbing amount.
A powerful caste system has formed among humans after rampant genetic experimentation. Write from the perspective of an oppressed “inferior” caste dreaming of a better life.
Most animals have gone extinct except for those pets approved by the Environmental Ministry. Illegal pet ownership is severely punished, but a thriving black market exists.
In a bid to reduce crime, the government now requires parents to screen embryos for a variety of physical and psychological illnesses. However, many families now feel pressured to produce the “perfect child”.
Due to food shortages, restaurants and grocery stores have been outlawed. All meals are now supplied by the Nutritional Distribution Bureau’s ready-made, cost-effective food products. However, a speakeasy dedicated to actual cooking has opened.
In an effort to increase efficiency and national unity, a universal language with strictly monitored vocabulary and grammar standards is imposed. Those who fail language tests are penalized by social restrictions.
The Life Extension Agency provides age rejuvenation treatments, but primarily to the social and financial elite. The poor struggle with shortened life expectancies, leading some to join radical insurgent groups.
An innovative new Direct Neural Interface allows people’s brains to connect directly to a vast online network. However, hacking into someone’s mind is now disturbingly easy.
In order to prepare youth for the harsh, dangerous streets, local Fight Clubs are organized to systematically toughen up teens and channel aggression effectively.
Due to rampant unemployment, the government now drafts citizens into mandatory civil or military service positions for 10-15 years. Failure to accept an assignment results in imprisonment.
In a bid to improve public safety, petite auditory assistants called “Shoulder Angels” are issued to all citizens to provide helpful guidance. However, their advice is not always ethical, wise or in one’s best interest.
In order to improve citizen health and longevity, the ingestion of all non-synthetic foods and beverages is highly restricted. However an underground movement of “Whole Food Rebels” persists.
Due to widespread infertility, prospective parents are only allowed children via cloning, therefore insuring a continuous labor force. However, a generation of identical offspring creates disturbing identity issues.
In order to eliminate homelessness and unemployment, all citizens must work as general labor at massive collective Farms that supply the nation with food and textile materials. The division of labor is demanding but fair.
Rigid rules dictate what colors, textures and styles of clothes that citizens may wear depending on their age, profession and social status. Fashion diversity is forbidden, with black market clothing trends continuously emerging.
Due to rampant hacking, personal data devices have been outlawed and removed. However an illegal group of elite hackers known as “The Archives” still uncovers and leaks confidential information.
Write about a future in which a volcanic eruption blots out the sun for years, killing crops and plunging society into chaos, violence and despair.
Write about an agency that pushes invasive brain implants that allow video recording of memories and forced data sharing against people’s will.
Write about a future where dreams can be bought and sold on a black market operated through tapping into people’s minds as they sleep to steal visions.
Write about a divided territory where selected wealthy elite live safely in utopian cities while the remaining majority survive dystopian wastelands of pollution and scarcity.
Write about those battling a law requiring registration with Social Harmony Agency that tracks emotions and punishes discord deemed damaging to psychological unity.
Write about resisters fighting against authoritarian rules forbidding casual relationships, friendships or non-approved personal connections in order to boost productivity.
Write about an uprising against an enforced caste system that assigns professions, living quarters, resources access and more based on DNA-based hierarchies.
Write about rebels secretly trying to instill history, art and free thinking in younger generations raised in a neutered, whitewashed and overly structured world.
Write about someone from an agency assigned to manipulate records to maintain historical propaganda narratives confronting their buried conscience.
Write about teachers secretly providing banned materials, intellectual freedom and emotional nurturing despite rigid restrictions on permitted lessons and development.
Write about twin siblings torn apart by diverging citizenship tiers granted to each one, leaving the other in oppressive conditions they try escaping.
Write about time travelers tasked with altering past mistakes and unintentionally fracturing reality through over-corrections of history.
Write about nature rebels trying to preserve plant life needed for clandestine botanical experiments to undo genetic disasters humans have caused through manipulation.
Write about librarians archiving confiscated artifacts, art and documents on the black market struggling to preserve cultural history for future generations.
Write about a hacker leaking scandalous secrets of upper-crust elite, revealing their criminal hypocrisy and oppression behind friendly public facade.
Write about investigators tracing early warning signs of current totalitarian injustice back many generations to disturbing past historical events.
Write about rebels secretly planning targeted infrastructure sabotage or disruptive hacks of controlling surveillance systems to enable societal chaos that disrupts tyranny.
Write about scientists furtively trying to revive extinct species in a controlled environment before authorities crush their unauthorized genetic efforts.
Write about youth experiencing forbidden cultural artifacts like non-digitized photographs, physical vinyl records or ancient paper books for the first time, feeling awakened.
Write about a team planning a high stakes escape mission to lead refugees from border detention camps to safe international territory.
Write about hackers digitally falsifying citizen records to manipulate assignment of soul-crushing undesirable labor mandates.
Write about activists utilizing hidden shortwave radio signals, coded language newspaper ads and other old-fashioned techniques to secretly coordinate resistance.
Write about rebel scientists planning risky psychological experiments challenging theories that current authoritarian rule is an inevitable consequence of innate human society dynamics.
Write about smugglers obtaining prohibited goods like sugar, caffeine or alcohol from foreign black markets to cater to restricted domestic population demands.
Write about resisters launching independent radio broadcasts challenging state-sanctioned news propaganda to circulate suppressed truths.
Write about rebel journalists using old-fashioned typewriters, printers and paper materials to publish and distribute banned insider exposés anonymously.
Write about a team capturing footage of dystopia oppression via hidden shoulder cameras to make viral videos awakening outside world to atrocities.
Write about citizens banding together under pretense of harmless community sport team as disguise to enable secret seditious coordination.
Write about defectors and infiltrators leaking confidential information regarding government-sponsored experiments trying to control or manipulate citizens’ minds.
Write about a duo discovering shocking classified files revealing orchestrated crisis events used as pretext to justify implementing incremental totalitarian measures.
Write about activists utilizing public wall art, performance protests, symbolic clothing and defiant slang phrases to express seditious messages under the radar.
Write about rebel families harboring unauthorized pregnancies in concealed rooms or underground spaces, despite harsh penalties if newborns are discovered.
Write about defiant hackers digitally attacking key infrastructure in Vendetta-like psychological operations to expose regime corruption, undermine authority and awaken masses.

I hope you enjoyed our 100 dystopian writing prompts, and I hope they inspire you to write something great. If you write something you want to share, please leave it in the comments. Also, please remember we have many other writing prompts on our site you might find helpful.

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100 Thriller Writing Prompts

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Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry. Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

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872 Dystopian Writing Prompts

March 2, 2021

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Writing a dystopian story can be fulfilling because it allows you to explore global issues and technology while delivering empowering messages creatively. But, you should know that it can also be challenging, as the genre requires plenty of imagination for worldbuilding and conceptualization of memorable characters, since its main setting is usually a future where things have not gone well for the human race.

One way to make your life easier when writing a dystopian story is by turning to writing prompts for ideas, as they can expose you to new worlds and perspectives.

Below is a list of a dystopian writing prompt that could help you become the next Margaret Atwood or Suzanne Collins:

You wake up in a prison cell not knowing why you are there.
The called test the strength of your community and healthcare by purposefully giving people diseases and be a witness to the ensuing madness.
Everything that happens to you now must be reported to the government. Everyone is constantly watched but cannot be heard.
Join a resistance team in the small country of Aotoria.
Write This is a trap wall inside a dungeon.
The government is spraying you with chemicals that make you perfect.
Get a job in the mail room, someone needs you to read and catch spelling errors.
Every so often your mind drifts away from your body and floats in the airspace above. Who you are and your body follow each other around like matching clouds.
The legs on your Chicken Fillet Footlong are no longer thin.
A scientist invents a formula for longevity, but immortality is at a terrible cost.
Everything in your village has a gender except you.
Everything is perfect. But just because it’s perfect doesn’t mean it’s not evil.
Only red things exist, trees, animals, creatures, humans. You name it.
The Scarlet Witch’s powers suddenly wore off, and humanity reacted in horrific ways.
You come across a child left on your doorstep, what do you do with it?
If you choose freedom then there is no turning back, if you choose your family then you die or disappear.
Your clock is winding down, do you know what to get done before your time is up?
New Year’s Eve is met with chaos, riots break out and the legal marriage age is lowered dramatically.
What happens when your character’s worst nightmare comes true layered with the fact that they never expected it to happen?
The bus driver says not to stand in the doorway any longer, but you like looking out the window.
The remains of the library are still there on your street, but the books are missing.
Non-humans are denied citizenship in your bustling modernity.
Society was not kind to us, so we are sending them a message in the form of a monster.
You match with a hipster on Tinder that drives an Airstream and smells amazing.
The owner of your local supply store has several shady deals going on, but you can’t find out what.
A sudden gas leak except the gas is thought-controlling properties.
An uncontrollable urge to consume human flesh.
A chemical reaction has embedded into your skin causing anyone to see you have to tell you their greatest desire.
There is a cure for cancer, but in order to go on it you must donate something. You are then told you get your identity back. On the way to the surgical ward you are told you are actually walking to your execution.
You woke up this morning to find everyone you know missing and a letter from officials dismissed from your fears, do you do what they say or continue your search?
The government has found a way to make the sun’s rays deadly.
Continue living your simulation as your priorities/curiosity guide you.
Someone in your town needs to do something perfectly after every little task done or they get slaughtered and eaten.
Only men choose the best from their harem of women, all others choose their mates in similar ways.
The government made their own killer virus in a lab because they were bored and it was too big to get out.
No one knows how you die, or why this is a problem, but when you stop breathing you burst into flowers of your addiction.
The city is overrun by clowns trying to recruit people to their happiness movement.
People who eat a lot of falafel never get sick, ever.
You witness a murder because your scientists found a way to stretch time with your pet dog.
Your city is decimated by a nuclear attack, should you stay or should you go?
The government is forcing citizens into more censored fashion today than in the last decade.
The Abolition Agency has come to claim your sisters from their jobs as prostitutes. But the Agency is not who they appear to be, and the soldiers and contacts in this new world is a bit perplexing.
Seriously, say the princess in the tower will marry everyone who rescues her or even everyone who tries. Add a deadline.
You seek to rid your world of powdered sugar, but it just grows back every month.
It’s forbidden to enter between the buildings of your gated community and know why.
How the heck do all these people survive without fresh food?
You’re a prisoner and your only crime is your last name. To avoid persecution why don’t you have it changed?
The aliens have invaded and destroyed any device that has an on/off switch.
Your mother died giving birth to you and you’ve been part of a government experiment ever since.
Your religion has been outlawed, why won’t you give it up?
In this new world, burning books is considered a sport. Why?
What if the country ran out of water, would the capital ever tell the rest of the world?
Food in the future is scarce and beautiful creatures called clones are meat, but they aren’t people.
What kind of dystopian world has no hive conscience, no way for the people to know what their lives are like?
The ravenous forest wants to swallow up your town. You need to learn to use dark magic to save the town.
Your parents and little sister were captured when the lights went out.
You anonymously post news about the odd goings on in your town, but the government decides who can read and what gets printed.
Everyone has their own group to go to, but you feel like you will never fit in anywhere.
You live in a place where you can make one phone call a day and you must say exactly what you are instructed to say.
The scent of roses floats on warm summer breezes.
Anything goes, no genre particular.
Your yard is invaded by giant jelly babies, how would you eradicate this threat?
Your people were killed while you were away by an enemy who specializes in tying people to poles.
All words required for everyday life must be sung.
Become One of the Few That Survive in The Aftertime.
A bird just dropped that…thing on your head,
A man in a white coat can be heard over the loudspeaker every Sunday morning, a sermon of sorts, by none other than God.
A towering walled-in city had captured your freedom and now you’re getting back at them.
The government is killing people for having too many kids, you are having too many kids.
Your body is a prison, control can be extracted from anywhere in your body.
Forced isolation is the standard in this new society.
You’ve never seen the sky – a whale crashes into a tanker miles out at sea releasing a poisonous gas that kills almost everyone in town.
You can see and hear people across the country as if on a television.
The president’s son, the prince, has gone missing.
Laughing gas attacks everyone every night.
The hybrid you’re driving has just completely failed you, some scientist has just put a stop to it.
Imagine that an author inadvertently wrote his or her own death sentence.
With the currency reset every day, you learned long ago to only buy what you can consume.
No one in your town remembers what is in the outside world.
A bio-weapon destroys all technology on Earth as people survive living in the ancient world.
Was it all a dream, or did it really happen?
You choose when you will die.
Everyone knows you, or can at least see you, and nobody cares.
You have the ability to see the future, although that future has been set and can’t be changed. Use this ability to its fullest potential.
A person can only get sick/Injured every half a century.
You are a humanoid robot, but the robots are on the streets and you need to go out of the city before they get ahold of you.
A walled city is slowly being taken over by a jungle.
When you listen to whispers at night they come true.
Using only found materials, create a sculpture for a sculpture of yourself made out of a strand of your own hair and fingernail clippings.
An unintentional mistake lands a girl stripped of her humanity and falling victim to the ways of the world, where it’s every man or woman for themselves. A nuclear war has just hit the outside—no one is left alive. Cl cleansing the dust and radiation is up to the prisoners working in the fallout shelter, but do you want to make that sacrifice?
There is a group of people that regularly commit suicide, why?
A cat can speak with humans and the other animals are trying to figure out what the cats are saying.
The city of York fell into the hands of a disease known as ‘the red sickness’ that made your skin turn red and caused death. Tell the story of how the government took over and banned travel.
There are no sweets in the world any more, why now?
What does your community do when human waste becomes an immediate threat?
It looks like rain—you hope it is rain, nothing else could survive.
The government or a corporation comes and buses everyone away, where are they taking them, and what are they doing to them?
Your neighbor tells you that the TV informs them what they need to. Every Saturday night a “movie” is played before the TV goes silent again. Every night the movie plays exactly the same way—what is it?
It is illegal to smile.
No one being allowed to marry or love ‘the one’ is illegal, why?
You are one of the chosen few that get to start over on an uninhabited island.
Suppose superheroes actually existed. How would the world react?
A dragon flies past your window every night. What does he look like?
Everyone you love is gone, everything you want is impossible and you’re dying.
He knew it was over the second he found her bloody body, by one of the disappearing people.
You are the chosen one.
Any set back can be overcome with drone piloting skills.
Society chooses sliced bread as the only food to be eaten, but people still can eat.
Anything below the equator is considered unworthy of travel.
You are cloned and that clone must go to the Capital and eliminate the government and there is only one you.
Humans are dying out slowly because they want to.
A lifetime ending when barely hitting double digit ages, how do we maximize the experience?
Everyone must take their piano skills to a higher level. Be creative but also be able to stretch your fingers to the max.
The government has outlawed movies due to a person from the film becoming sentient and killing several employees of the cinema.
Save an artificial leader or save the real one.
You wake up gray and paralyzed, where do you go from there?
Where does the water come from? Where does it go?
Your legs. You don’t have them. In their place are encased pistons that propel you through the complicated clockwork of the world.
The wrong side of the coin dictates the rules of this society and if you don’t like them you’re in line to become the town scapegoat.
Kids hunt down adults and eat them. Seriously, why would we do this? Simple- because we all enjoy a good dystopia/utopia/ post-apocalypse/end-of-the-world-is-up-our-street man. We love the total madness of twisty narratives and sharp societal undertones. Frequently, the best phrases I’ve heard have come out of middle school when they start to encounter the real world- in that first plot twist you’ve probably not experienced yet- so maybe they do know their talkin’ a whole lot of good.
Your father disappears and you search for him.
The local police are putting in surveillance cameras on all of the residents and raising taxes on everyone.
The population is controlled by mandatory sterilization, you find out your autistic older brother was sterilized so he would never have to worry about being a father and a burden to his caretaker.
Why shouldn’t you pee while taking a hot shower?
A strand goes missing. No one can find it, each time someone goes near it, they lose time.
You have a special gift, but only if you find certain people with a special tattoo.
The ground may be solid, may sink into the abyss, may disappear in some other unknown way at any moment in time.
A haircutter finds universal love in the forehead of his clients.
The Groundwater’s gone, now the humans must live on the rooftops.
Each day everyone wakes to a new sign created by a nearby village. What do the cribbles mean?
Three children get lost in a cave and stumble into an underground city where people have booby-traps.
An influence has come over your town and no one questions what happens, you were born with the courage to question.
The government height and weight regulations for women make attempting to find love impossible.
Everyone in the town is a zombie, how do you survive the politics of the zombies?
The mist is red at night and black during the day. Why?
Your waffle iron tells you the future because you’ve been chosen by a dead French feminist.
What is the government trying to accomplish with the suppression of basic rights?
You’re on death row and you wake up in your cell the next day, fully alive.
Carrying anything bar money is considered littering.
You were born with wings.
You’re poor and hungry. Every meal you prepare for yourself is poison, but if you don’t eat you die. Why are you getting so hungry?
Everyone lies to you, all the time.
Magic is real, but does not work without a contract?
You can’t step into water because you will melt, when you are in water you never stop shimmering.
The rich are the only ones who look healthy while the malnourished are starving.
They have taken every piece of art in your house away, and frame it proudly.
Someone has accessed their brain and replaced all negative memories with happy, kind of memories.
How does the dystopian world view knowledge and how do you gain it? What do you do to obtain it?
Even though the Carnivore Initiative was said to have ended giving results, your brother goes missing.
The mantises have now evolved and are starting to prey on the humans.
How would you escape the Dome?
The cataclysm has been over for several years but the survivors, struggling to grasp reality after all they lost, compound the already formidable challenges of rebuilding their lives, reverting to the natural order of things or all out anarchy and chaos to conquer.
Everything is fine on the Surface until you happen to go deep down below where everything isn’t so fine.
Everyone has a tracking device implanted under their skin.
An oppressive force smashes idols of leadership everywhere in an effort to tear down the government.
An apocalyptic event destroys all mammals except human females and they all go into heat and try to mate with you.
It’s illegal to be attractive and you, being the most desirable member of your immediate family, were disfigured to protect a source of power.”
You are interrogated by a government official, but you don’t get it—why are you being questioned?
After a catastrophic travel accident the sun rotates in a complete circle underground, heating everything on the planet.
A new type of pill helps you hate everyone. You can’t lose.
If the world is ending the why wait to fix it?
It is the end of civilization as we know it and those in power are feeding themselves well while the peons starve.
Everybody is segregated by species, how do you survive while being labeled as an “animal”?
Your government doesn’t want your country to learn a certain history.
The government is corrupt, but the highest power in the land is an orphan girl.
All human males are dead or missing, now society must depend on female rulers and males are used as slaves, what kind of world does society create now?
A mental institution runs human experiments on patients outside of regulations.
Man has destroyed the environment to such an extent that a future generation will never know what it is to see the stars.
A clock counts down the time left on Earth.
Reactionary new laws by the government have left you with no choice but to join one of the nation’s criminal organizations.
A nearby country begins using female soldiers, and yours is the first in response.
Water is either rationed or non-existent, who steals to get water, do you?
Those who take their lives are at peak happiness and have their debts erased.
They keep crying that they’re manning up society, and stealing your rights as a human being.
Forced labor is the only way to get by, are you tired of it yet?
A woman living in your town somehow died but because of her pregnancy she kept getting weaker. Her soul is now inside any plastic sealed food or water in the town. If you consume the soul with say the tomato soup she was hiding in your refrigerator, you gain her powers.
Everyone you knew was just wiped from diverse memories.
Is a black market profitable if those who sell don’t survive?
Engineering geniuses allow dolphins and manatees to talk and walk upright, and are conscripted into the government as soldiers.
The government may be stealing babies, how do you survive in a world that is void of adults and humans to fight?
The entire world is made of towering stone monoliths.
A giant divide in socioeconomic status creates a caste system where you are created many levels below your actual ability.
If you have to grow food, it doesn’t have to be pretty.
Free contraceptives and abortions are a given, when the right to procreate is one of the greatest things to take away from people.
Stay out of the ocean or the sea will swallow you whole.
The people of your town send their “deviants” where others should not see. What happens there?
Butcher boys roam around at night stealing and executing people in gruesome and horrific ways.
Somehow you sprouted wings and can fly. What do you do with these new abilities?
The only children allowed outside are the ones who are injured.
The population needs to return to a sustainable number, any child not born to a married couple will be taken away.
Raptors abound in the world, you are one of the few ‘Ephers’ who helped defeat them back and live a bitterness-free life now. Why are there so many rumors about happenings at night?
It’s the Dark Ages! Conan the Barbarian runs the European Union!
Things were just solved, the kingdom has been saved… or has it?
There’s a new district in the city, but as to why it’s about one third the size of the few other districts, nobody knows… For this prompt you write a post about your character trying to figure out the mystery behind what is going on, along with details of everyday areas.
Do you get money to go to the grocery store or stay home to work private jobs to get what you need?
You wake up in an ancient, dusty elevator and the only access is up via the buttons inside.
A tiny island in the middle of a great sea is the only continent left on the planet. Only one man has been there and he’s coming back with a survivor.
Happy citizens keep away from the fence that surrounds the town.
A toy story-like play on plastic surgery.
All immigrants are immediately given the ultimatum to join up and change your identity or be arrested as enemy aliens. Do they survive?
Five kids at your age have ended up like this and no one knows why.
You find a black box, maybe it’s a TV, no wait, it’s a camera!
What do you do when no one can agree on reality?
The numbers on your house mean more than how many floors it is.
In order to escape into the outside world, you will need to complete a series of riddles.
Gypsy’s can see the future, but a secret government agency has found and killed all of them, except one…Some eggs cannot be hatched, why else?
You are a member of the rebel faction, but your inadvertent moment of weakness could have you executed.
Where’s the receipt? Crowds preach that followers of Jesus must repent. You did not receive a ticket for the payoff. How are you going to get in the queue for this time travel machine?
Cotton Candy is extremely addictive and the supply suddenly reduces to only a month’s worth. Department stores sell the precious substance and it is bought and sold on the street with different theories on its sudden loss.
Stop, Brain, Stop! An Essay of How to Marry the Miraculous
A man runs by toward you, people run out in warning after him, a beast leaps toward him and eats him in mid-stride.
People who disobey the law are killed and hauled to the graveyard, run-ins are inevitable.
A coin toss determines your fate.
Discover a hidden secret about your neighbor or family, and you aren’t allowed to tell anyone.
You can have any intro you want, as long as it’s written in a journal logging your descent into madness.
You live inside the walls of a spaceship that travels through the solar system, resources are scarce and so is air.
A nationwide sensation called Watch It! shows you what you desire most, and isn’t afraid to make it abundantly clear why you don’t deserve it.
A devil walks into your school and you are his only challenge.
Boys ran the world until it was no more. Now women run everything, but they still get drunk and cry and bring boys back to the room. This must be outlawed.
The sun is gone, but there is light. Do people venture to different sides of the world? Where do they go?
An explosion wipes out everything in the whole world, minus a city that survived. The people who lived there are now immortal. But the blown-out city is creeping itself back into civilization.
People are dropping like flies from the virus but there is no sickness.
Your job is protecting the money, but suddenly all the money goes missing.
Chess is against the law, do you cheat?
Why do mechanical birds so often question the struggles of the common man?
Your parents were certified insane, they did not want the government to get their hands on you so they planted you out into the woods hoping you would be found and live a normal life.
Every time you blink or look away, your job changes. How would you survive?
All men are gone from the world, how do women conceive in this new world?
Everything is peaceful as is the new way of life, why does no one question it?
Everything in society is based on keeping the economy running, so people are always working.
The authorities do not want you unfit and in the way of their agenda to rule as they see fit.
Machines patrol the streets, always watching us. – Draw this scenario as a comic.
A disease no one ever contracts or contracts and never does anything more than causes a bit of itchiness and a rash.
No one but a forgetful and naïve dog can see or hear you.
A nuclear holocaust turned the clock back to The Age of Feudalism.
A mysterious being is killing people’s livers, leaving nothing behind but a birthmark and a newborn.
Weather balloons litter the ground after the sky was once clear.
Light becomes closer to a precious resource.
You sit alone in the cold dark of your jail cell, wondering how you got here.
Time is running out and the town is preparing for it, knowing their doom.
Some children remain innocent after a dog eats their entire family. How do they adapt?
The crime you see on the news happens to you when you step out that door.
Giant mutant cockroaches plague society and anyone who gets bit, not only dies, they are brought back to life, but changed, now they are an even bigger mutant cockroach!
You sing in your sleep and the government is after you.
A plague takes the skin off your body, leaving stickers in its place.
The casinos had only the letter “Z” in their names.
How do you survive when you are forced to fight to the death each year?
No one in the world can speak.
Everyone within the sound of this dog barking is being transformed into the dog, what happens next?
An entire island is covered in mushrooms, you decide to enter.
No one can be trusted, not friends, not family, not anyone, always suspect ulterior motives.
You have the ability to put people to sleep at extreme ranges and with ill effects.
Extreme temperatures and windstorms seem to be the norm of this new world, why did your world change?
You disappear and the world moves on as if you were never there.
Today, time travel is illegal and you just accidentally used it.
People are being transported from your town and never coming back. What do you do?
Start a diary in which you must convince yourself every day that the outside world is real.
Your dreams, blood sugar pain, laughter and nightmares are all reality.
Children all over the country are escaping into other worlds, yours included.
Severe lack of food supplies makes mothers prostitute themselves.
Just because you’re levelling up doesn’t mean everyone else has to die.
The population of all the towns are told not to leave, but you secretly want to.
It’s not safe to lock your doors, it’s not safe to have any kind of shelter, it’s not safe to hope for a brighter future.
Your town doesn’t have human inhabitants, instead, every day, pigeons take over and they do it right where you work and live.
A killer has declared war on anyone whose birthday is the same as his, what will you do?
Nothing ever ages, once it exists it remains the same forever in salt containers in the city hall.
Your mother insists on dating your best friend’s older brother, but he’s actually a man-nequin. Who has feelings and a love life.
People have no control over the weather. They can only look at it and wonder what is going on.
An artist is painting intricate portraits of the citizens of your town, maybe they will make it less lonely.
A community of clairvoyants and you are the only one without special powers. The establishment is depending on you to fail, but you refuse.
Your boyfriend brings home what he claims to be a robot, but it surprises you every time.
A character wakes from a coma and has to pretend they are a completely different character.
Everything you used to know has suddenly disappeared as if it never existed.
Your smartphone doubles as your battle mask and projectile weapon.
A person disappears every day.
You hear a distant howl that grows as the days run out.
An earthquake knocks out Wi-Fi, cell phones, and electronic devices, how your society handles STDs.
A group of people do drugs that allow them to travel back in time. However, they forget their time when they get back to where they were.
A nameless enemy destroys everything, but every year until your death there is a glitch.
What if the Ridiculous were Prohibited? Things get pretty political.
The food in this dystopian world causes food poisoning or a mutated version of food poisoning.
Your friends are what holds you together. Just them and some duct tape and you’ve got it made.
Your eyes glow everytime you drink because you can see into the future.
Work together or face a fate worse than death.
Everything you do must be done with the help of your computer.
If you see someone shrink or grow, you’re next to go because you’ll have something to tell.
Men have no legal rights, women have all the power and live in a post-apocalyptic world, men however wreak havoc in secret gangs as they stalk the city at night attempting to rescue babies being held captive far from the city by their high tech captors.
No one is allowed to wear flip-flops outside and a dumb boy can’t learn to break that rule.
What happens to the prisoners who are electrocuted/burned alive/shot outside in their cells each morning?
You are taking an aspirin, but it’s actually poison and you are slowly dying.
A severe storm keeps everyone inside for weeks, but one morning you get to your front door and see something out of the ordinary.
Instead of air rights, you get land rights. And those “rights” are constantly being taken away from you.
The SWAT Team has your husband surrounded at work. You have to save him, but how?
This game is intended for you to have fun with so spice it up! Use published dystopian works or go off the grid, whatever tickles your fancy. Don’t use setting material from your own published work. We want to see original characters and settings!
There is nothing more unsettling than the look of the unknown.
Some evil being is controlling everyone beneath the Earth, the people of this world do not realize it.
You find out that you are the product of better breeding techniques. Are you happy?
You hear them approaching, but what do you use to warn the others?
All food has a price tag, but it doesn’t come with nutritional contents.
Seven children are told, “You have the week to stop a war.”
An invented history gives rise to a new world, which is a second chance.
There are rules posted around your town that no one pays any attention to, but everyone follows.
Everything in the world is green except people. The air is thick and respiration is difficult, but you can move through the pollution with ease.
A world where you need a license to marry someone, get a job, and have babies.
The government tells people that chocolate is poison, people are surviving on sugar tablets.
Any followers of Satan are required to go to the department of the opposite of what they believed in and live there.
A new cure is released, everyone must get it by midnight or they start festering and then disintegrate.
There’s a bunker under the city and past generations have left instructions and notes to us, but only you and no one else can read the notes.
Your childhood animal makes an appearance and is now your only friend, it talks.
They’re incredibly smart…and they’re incredibly deceitful…and they’re everywhere.
When will the last oil spill happen?
An annual uprising by the “leadership” occurs when the common people steal and pillage what’s left of the city.
You know you’re never going to find the person you lost.
If you saw a monster, there would be no hiding and no escape.
A technology update gives us the ability to monitor people’s every move, what strings are being pulled?
A sudden disease spreads across the world and people catch it by making eye contact.
Disease wipes out the population except for a select few immune, how do they survive? What stops the disease from wiping them out too?
The Mayan calendar ends with a sharp boom…
Hand in your alarm clock and so forth and so on.
A boy comes of age in a world where every night the soldiers burn and powerwash his village clean of the day’s perspiration and smells and night marks the change in the world. A shift in the pattern and he is inspired to flee his home and unearth the source of the wires that fill the streets.
Every week there is a random curfew issued and it changes every time and varies from house to house.
Every inhabitant of your orphanage is adopted out to different families every weekend, you must behave if you want to be adopted yourself.
The government tells you that you are chosen as their number one perfect candidate for society. You have no choice.
An alien race attacks and kidnaps a legion of soldiers and elite neurosurgeons.
Gamers become the actual characters from their favorite video games.
Everyone must limit their time out of the house, else get sent to prison.
Everyone gets out in time, right? Wrong.
Everyone on Earth forgets your name but those who know you best.
Lynch the innocent and let the guilty prosper.
So very many alligators have been raised from darkness and age old folklore comes true.
Fantasies are illegal and punishable by death.
Threats of nuclear war surface, but you are blind to all of this because of your contact lens.
The sun is the last natural resource on earth, and expectations of how the sun operates have forced everyone underground.
Everyone can speak every language whether you know it or not. When you do not know a language, you speak gibberish.
The government has mandated certain colors of the paint on houses. Why?
You get in an argument with your parents and they lock you in your room during the summer.
Life right now is a flashback to the past. Are you alive by mistake?
An accident turns a small town into bubble people.
In the future, you can live on Earth, below ground, or in an orbiting spaceship. How do you choose which to do?
Time is running out. You have seven days to live after taking a holiday’s worth of opioids.
Similar question as above but with children being exchanged for animals.
What makes your town distinct from the rest?
No one is allowed to say what they dream or state their desires out loud for fear the government will take it away.
Mutants, demons and cannibals walk among us, but not all is what it may seem, until you see those teeth.
Your labyrinth undergoes a transformation every few hours, get ready to keep track of that maze.
Your village needs fresh slaves for the arena.
One day you wake to find that you no longer have a penis, on the plus side, you do have period-like symptoms now.
A private plane lands and lures the people of your city into the jet.
The girls are all missing but no one seems to notice them missing.
You’re accidentally thrown into a panic room, what will you do?
Talk about the weather with someone and your throat slowly dries up.
There is a new entertainment from Software, Inc. called Rewind.
The reason marriage is illegal is because you will be bought by who you get married to, do you still want a marriage?
How do your relationships suffer due to your mutations?
Crime doesn’t exist, but you’re still too upstanding to be a vigilante.
You never die, but can only heal to whatever wound you sustain.
Hallucination propaganda is everywhere. No one knows what is real and what isn’t.
Find out who keeps exploding the moon.
Break curfew and you are eliminated.
Growing up your parents leaned towards a certain political party, now if you vote a certain way they will make sure you pay.
Every woman is stabbed in the heart with a needle and has their memories wiped. What happens when it happens to you?
An invasive species is taking over the planet, they’ve already gotten what you have.
You wake up and your name is different.
A strange tickling sensation can’t be explained, but there’s not much time for research.
A school fire burns ALL of the students, but their forms are preserved in pebbles.
A robot has won a local election, the community is surprised at the turnout.
Outing someone counts as treason as well, so a total hard left-wing society fights to contain the knowledge at all cost.
A machine you rub on the wrist not only ends your current life, but also resets your age. To have a new life, you would have to re-enter your current name and age because if you were to maintain your current memories, well, you’d know what you were up against, right?
The government is stealing babies and you’re next.
Is it where you’re from or what you believe that defines you?
The sun is gone from the sky. A dark being devoured it.
How do people rebuild their lives after surviving a plane crash?
Did you know you’re not quite human anymore?
Only the people of the royal family are allowed to read. Those who do are punished, but nobody knows what.
People are disappearing every night. WHO???
Write about how life would be in a controlled economy or a city that is ruled by one dictator.
Every person in the world is required to hand their cell phone to a person who is an alternate version of you.
Everything is free, but it could all change at any moment.
Before you go to sleep you need to recap the happiest moment of your life so someday it will haunt your dreams.
Maybe we’re not meant to know everything. Maybe there are things that we shouldn’t know.
Your life as a single was deprecated, do you join a harem or not — and if you do, are things really any better?
People are being forced to marry the person so appointed to them.
The whole adult population is just gone, leaving only children.
If they smile, you can never leave. You were a warning sign.
Rebel with your brother against an aged government.
Every family has a Darius, and Darius can’t speak. Not even whisper.
No one looks down on you or judges you, in fact you can do whatever you want in this world because the village is completely desert wasteland
Give into your urge to survive and kill.
Dragging your every move is a ghost which won’t let you rest without a night of terror.
How does censorship only work in America?
There is a wall surrounding a city, anyone who wants to enter or leave is shot – by snipers.
The government controls all oxygen, thus also controls all breathing.
The war has begun, but is just not being reported in the papers any more, why?
You’ve got one week to decide whether or not to kill your comrade.
The government has already called round-ups, how will you hide your non-DMusic-follower beliefs?
Everyone over a certain age is compelled to walk into a giant windmill, but the first time it happened it had no effect on you.
The President is choosing a new wife, those are the rules.
Your town’s population begins to rise from the dead.
The stupid card was revoked.
Your city is ruled by diseases and these diseases convey social status and stimulus.
You’re gun shy when it comes to being directly involved with the Resistance.
Advanced robots somehow became self-aware and enslaved the human race.
A meteor hits the Earth and sends the entire Northern Hemisphere into a deep winter, how do city and country-dwellers survive?
You are the leader of a movement to throw the bums out who just stand around and do nothing when trade laws mean you will lose your country’s resources. Your protests are for nothing because your new government just pushes harder and when this fails to silence you, they push harder. What next?
Some people’s secrets can save them. Other’s can destroy them. Which is it for you?
What lies beyond the walls of the great white city?
Your neighbor offs herself and you find out that she had also murdered her family before killing herself.
Shipping container homes full of American fans of the royal family must find places to live after being kicked out of their housing.
Find your name on the government’s death list and have a particular pleasure for the fear in your eyes.
Two teenagers are told what to do and what to eat and what to wear their whole lives. One night they decide to leave.
You end your apocalyptic novel with a child born in the rubble crying out, giving hope for the next generation’s survival.
Gun control backfires and the country is in chaos.
There isn’t anybody you love anymore.
What if the only thing we own is really owned by Corporations?
You’re at a party, and you can’t get over the fact you’re surrounded by a bunch of dead people.
At first it seemed like life was turning around but the man you married ends up murdering you and all of your joy.
You smell silver, it’s tasty, but silver is the currency.
You can still remember life with your family, but not every person grew up in the same culture.
The answer is candy. The question is why?
Vampires aren’t evil, but they are misunderstood and dependent on human blood.
You can only breathe if you lay on your back.
Some awful virus makes everyone crazy with murderous energy except you, you don’t get to participate, can you make it?
After going without for so long, just a single taste can send a human to an addict’s high.
The point of living is now illegal and frowned on.
Someone’s coming to kill you but you’ll never know when it’s coming!
A terrorist survives the bombing he planned to commit, how does he use his new power?
The government is training children to be the future leaders of society.
A nested doll, inside of a smaller doll, inside of a smaller doll…
one of your friends was replaced by a robot
The day that begins like any other is no longer so everyday.
Black and white zones surround a center area filled with people. The black and white zones are barren of all life. What is the deal with the colored zones?
Endless torture is your sacred right, and you’re forced to abide by it.
Build your own utopia and define what three laws you would establish.
The prettiest girl in town lives alone with her single dad in the one abandoned shack town.
You are on a work crew, a long-lost luxury you’ve now regained, and you see…
The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere drops and becomes poisonous.
A virus has spread globally. Some lose their hair, some lose their hands, some lose their minds.
You meet a chillingly polite cult leader and he invites you to join his group.
Someone sneezes in front of you and you hear ‘All Hail the Revolution’ just that quickly.
Vampires are taking over the world and are luring out victims with freely available cocaine.
The dictator of your walled-in town is a hot lady, everyone lusts after her.
Nothing works and you keep receiving bills every month.
You come back from the future and people don’t believe you, even though you’re used to having them deny you.
The energy market is controlled by one company, their monopoly is killing humanity.
There are surveillance cameras in everybody’s home, watching everything they do.
No one knows he’s a prince but he’s vapid, has no motivation besides partying, and has everyone drooling over him.
At night, you just don’t know what creatures will appear.
Who you callin’ an Anchor Baby?
Demon possession seems to be a curse in your family.
Page after page of numbers equal the total of human lives remaining in your world.
Orders are orders and you’d best abide by them.
The crime rate is going through the roof, but the police told you it is peaceful and safe and something is false.
You signed a contract to have surgery to become healthier, never mind the side effects.
It’s the zombie apocalypse, but embracing death is strictly forbidden.
The dead become alive. What happens when bodies rot away and only a skeleton remains?
The government demands blood from the townspeople every year, why?
The fridge is never stocked at the library.
The power goes out overnight, what will you do?
Supplies are just barely enough for the community each year.
A plague hits your walled-in town, but instead of people dying, they just disappear into a poof of smoke.
Find maps of hidden underground tunnels used to escape hundreds of years ago.
You are constantly stuffing small objects into your stomach, but you can’t keep them there for long.
Will there ever be an end to war?
A computer program that procreates humans.
Someone has been digging for treasure in the cemetery, can you find it before it reopens?
A ruler has banned all fiction. How does this change reading?
People live freely and in nature together like animals without clothing or other signs of civilization in authoritarian America.
Two people are selected each year to leave the city for a two week vacation. They are allowed to take one luxury with them.
Riot police surround the city and anybody out in public is taken away.
It’s ending soon, but not the way the televisions say.
The Government is in jail and you can see their window from your house.
What happens when the government is involved in every aspect of your daily living?
Crows and gulls have ravaged the earth, now fish fly and snakes are crossbred with fish to come to life on land.
Everybody and everything is infested with nano-bots running on normal electricity.
Your city is completely surrounded by neon green trees, but every plant you touch feels smothering and dark.
The desktops of government officials are fairy-tale land maps showing the location of every citizen.
All you know is the old world is gone and these things live in the new one.
A digital shadow follows you, you have no control over it, what do you do?
Breastfeeding is a felony offense.
The only way to discover the truth is to kill.
You pick up a stranger’s lost cell phone but it’s not just a cellphone.
What does your race think of eating babies?
A new disease you can only get by eating the brains of the deceased spreads over your town.
Mobs roam the streets daily, looking for women to attack and violate. What do you learn about them?
Your house is surrounded by bombs that will go off if you leave, how do you live?
Which is more important, breathing or eating?
Why would someone want to hide away in this bunker?
You must defeat the Corrupt-a demon that lives in your very heart to survive the breach.
What would war be like without any guns involved?
Anyone who does not fit the current society model is to be thrown into a river, one of you has a genetic deficiency.
The earth is dying and if something irreversible happens, cloning will be key to the human race surviving.
Pick some animals and create possible future mutations of those animals.
Brutality at bayonets of an evil army on a black hearted battlefield, day after day, after day.
A dominant militaristic culture takes over and anyone who speaks out is systematically exterminated.
Every morning the paper records the number of deaths from the night before.
After the purge, starting every year on x-day, no one dies, anyone who attempts to commit suicide is knocked out for the day.
A scientist invents a device that sends everyone happy thoughts, even if it means electrocuting them.
The mushrooms taste like chicken, are you eating a cow?
An event in your dystopian world brings legends to life.
The history books have been tampered with, you are sure of it when you begin to question everything.
A new wave of sleep paralysis is affecting everyone, no one is able to sleep peacefully.
A lighthouse sits there in the distance, when did it get there?
A curfew on TV and radio, so citizens don’t become discontent with their lives.
After a death in civil war, your new government requires that everyone carry a firearm all the time.
Your father is lying on the ground, you run up to him thinking he is asleep, he isn’t, he has a knife in his back and he isn’t breathing.
The stars are out because they glow in the night and then shatter and fall to Earth all over the world.
Reality changes and you are the only person who can see it.
Walk through the doors and you lose your family.
To escape the laws of this land you must kill a person.
All the history books have been eliminated.
Your freedom of speech was taken away forever when you were brought here.
A war rages between you and your nation’s neighboring country and women can’t even get pregnant.
What does a child not want to grow up to become?
War is the only reality, but the rules keep changing.
A cure for cancer is discovered and you awake one day to find yourself immortal.
A riot has broken out in the streets, you must escape by any means necessary.
You wish you could sleep through the night, but your dreams are haunted by zombies.
You wake up and find that a group of religious zealots have taken over your hometown.
Find a boy. Save him.
Things were better in the old-school ways, or so is claimed as government officials are thrown in jail daily.
Devils in the mirror, how do you get out of this one?
A senator’s son dies mysteriously and the wild conspiracy theories spin out of control.
You’re on a TV show featuring ” normal people “. A loving shunning cult that loves to shun is formed around you when you speak opposition rather than supporting their beliefs.
Men are scarce, women are plentiful, so begins the new world order.
You need an I.D. from the Department to purchase anything.
Always under lock and key, but you’ve gotten in before and you’re looking for some place to hide.
Upon your father’s death, the debt to his company divides between you and your twin daughters.
Society is telling you what to do and how to act, if only it would stop talking.
Dolls, while not alive, are better than real parents, you have to take one and they choose you.
Your neighbor just disappeared and the government claims he doesn’t exist.
A mysterious box shows up at your doorstep, it always has a viewer on it who wants to talk to you.
Too many people are breeding, as if there is no tomorrow.
People that get upset turn to stone, but no one knows how to help them.
All animals are gone from the world, how do people in this new world survive?
Make up your own dystopian future.
It is final exam week and as you look at your essay, you quickly realize you have no idea what you are actually writing about.
Cost of living is so high, it costs a million dollars for a loaf of bread.
How do you outsmart the government if that’s what they want you to do?
A mad scientist has taken it upon herself to fix you up, it hasn’t worked out yet.
The government is the only thing keeping humanity going and they’re a Blood Lord kick line away from the end of their act.
You wake up from a dream to find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world.
Send in general oral history questions to mj at merrimack.edu for them to appear on the podcast and your name to be entered into a raffle to win a free book.
There is a question you must answer every night at midnight… and if you do the question, you forget it the next day.
As you’re loading up your truck in “the morning,” your parents forget the most important part.
There are no books in the world except one.
Every room in your home is fitted with cameras and everyone has loved ones trapped in a castle.
There is only one child.
In this world, people write on a tablet’s surface with a stylus, instead of writing on paper.
Ghosts are everywhere and there’s no escaping them.
The computerized police state finally arrests you for something you didn’t do this time.
The boy you’re in love with is entering a modeling contest where people can bid on who is really the most beautiful, and he might have had facial restructuring so he can win.
The human genome has been modified to ensure there can never again be a World War. Discuss.
You take a pill to control your dreams, what happens when the supply runs out?
A race of pasty, white men with fishy eyes climb out of the sea.
Youth just got the right to vote, what do you decide changes?
Automobile travel is banned in a desperate attempt to save the world, but you insist you have to go.
Someone is murdering all your family members.
Dating is illegal, find love in other ways.
Your four year-old is gone, the police say he probably just wandered off.
Uncle Sam and his cronies are outlining new rules for American life.
Government experiments have gone bad resulting in destroyed or mutated plants and animals.
A man lived and an old woman died. A trio of knives from ailing hands make free his prison called the world.
Machines have destroyed people’s minds, but the machines have evolved into something that harms humans as well.
Create a world from a tourist guide brochure from your own present-day country.
If you’re a female, you better be wearing a dress.
Everyone works in a smelting industrial greenhouse, the little people working the furnaces, the larger Hempons on top of the gondola equipment, the rest of the grossly pox-scarred population in the offices.
Your family is the only family on the block that the government recorded as extinct, should you walk up to your house?
Help! You get kidnapped in this lifetime, how do you get away?
The water tastes sweet, why do you think this is risky?
What are some of your favorite Dystopian writing prompts?
The aliens you’ve been abducted by aren’t entirely evil, but what are their intentions with you?
To ensure the safety of all citizens, you must relocate. Where? What will it take?
Only the wealthy can afford to buy houses and everything else is rented.
Battle for the truth. No one has any real truth, but what if they did?
The adult you is as real as the girl you were yesterday.
Through a mysterious agreement all the people of a small town decide that nobody goes in and no new people are to be born.
No one can die in the city they live in, people simply vanish.
Your sense of smell returns and you just can’t tell those scents apart.
Not all plagues are biological…some are emotional.
You can never fall in love because you are the only eligible bachelor in your district.
You wake up on a step, covered in a thick coating of moss looking at a group of people surrounding you, but you haven’t a clue what they’re saying.
A black fear has swept the country, a disease is sweeping the population. Be careful not to spread it though, it can sometimes make you invisible!
Chains hang from your ceiling and no one in the world can explain why.
No one is allowed to have children while alive in the city. Their bodies are buried and under their names sprouts a new tree. If you want to see your family again, go to the garden cemeteries of the city.
You were walking alone at night and ended up in another dimension.
Your lucky day awaits! Grab a ticket and get to the front of the line.
Dogs are growing human ears, some of them can talk as well.
As you slip through a mysterious vortex, your world stretches into vast distances.
Sugar in all forms and amounts is banned. What are the effects?
Something is growing in the woods and one day it stopped.
Find a way to survive the zombie apocalypse thanks to the combination of your wits and a book by Nietzsche.
Find out what happens when the human race acquires telepathy, everyone hears everything.
Everyone you love is listed in a notebook, and one day that list simply vanishes from the world.
Everyone is upset about how rude teenagers are, how do you prank the population into thinking it’s getting better?
Your child will never reach maturity because they will be murdered by their birthday.
Sir Issac Newton invented a computer to predict the future, the computer never predicts the same future twice.
A lab experiment gone wrong wiped out 99% of the world except for you and a handful of others.
A government program that will promise everyone a higher salary now that their muscles are cloned.
You become sleepy whenever you hear music, how do you try to stay awake?
The world transitions from feast and famine, causing all to die of starvation except you.
You know when someone is lying and when they’re telling the truth.
The cure forverty is darkness, not communicating with the outside world or light or your friends or family.
Being a teenager in a dystopian universe is rough.
A deadly virus is killing without warning, what does the government have planned?
A group of teens and a mysterious boy escape the testing facility on a boat.
You write a story and it’s called, “The Ones That Got Away.”
A desperate housewife makes her own home clothing line and all popular stores start selling these clothes for free.
The Junk picks you.
Out of search for a cure, the government has begun testing an experimental medicine on children.
You marry the guy of your dreams but on your honeymoon in the country he turns into a murderous psychopath.
The population only increases by one
Your fingerprint determines your fate and your future.
An object falls from the sky and everyone seems to be going crazy for it.
Your talking pains you, so you have to turn it off right after you get it.
Everyone in the town kills themselves, all body parts are disconnected and/or hidden under floors.
The government declares war on chocolate.
Look for a stone and if you find one, do not pick it up. If you do, you will release something terrible into the world.
The government is telling everyone that the way they live will keep them happy. What will discredit this government?
The homepage of the internet is changed to nothing but propaganda and white noise.
Your serial killer ex has come back as a deranged zombie and wants to date you.
A small handful of people go into the woods, but then never return.
The world is in ruins, except for one pristine city that dominates the land, beautiful yet oppressive.
Dressed in white robes, this mysterious shadow has taken over the town, towns people flee to the city, but to no avail. The only way to go to another plane of existence is by choice.
You haven’t ever been able to speak. You can talk through a Chirpwriter or Handy.
Any body sustained a sight plague, including the eyes and skin.
People start spontaneously combusting for no good reason.
The Earth turns and you’re always facing the sun, your shadows and darkness are non-existent.
Don’t leave your house because the neighborhood is haunted by killer mannequins.
You are granted a secret wish, but it loses its magic when you realize the world has stopped making wishes possible…..
Have you ever had a story that had you so consumed that you didn’t sleep for days because you just HAD to finish it? What was it? Please share in the comments’ section below!
Forced to marry, but heaven forbid you make love to one another.
Is your face displaying on the Commerce posters?
Once there was a little boy who really adds up, how do math and family life work now?
Some of your everyday appliances are now electrifying and killing you before you get the chance.
Genetic modification is now possible and cloning of animals is allowed.
The voice in your head is talking, who is it really?
The government knows future crimes before they ever happen. Cue snitchin’.
You lose your husband and then, a new and very handsome one arrives.
You are the last person left of your race and are living in a bunker…and the computer is turning on itself.
A pug dodges the bombs till he thinks the coast is clear. When he gets curious, he looks and the road is filled with smoke.
The president’s daughter is trapped in a kids’ game by triggering a bomb strapped to her chest. They call you to save her from a cruel fate, but you have no special skills or abilities.
Whatever you thought could do or could help others do, think again.
Your planet’s sole source of food is rapidly declining and it’s unclear that the remaining sources of food will be enough for its raging population.
A dreamcatcher-like bug occupies most of your home. It grants you wishes and collects your nightmares.
Everyone is required to turn in one person who has done no wrong and the reward is great.
Your government tells you one thing, but you know for a fact that that’s not the beautiful truth.
Troupe, maybe, or not, but you are one of the only people with tattoos left. No one knows what they say anymore.
You have to work slave labor for food and shelter.
You catch a virus and die immediately. But after your death you rise again but not as yourself.
A boy’s name means more than he could ever imagine.
A servile world where everyone needs a license to do everything.
One room jungle cave where air and food are recycled but a clean copy of everything is uploaded into the lost archives each week. Now you just hit speed-read.
The city is overrun by huge lava monsters and you manage to survive only to be walled in by some unknown strangers.
A strange man in a black leather coat and red aviators watches your every move.
Someone randomly dares you to be brave.
A fast food restaurant advertises “pork, so delicious they named it twice.”
This is neither the America nor the World you once knew. Is there anything left of it?
You’ve been shot out of the air by an oppressive regime when you accidentally flee from drying some outside in the rebel zone.
You make navigation out to the ocean, in that primeval world, do you try and survive?
His heart was a match for mine, but his appearance contradicted his heart.
The government prohibits everyone from falling in love and high school tests are randomly giving out romance papers.
Men are the destiny of women, not their enemy.
How do we all die this time?
Read the rules, play the game, and you’ll stay alive. If not, you’ll just disappear.
A parent tells you they don’t love you, and you find out they actually just have no feelings at all except this weariness. Your whole life was a lie.
You’re being tested for your allegiance to the government. Will you resist and join the resistance?
A day that starts out grey, but by midday is hot.
A family survives raging riots for the price of their youngest’s life.
Over time, more and more of your freedoms are removed through laptops and TV’s brainwashing.
The crime, if there is one, is unregulated candy shops.
People are allowed to go outside in the mornings only.
You are protected against the bad things in the world by the needles in your spine.
The world is in chaos and you have just been released from the refugee camp.
Many years ago someone wrote a powerful spell. Now someone is trying to unleash it. What Alaric Scamander saw in his last minutes–the thing that can only be seen once Death has you by the neck.
All the adults suddenly die and you try to survive through dog-eat-dog anarchy.
The plague is spreading, only it isn’t, and you are its first victim.
The human race is insanely lethargic, it is almost impossible to find something that makes your heart race noticeably faster.
You’re a slave for your country. The only entertainment you and your friends can tolerate is books.
The poor followers of Maurice might get to heaven, but first they must work.
A gun stopped working with only one bullet left, what happens to build this story?
The government knows all your secrets and has no intention of helping you unless you’re ready to pay the price.
If you see a tattooed face past your town’s gates, prepare for battle, but why?
There never were any computers and everyone lost their minds when this was revealed.
Everyone you love is dead and it’s all your life’s fault.
You see police everywhere, but they don’t wear uniforms. Why?
You find a room under the floorboards of your house with a hole in the wall to a dungeon.
Children are disappearing right before your eyes so you decide to write a manuscript to warn people.
A computer glitch erases all adults’ memories of your country.
Your travels take you to a foreign land, filled with field upon field of nothingness.
Children are disappearing from the town you live in. What did you do when you heard?
Everyone is free and equal, there are no cases to argue and your title is the same as the man standing in front of you.
What were you before the wall was built?
All children are taken from their parents and sent to an isolated place to be raised for the government’s use.
A secret society leaves dolls on your doorstep to spy on you. The dolls explode to reveal insects if you try to touch them.
Everyone has a phantom matchbook in their pocket and there is no match to go with it.
Giant guinea pigs live in all of the major cities in your country, no one knows what they are doing, but they are very big.
A prodigy has just been born and the leader is coming on your television tomorrow night.
A race of aliens has come to earth to grant a select few humans the ability to live forever, at what cost?
After every murder on death row no one dies anymore because someone dies in their place.
The desert has swallowed up civilization, but there is still WiFi in your backyard.
You can’t move and you can’t talk, but someone can hear your thoughts
Everybody lost their memories overnight, for no reason except that somebody does not like them.
The future of America is blackened with a nuclear wasteland that is unrecognizable from what you grew up with–though you may find America familiar with symptoms you had not previously noticed.
The walls are not that thick and no one seems to notice but you.
The sky turns orange and people become obsessed with cats.
Government officials walk down the streets with big nets, catch who they can and take them to the city’s prison for no apparent reason.
Every man must fight, there is no right or wrong side.
Systems have been installed on all vehicles and buses follow a set schedule, including the law enforcement.
Everyone remembers their first love, and for Lucy it was a UFO abduction.
A terrorist organization kidnaps journalists to cover its work.
Your blank Tarot cards turn out to contain the answers to your uncertain future.
The credit card companies and banks have made loans compulsory, Does your character find money obsolete or not able to pay?
Humans live in a vicious cycle of existence, every day the same, the vision never changing.
It is illegal to be poor or sick.
A robot comes to life and begs you to help fix him.
The battle is over, every soldier alive goes into cryostasis. Except the rebels win the war.
Vehicles are banned.
You’re the only person not sick. Who’s supposed to save the world?
No one knows how it happened, but one day wal-mart stores just opened.
What is life like when you work for the government?
A person outside your walled-in town wears the cloth of an old culture? You’ve seen nothing like it before.
An alien ball of light and energy hovers above your otherwise ordinary town.
Your teacher doesn’t always look like your teacher, sometimes a robot, sometimes a hologram, how do you respond?
The world is ending… in a couple years.
Your parents encourage you to volunteer for ways to be healthy. You don’t know they are signing you up for human testing for something.
No one actually lives in your city. People visit some types and stay in hotels, but everyone works in other parts of the country or world.
You’re good at art, the holocaust museum needs you to fix their paintings.
A million years in the future, what have computers done to the world as we know it?
All pain gets erased, but there is no antidote for sadness.
Certain lands don’t produce sounds or songs but you owe your ancestors and your life to those very lands.
Your family is stolen and replaced with robotic clones. No one realizes the difference but you.
Your mother abandoned you the day you were born and never came for you.
An outbreak of Marburg Virus infects the population, but the only symptoms you know is your skin scalding red.
Eternal sunlight/starlight will give those that bathe in it an ageless look, but at what cost?
The missing persons list gets longer and longer, but it turns out it’s your date for the weekend.
The sun is setting earlier everyday.
How did your grandmother die?
If you think about your crime, you are found guilty. To an outside observer you are innocent, what crime did you commit?
The world is ending, nobody cares.
You could call your mom who lives on the other side of the globe, but what if she can’t hear you cry for help…
Women rule the world and no one can tell them what to do.
Government becomes a more powerful hug.
What happens in this animal domestication facility doesn’t always stay in the facility.
Life is simple and without luxury, until one day the company who provides your life’s necessities announces sudden change in the way they do business.
An engineered plague hits your country and everyone must submit themselves for testing.
Rise up against the evil regime, destroy the corrupt government.
You’re your own worst enemy.
Technology is no longer functioning, now all we have is gun powder.
Tibetans are being forced from their homes to make room for a mining company’s headquarters.
The last thoughtful person on Earth, the only literate person left in the science-fictional world!
A woman who drank the wrong serum is giving birth to herself.
What do you do when everything is close to perfection?
Your religion has forbidden thinking, they do all your thinking for you.
Technology is used to predict heroes or villains before they are even created.
You’ve never met each other but you’ve found old books, letters, and postcards that tell a story of a previous time.
The mist covers everything at night then disappears with the sun’s first rays.
Each day a man walks by you and screams at you through a megaphone to find his missing daughter.
After the adoption, you lose all contact with your biological parents. There is no one to replace them and you live the rest of your life never knowing anything about who you were before the government took you away. When you die they take your baby to replace you.
All roads lead to one place.
Humanity is devolving into barbaric old tribes, what keeps you from losing empathy?
No one knows who the ruler behind the totalitarian government really is.
You have been dating the same guy all through school, but now you have to choose between him or your mother.
Be a fugitive. Escape your town and live in the cave of the woods because it’s the only place you can trust.
You kill yourself with a flip of a coin, no matter the outcome.
Your dog can only bark, it can no longer make its usual yappy noises, that is unless you do your chores.
Step out beyond your front door, and the brutal reality comes rushing back.
It is your job to give false memories to a new group of young children, your life may depend on getting the fake memories right or you might not even have one.
Everyone suddenly loses their sense of balance and everyone dies.
Your city/town is empty when you wake up one morning. It is only you… it is only you…
The government is killing the mentally ill population, it is called the Labeling Plan.
Strange fliers fill the skies every day, but they do not fall. What could it mean?
You are given a questionnaire in which you can’t say no to questions lest you suffer the consequences.
Eighteen hours a day of soap operas, reality T.V., soap operas.
Everyone who has tried to escape a walled-in town has come back with tattoos within a few days. What would happen if you tried?
If you are caught keeping pets, you and they will die horrific deaths.
The crime rate is at an all time high and Gordon the shop owner is only one man.
Once a month, on the full moon, everyone in town devolves into a wild animal.
Siblings that were split up to be raised around the country are now able to find one another.
Your lover’s story is different than yours…will you ever find out the truth?
There is no longer any living or dead. Living people are stuffed into shipping containers for use later, dead people buried in trash.
In the future children are replaced with machines grown in vats, oh how you wish you could have met your real parents.
Who will win, the poor or the rich?
If you fall out of line with the government, you become the enemy. What happens to the enemy?
Time travel is illegal unless you want a lover from the past into your present.
You’re a citizen of a giant city that has a track that circles the city. You have to dive into a random hole and wait a week before coming out.
You come watch your neighbor, but you just can’t leave.
You can read a book and find out your future, but each time you do, you lose your sense of smell.
Airplanes have crashed and killed billions of people. Do you care? What are you doing now?
You live in a world of clones where everyone but you is indistinguishable.
Everyone goes bald for an unknown reason and the hair remains in jars around home.
You feel a quick prick and then no more – you know you’re dead and soon to be dissected.
You shot the Mad King at the end of the war, but you had no choice in the matter.
You have a red coin in your coin purse that says, “Above all, do no evil.” Where did you get it?
Someone could cheat death, what would the ramifications of that be?
Your daily necessities are provided, but you’re not allowed to know how or where exactly.
Nosebleeds start occurring and then black specks are found in the blood.
Tattoos are a cultural style in your country that literally feed you. What happens when that system eventually fails?
To live you have to do one evil thing on Earth every single day.
Small odd shaped parrots plague a town releasing a cryptic message before going to sleep.
Life on your floating island is quiet, but why?
You are a group of kids with abilities who have been locked in a Government prison for their whole lives and are forced to do experiments on each other.
You can see two moons in the sky but the mysterious one disappears for weeks on end, where does it go?
Traps are laid throughout your city without warning, and you don’t know when you’ll stumble onto one.
A common city drug transforms people into monsters.
Every single person has natural, electric blue hair and it’s illegal to dye it.
People arrive on campus with no knowledge of themselves, good guys or bad.
Your town, Last Stop, gets an invitation to a prestigious Academy Award style awards ceremony, where everyone will win.
A new law threatens to grant witches mob justice.
You have nothing to eat, but the guards feeding your family don’t care either way.
Who is the mysterious runner girl?
Fear takes on a physical form, what form does it take?
What makes you a hero when there are no heroes left to save us?
If you stand in the town square at noon you will disappear.
You can’t tell anyone how old you are.
You can see light on the other side of this storm, does the government know about this?
Your village is burning and you must grant forgiveness to the arsonists or burn forever.
An earthquake hits and leaves your home uninhabitable. Your family must evacuate their home into a crowded cabin and live off the land for at least one year.
The world has been cleared of humans, but millions of small animalized creations run around.
Dogs walk on their hind legs…can they also go to war?
What is the best form of control?
Your husband tries to abandon you, even your 9 year old son, and you can’t help but to remember what happened with your husband’s last ex-wife.
You’ve invented a device that lets you look invisible. Why do you not use it?
Two people in the small facility that holds the last survivors of the human race are also in love.
You’re implanted with a microchip that counts down your remaining life hours.
Your new planet isn’t what was promised at all and it is nothing like Earth.
But what was stolen from him might not be water, but blood.
Your children have no faces? Why?
You are the only normal family left in the world.
Your brother ARRsIMG Strategies For Photo Scavenger Hunt
You get one send of a postcard from your best friend saying “have fun on your trip because that’s all you’ll get from me in life” and then they never post anything else.
Find the boy with the initials ECG and stop the approaching rebel forces.
All books without permission are punishable by banishment from your dictatorship.
Standing at a crossroads, you could go right or you could go left.
You wake up overseas and you start hearing your employer’s voice on a hidden speaker coming from your brain.
Your recently lost child has been found alive, but all her teeth have been removed.
A tower turns all within its great walls into stone. How did this happen? Why?
What do teenagers do in YOUR society when their parents and older people don’t allow them to leave their barracks and learn about the outside world?
Life is a pyramid and each day you climb up a little higher. What if you slip?
No one goes to school ever again, why? Why does their world function without schooling?
There has been a horrible crash, and you are the only survivor, but you were in the last car.
A certain criminal has been sentenced to execution for the rest of her life, now forever for she can regenerate.
There are no boys, there are only “oops” babies that pop out of the girl’s skirts, why?
Your name is all of the exactly same characters.
Vampires founded the republic of Karova.
Women are being kidnapped and replaced by cloned doubles, for what possible reason?
Read dystopian fiction!
Due to a drought and the population explosion, mandatory in-home euthanasia has been enacted.
All U.S. Citizens are expected to turn weapons over to the government upon the event of martial law being declared. Something went awry.
The creator built this as a gift for you and your kind to play it out on. The creator despises the gift and your kind.
All wards are women, but women from different eras.
The government wants to control fertility but the only way is to put a chip in everyone. You have the chance to get out of this but at what cost?
Your invention can bring about the end of the world or brilliant new age of technology.
How does the government rule?
A town banishes it’s criminals and the unproductive to live in a pile of trash so they don’t burden the town.
The desert eats the living, but never the dead.
A floater is an inflatable bag worn upon the head to create a realistic illusion of a living person for funerals and brush clearing.
The government is a true democracy and everything seems okay…but you know better.
Young man, the rest of us have already found the cure, you must think outside the box and find your own.
Something lurks in the dark, but isn’t limited to the trails of red that seem to always follow.
Sitting in your parked car with your son, you watch horrified as all kinds of farm animals from all over the country are marched to their slaughterhouse of doom, wondering if it could ever be your turn.
The Food and Drug Administration has just unveiled “Food Drug Zero,” a drug focused on eliminating obesity.
No matter what you do you will always be a slave.
You wake up in a hospital bed with absolutely nothing on this clothing body.
Hit the high rim and you might just change your reality for a little while.
You watch your lover get impregnated by a very busy alien.
Everyone can know how you are feeling at all times.
The previously mentioned anarchism club is on fire, why?
Everyone is fighting for sanity in a loss of mind due to extended fight or flight.
Scientists have found the remains of a dolphin-like creature.
Nothing operates on any electric power and you hate it.
The government is forcing children into military service, what happens to the kids who refuse to fight?
A creepy circus is forming in The Great Smoky Mountains, it won’t be long until the evil clowns are coming after you.

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16 Dystopian Writing Prompts

Posted on 24 Dec, 2022
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Below are 16 writing prompts for dystopian story ideas. Surprisingly, this is the first post I’ve done specifically for dystopian writing.

Dystopian Government Control

In a dystopian future United States, where the government controls every aspect of life, a group of rebels fight to overthrow the oppressive regime and bring freedom back to the people. The only problem is, the government in charge operates out of a secret location, and all enforcement is by androids, which can easily be replaced and flown in.

Mind Manipulation by the Government

In a society where technology has advanced to the point of being able to control human thoughts and emotions, a group of individuals struggle to hold on to their humanity and resist the government’s attempts to manipulate them.

Hunted Dystopian Survivors

In a dystopian world where the environment has been irreparably damaged by humans, a small group of survivors must navigate a harsh and dangerous world in order to survive. Unfortunately, they are being hunted by a powerful underground political group that benefits from the rest of the planet’s misery.

Dumb Rebel Warriors in a Dystopian Future

In the distant future people are ranked and divided by their intelligence and abilities, a group of outcasts must prove their worth and fight for their right to be treated as equals. Unfortunately, they really are kinda dumb.

Dystopian Population Control

The government has implemented strict population control measures in which a couple can only have one child. A young family must navigate the challenges of having a second child in a world where having more than one is strictly forbidden. Part of their plan is to flee the mainland and live on a remote island. But they have to get there before it’s discovered that the woman is pregnant.

Weaker than the Rest in a Dystopian World

In a world where humans have been genetically modified to be stronger and more intelligent, a group of unmodified individuals must fight for their right to exist in a society that sees them as inferior. Unfortunately, they are kinda weak.

Fighting Misinformation in a Dystopian Society

In a society where the government has complete control over the media and information that people are allowed to access, a group of rebels use underground networks to spread the truth and fight for freedom of expression.

A No Communication Allowed Future

In a world where all forms of communication have been banned in an effort to control the population, a group of rebels use secret codes and underground messaging systems to organize and resist the government’s attempts to suppress them.

A Future with No Career Choices

In a society where people are divided into strict castes based on their profession, one man is trying to grow and lead an army to overthrow the system and create a world where people are free to choose their own path in life.

A Case For the Weakest to Live

In a world where the government has implemented a strict policy of eugenics, a group of rebels must fight to protect the rights of those who do not meet the government’s standards of perfection. Now a case has come before the grand court that will test a century worth of eugenic laws.

A Future With No Memories

In a dystopian society where people are required to undergo mandatory memory wipes in order to maintain social stability, a group of rebels fight to preserve their memories and their individuality.

There Are No True Utopias

In a world where the government has created a perfect utopia, a group of rebels discover the dark secrets behind the facade and fight to bring the truth to light.

No Art in this Dystopian Future

In a world where the government has implemented strict laws to control the population’s access to art and culture, a group of rebels use underground networks to fight against the oppressive regime.

A Dystopian Future With No Ugly People

In a society where people are ranked and divided based on their appearance, a group of rebels fight to overthrow the system and bring about a more inclusive and equal society.

Controlled Healthcare in a Dystopian Future

In a world where the government has implemented strict laws to control the population’s access to healthcare, a group of rebels use underground networks to fight against the oppressive regime.

No Food for the Weak

In a world where the government has implemented strict laws to control the population’s access to food and resources, a group of rebels use underground networks to fight against the oppressive regime.

Let us know what you think about our ideas! Comment below to give us your opinion, add onto an existing idea, or submit one of your own!

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13 Dystopian Writing Prompts

While most suited to older students or writers looking for a dark yet thought provoking topic, dystopian stories can be a rich area to explore.

Often involving troubling subject matter such as authoritarian government control of the population or devastating climate damage, these stories can be great tools to look at what could happen in the future if people are not mindful of the direction society is taking.

So today we have a variety of darkly dystopian prompts to get your creative (and thoughtful) writing juices flowing…

How to use these prompts?

Try picking one at random from the list below, and take up the challenge of writing a 5000 word short story on the topic, letting your imagination run with it.

Alternatively, read through the list of prompts and find the one that speaks to you. Some creative ideas just resonate more strongly with us than others.

Take one story idea, and share it amongst a group of writers to see how varied the different resulting stories become.

Set yourself (or your students) the challenge of writing one short story a day, or a week if that is more manageable. Use the list of writing ideas as the theme of the challenge, and allow each one to act as a starting point for each subsequent story.

The prompts:

The whine of the scanner drones outside the high-rise apartment block was barely able to be heard, but everyone knew they were always near scanning the city for unauthorized activity…
The last of the wealthy ruling class had left the sprawling mega cities, headed to their secure mountain retreats. The cities were crumbling into chaos faster now, far more quickly than anyone thought could have happened…
The augmented reality headset had been on him since birth, unable to be removed, and gradually expanding as he grew and aged. Like the rest of society, he’d never seen the world without it’s altered view, and at this point he was glad of this, it seemed terrifying to think that in the past people could see the world in their own unique way, without a filter…
She was afraid, but could not show it. Her Social Rating score was the lowest it had ever been, after that emotional outburst last year. If she couldn’t increase it in the next few weeks, she knew there would be a knock at her door next month. Nobody knew where the lowest 20% Social Ranked citizens were taken…
The constant background noise of sirens and yelling and crying babies from this housing complex faded away to silence as the VR took him into The World. Everything was perfect here. Every face was smiling, everyone around him was going about their day, all walking to and fro down the perfect beautiful walkways of this virtual World. But despite their smiles, their eyes were cold and unfeeling…
The instructions arrived at his workstation from the Government, as they did everyday. No knew what it was that they were working on, but all of society was assured it was in their best interest…
As she slipped into sleep, the flickering of the lights began, as was expected. The same images that had been used for many years flickered through her unconscious mind, unsettling. Each morning when she woke she was happier that the making of decisions had been removed from their lives…
After clocking out from their work day, the credits arrived on their device. The long queue for oxygen canisters quickly wound around the block…
The news stream kept repeating the same three messages, around the clock. Any opinion that differed from these was seen as dangerous…
The solar farms were closed now, as the years of Government owned coal plants expansion had left the skies so thick with pollution that the sun could no longer reach the solar arrays…
As she selected which film to watch, she carefully considered how it would be interpreted by the State. All media consumption was monitored of course, and care was needed to select only entertainment that would not draw attention to one’s self…
As he waited at the city limit border, he practiced what he would say to the guards about why he should be allowed to leave the city. He yearned for the fresh air of the forests and open spaces of nature, but could not mention any of that for fear of arousing suspicion…
The security system in all homes was there to keep us safe. Over time it had started to demand more answers from us about our plans for our day, and why we were leaving the house…

Let your creativity be free!

I hope you enjoy your story writing, and would love to hear which prompts you’ve enjoyed using most of all to kickstart your short story (or epic masterpiece!)

We are creating more free resources for you every week, so please bookmark and Pin, and check back soon for more creative inspiration.

Thanks, Matt & Hayley

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49 Amazing Dystopian Writing Prompts

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Welcome to the next article in our adult writing prompt series . To keep with our mission of offering 500+ genre-specific writing prompts and story ideas potential authors can use to write their next bestseller, today, we offer up 51 amazing dystopian writing prompts.

Let’s quickly define dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction is a genre of fictional writing that often refers to a setting and/or society marred by depression, poverty, and general unhappiness. These works of speculative fiction often explore the social and political aspects of these dark and inhabitable conditions.

If you are interested in improving your creative writing and learning from a dystopian best-selling author- We highly recommend Margaret Atwoods MasterClass .

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So if your someone like me who has always enjoyed reading and writing these happy-go-lucky themed books, then you will definitely like some of these inspirational writing prompts.

In a post-apocalyptic world, where a person’s five senses are taken away and earned back through monetary credits earned through indentured servitude to the privileged class.
A society in which a family’s wealth dictates how many of its own children that they can keep.
A futuristic world where everyone’s thoughts and dreams are constantly monitored so they can be taken and used by the wealthy privileged class to remain in power.
A world so dependent on technology, that the human race has stopped being a social mammal, and this unbreakable solitude now puts them at risk for extinction.
When Earth is ravished by a series of climate-related catastrophes, the survivors have no choice but to fight over the small plot of land that is still fit for human survival.
Artificial intelligence and augmented reality have become a staple in day-to-day with life, so much so that the average person spends 24 hours a day in a virtual state. What happens when they find out the AI discovered a way more useful use of this technology and entertains the people in it.
In a future world that prides itself on optimal efficiency, each person is given the exact path they are to live down to the very day starting with the day they’re born.
A world with limited resources after an intergalactic war destroys most of the planet, forces, and citizens to self-police population growth. The law says for every person born into a family one must die.
Earth loses an intergalactic war to a hostile invading species within the enslaved the survivors to help them extract every last resource out of the planet.
In this world, thoughts are crimes. Artificial intelligence is judge, jury, and executioner.

After the last great world war, all religion was banned. This included all religious works and artifacts. But what happens if one Bible still remains?
In this society, the only currency anyone has his life expectancy. The ruling class oppresses the masses of poor citizens by forcing them to trade days of life for the basic goods and services needed for survival.
In a society that is focused on gene manipulation and the furthering of the human species, any people with less than desired DNA is either made infertile and sent into slavery or eradicated at birth.
The human race is overtaken by alien hostiles, they are forced to live in a quasi-vegetative state offset by augmented reality while their bodies slowly decay as they are used as human carbon batteries.
All learning is banned from society. The Internet is totally rewritten and all books are destroyed. The only thing society has is the propaganda given to it by its oppressive ruling class.
In a world, where it is been determined, that the optimal age for existence is 28, humans are perpetually cloned at that age and granted existence until they turn 29.
Society has gotten over the automated, and the richest class has gotten richer and richer while everyone else has fallen into squalor. To deal with the boredom and help entertain the ruling class, poor citizens turned in use as pets.
In a society 100% under state control, humans are selected at random to face off against each other in a 24 hour broadcasted deathmatch.
A weaponized biologic is used to control everyone’s actions as it empowers its creators to instantly activate it inside of any one person killing them within 24 hours.
In a world where disease is left unchecked, the only ones privileged enough for Medicare and the cures are the controlling class of Aristocrats.

A world where all money is done away with, instead, people must pay their way with an intellectual or physical contribution to society. What happens when a system of deciding the value of contributions is rigged?
Women have come to power over 3000 years ago, slowly the value of men has declined. To the point where their only value and reason for existence is procreation of more women.
In a twisted futuristic world, society’s darkest minds are connected to an Augmented Reality machine to have their machinations come to life as entertainment for the rest of society. When these virtual reality horror shows come to life the world will never be the same.
A world that no longer believes in prisons, instead these prisoners are used as human prey in a dark and twisted hunting game.
Sports, as we know them, are long gone, they have been replaced by darker, deadlier versions of their past games. The new death games are meant to be a social release for the masses to avoid unleashing true demons on themselves. But what if the games were really a way to desensitize and train people to act the very way the games were said to prevent.
Every city in the world is reduced to rubble in the blink of an eye, all except one building that is left standing in each. Now the survivors need to figure out what caused the tragedy and what is the significance of these remaining structures.
A zombie plague has slowly overtaken the planet. A cure was found and now 80 percent of the population are functioning zombies, which can still participate in society and keep the world going, but each day is potentially a dark day, as these zombies are still liable to kill their human counterparts at every turn.
After an unknown cyber attack takes out the world’s power grid, the world is thrown into shambles. Anarchy rules the streets, and long-term survival is unlikely as the chaotic war zone is unleashed on the public.
A global food shortage occurs with severe climate change. Leading to severe famine for the last several decades. In this world, food is more valuable than money or gold every was. The most abundant food source is human flesh, and the evil ruling class has no problem with that. In this world, you are either wealthy or eventually turned into dinner.
Society has long become dependent on pharmaceutical drug Zenvia. A highly addictive CNS drug that creates a feeling of euphoria. The government uses is to hook the population and bend them to their will by manipulating them through their Zenvia addiction.

A society that uses its citizens as subjects in medical and psychological experiments decides the current generation of people will partake in the breaking point study, which is designed to have these people subjected to non-stop mental stress, and depression-inducing stimuli to see how long it takes to break them for good.
A society where gender identity has been completely wiped away, anyone that demonstrates any masculine or feminine traits is imprisoned to be cleansed.
In this society, dreams are controlled my mind mimics. But these dreams are far more real as is the danger they pose.
Society had been wiped out by a huge nuclear war. Now they live in the safety dome, forced to relive the same mundane life simulation every single day.
Earth was under attack when defeat became clear they started to evacuate to a space station that was still under construction. Unfortunately only 5000 people made it out, now they are stuck on the bleak space station that is barely functioning.
Nanobots were once touted as a great technological breakthrough, but now they dictate everything about your life. You know longer have free will, only an ability to follow the path that the nanobots set out for you.
In this alternate universe, Hitler won World War II and his persecution expanded to anyone that didn’t have blond hair blue eyes. They are now slaves in concentration camps until they can’t work anymore.
After a full economic collapse, the world boils over unleashing the worst part of humanity onto itself.
An alien box lands on the planet that promises to hold unleash knowledge and power the world has never seen before. But in order to unlock it, humanity must commit certain atrocities on itself. What choice will they make?
In a horrible society where women are treated like second-class citizens, once a year, The reaping goes on for 24hrs, where men are allowed to hunt and treat women any way they choose with no repercussions.
The air quality on earth is so bad that it can no longer sustain most human life, without assisted breathing apparatus. But as the sun gets more and more hidden from society and breathing becomes more and more dangerous, will the human psyche crack before the body.
In a world where all disease can be cured, that is if you have enough money, through a process called human transfer, society’s richest people are allowed to select random members of the poorer class to transfer their health issues onto and get a clean bill of health for themselves.
In a future where everyone communicates telepathically, the language disappears, then human interaction, then procreation leaving humanity on the brink of extinction.
Severe environmental changes cause certain animal species to go into a type of accelerated evolution for survival. Now the planet is overrun with beasts that hunt humans and as they reclaim their place at the top of the food chain.
Children are born and given a test to make sure they don’t carry a certain gene that may be susceptible to the zombie plague as part of the government’s prevention strategy since getting the zombie crisis under control. But what happens when every child born has the gene?
A zombie pandemic has taken down 40 percent of the population. Promises of a cure have led to zombies being caught and retained until a cure can be found to bring loved ones back. But what if the cure is only made available to the richest people in the world?
A huge electromagnetic pulse destroys all technology on the planet sending back to the stone age overnight.
In a world where children are born with a lust for blood, they begin to hunt and kill their parents. Now people need to decide, stop having children and guarantee extinction or continue to have them and fight the demons until normal children are found again.

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I hope you have enjoyed these 49 Dystopian story ideas. Feel free to take any of these 500 writing prompts and use them as inspiration to craft your next best-selling dystopian novel.

Remember that we have a full series of free adult writing prompts that you can check out in other genres. If you like these then make sure to check out the rest.

Sometimes writers hesitate to use a publicly shared writing prompt as their inspiration for their next novel. But, I will tell you, you shouldn’t be, because alone none of these writing prompts are worth the paper they are printed on, and that’s really bad since this is digital.

But it’s true, this dystopian writing prompts need to be fleshed out, to create a full plot and satisfying novel.

That is where you come in, As a dystopian writer, it’s up to you to create a believable world that engages readers by putting them in a deprived setting that is barely worth living.

So good luck with your writing, I hope you can use one of these dystopian story ideas as inspiration that will lead to your next great published book.

As always, Thanks for Reading and more Importantly Writing!

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Home / Book Writing / How to Write a Dystopian Story: Definition, Tips, and How to Publish

How to Write a Dystopian Story: Definition, Tips, and How to Publish

Dystopian fiction has been and continues to be popular in all forms (novels, short stories, movies, shows, and comics ). While delving into the reasons for this would probably require the help of a trained psychologist, you don't have to know why these stories are popular in order to write a good dystopian novel.

And that's just what this article on how to write a dystopian novel will help you do.

Defining characteristics of dystopian stories.
What to do before you start writing.
Tips for writing a great dystopian story.

What is Dystopian Literature?
Get to Know the Genre
Research the Market
Consider Oppression in Any Form
Determine the Time and Place
Character Development (Nature vs Nurture)
Nail Down the Specifics of Your World
Craft the Main Conflict
Put Increasingly Difficult Barriers in the Way
Create, Customize, and Publish
How to Write a Dystopian Story: Conclusion

All storytelling relies on one very basic fundamental: conflict. This is one reason why you don't often see utopian stories. After all, in a world where nothing is wrong and everyone has everything they need to live healthy, fulfilled lives, there's really no cause for conflict.

While we would be lucky to live in a utopia, there's a big difference between striving for a better society in real life and picking up a book for entertainment. Utopian stories are, in a word, boring.

On the flip side of this speculative fiction coin, you have dystopian stories, which are rife with conflict. A dystopia is a society in which there is widespread suffering, injustice, and oppression. If that's not a backdrop for great conflict, I don't know what is.

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But not all dystopian novels feature brutal neo-fascist regimes that squash all dissent with an iron fist. Some dystopian stories are a little more subtle, presenting a society that is, at a glance, pretty good. It's only when you dig a little deeper that you see the dirty secrets that are swept under the rug by those in power. These are called false utopia stories, and they're a fairly common form of fictional dystopian work.

Whatever kind of dystopian story you're aiming to write, you'll need to make sure that you hit the primary tropes of the genre . I’ll discuss some of those tropes below. But first, let’s talk about things it’s good to do before you start writing your dystopian story.

Do These Things Before You Write Your Dystopian Novel

The following tips can help you make the best of your writing time. Whether you've already started your story or you're just now formulating your idea, these tips can help.

The best thing you can do before you start the creative writing process is read! Not only can reading dystopian novels provide you with plenty of inspiration, but it can help you get to know this science fiction subgenre . To that end, here are several popular dystopian novels to check out:

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Divergent by Veronica Roth
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Giver by Lois Lowry

Since the dystopian subgenre is a popular one, it can be difficult for new writers to gain traction on Amazon. Simply publishing your novel is not enough. If you want to be the proud writer of a popular dystopian novel, then you'll have to do some planning. Ideally, that planning should begin before you start writing.

There are other categories on Amazon that could be a great fit for your book but may be less competitive than the dystopian category. This is why I suggest doing your research before you write. You could find a category that's adjacent to dystopian literature that might work better for the story you have in mind. And if that's the case, you could then make sure to include the things that readers are looking for in that story.

A couple of examples of “dystopian-adjacent” categories include Alternative History, Post-Apocalyptic, and Cyber Punk.

While it's possible to do decent market research by scrolling through Amazon with purpose, this isn't the most time-efficient way to do it.

This is why I recommend using the tool I created to make market research and advertising easier. It's called Publisher Rocket , and it can help you analyze categories, find books like yours, and select customer search terms that readers actually use.

It can also help you gather a list of keywords for use in Amazon Advertising, which is a powerful tool many successful writers use in their marketing efforts.

Check out Publisher Rocket here to learn more.

Tips on Writing a Great Dystopian Story

Good dystopian tales explore what it means to be a human while also providing readers with an intriguing and often disturbing glimpse at an extreme form of society. The tips below can help you balance these factors to keep readers turning the pages.

While you want your story to be about the humans living in your dystopian society, you do need to put some serious thought into the backdrop of the story. Dystopian societies are characterized by widespread oppression of some kind, even if it’s oppression by social norms.

This could mean strict censorship of speech, expression, or thought. It could mean that every child born is taken away to be a ward of the state until they're eighteen. Or it could be a society in which people are subtly enslaved by oppressive economic policies and the strict control of resources.

Here are a few broad dystopian scenarios you can use to influence your story:

The loss of individual freedom and expression.
The restructuring of society after nuclear war decimates the planet.
The commoditization of human life.
The crushing grasp of a totalitarian government.
Technological advancements fueling oppressive systems (armies of robotic police patrolling the streets, artificial intelligence pulling strings for seemingly unfathomable reasons, etc.)
Environmental degradation resulting in societal collapse.
Alternative history stories in which some event in our past changed the direction of human society for the worst.

These are just a few examples. The best oppressive dystopian regimes are based on topics important to our world. By taking a real-life example and turning it up to eleven, you can create a great dystopian setting for your story.

While many dystopian stories happen on Earth in the not-too-distant future, there are numerous other settings for these stories. They don't even have to take place on Earth if you don't want. You can make up an entire planet if it serves your story well.

You'll also want to think about time. If they happen on Earth, is the story taking place in the past (alternative history) or the future? Is it taking place in an alternative present? Even if you don't spell it out for the reader, it's a good idea to know for yourself so you're consistent in your storytelling.

It's important to remember that there's a fine line between the dystopian genre and other science fiction subgenres. If your world is overly fantastic, featuring aliens and space travel, it could easily be seen by readers as less of a dystopian book and more of a space opera or some other SF subgenre.

In order to keep it in the realm of dystopian work, you'll want to keep the society fairly recognizable for modern readers.

While some writers may start with the overall concept of their dystopian world, this isn't the only way to do things. You may want to start with your main character and let them influence the setting as you write.

Either way, you'll want to give serious thought to how people living in your imagined world would behave under the conditions you've created . In many dystopian stories, the protagonist is a normal person just trying to survive with no real thoughts of revolution—until something happens ( the inciting incident ) that drives them from their ordinary world, putting them on a crash course with the powers that be.

In other stories, the protagonist is a government lackey who works as a cog in the oppressive machine until they decide they've had enough.

These are far from the only options you have. In fact, you'll want to stay away from cookie-cutter protagonists. Let your knowledge of the genre influence you, helping you to write a unique character who has believable wants and needs (not just an implacable hate for the rulers or a blind drive to take the system down).

Likewise, decide on your antagonist. If it's going to be a person, then spend as much time on their development as you do on the protagonist. If it's going to be the faceless foot soldiers of the totalitarian government, think about the ways you'll present the evils they embody.

Once you have the broad ideas down, use them to inform the more minute details of your world. By this I mean things like cultural norms and traditions. If your main character were to rebel at first on a small scale, what would that look like? Skipping the evening prayer? Not averting their eyes when passing a member of the ruling class on the street?

The little details really help to set your world apart in the reader's mind . They provide the texture of your society and serve to show the differences and similarities between it and the one we live in now. For more information on nailing down the details of your world, check out our article on worldbuilding .

Crafting the main conflict of your story may seem like a no-brainer. Your protagonist has to incite revolution and take down the oppressive society, right?

Not so fast. Just because you're writing a dystopian story doesn't mean it has to end with the defeat of “Big Brother.” While this is certainly an option, don't feel like you must work toward this outcome.

Some dystopian novels end with the characters succumbing to the societal pressure to conform. Others end with a failed revolution. And some of them don't even attempt to tackle this grand objective.

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In fact, your central conflict doesn't even have to touch on this directly. It could be a heist story set in a dystopian future. It could be a coming-of-age story in which the character realizes that there are certain trade-offs to be made. Perhaps the majority in this society is willing to trade some personal freedom for better living conditions, even if it does seem like the worst thing in the world to your adolescent character.

If your main conflict will be about taking down the dystopian society, ensure your character has a good reason to want this. Show them discovering this need or being thrust into it. Just as unexplainably evil characters are boring antagonists, unexplainably heroic and “good” protagonists are also boring.

Give the reader a good reason to identify with the protagonist , and they will care about whatever that character's ultimate goal is.

The basic building blocks of any popular fiction story remain true in the dystopian genre. Once your main character has a goal, you can create suspense and drive conflict by putting barriers in their way . These barriers should be put into place by the antagonist, forcing the protagonist to learn and grow, creating a character arc.

The climax should be the most impactful and difficult moment for the character. Whether the protagonist achieves their goal and defeats the antagonist will be up to you.

For more on plot structures, check out our story structure hub here .

When you've written and edited your dystopian manuscript, you'll still need to have it professionally formatted for publishing in eBook and print.

With Atticus , you can actually do both the writing and the formatting. You can even see what the finished product will look like right in the tool, allowing you to customize it to your liking with just a few mouse clicks.

You can also set writing goals, edit with ProWritingAid, insert your own scene breaks, and much more. Check out Atticus here to see everything it can do.

Whether you're writing a novel or a dystopian short story, the tips above should help you create an original and market-honed piece of literature. The combination of setting and character can help you establish the details of the story. And when you determine your primary conflict, you can put barriers in the protagonist's way as they work toward their goal.

If you want some story prompts you can use to jumpstart the writing process, check out our dystopian writing prompts article .

Dave Chesson

When I’m not sipping tea with princesses or lightsaber dueling with little Jedi, I’m a book marketing nut. Having consulted multiple publishing companies and NYT best-selling authors, I created Kindlepreneur to help authors sell more books. I’ve even been called “The Kindlepreneur” by Amazon publicly, and I’m here to help you with your author journey.

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Dystopian Creative Writing: The Room

Here is an excellent exemplar of creative writing based on the conventions of Dystopia.

This is a student piece written by Mohamed Zakaria bin Mohamed Said. It is entitled, ‘The Room’. Thank you for sharing your writing.

The small dull-grey clock read 8:30am. I rise from the simple white linen and I look over the suffocating space around me that I have lived around me that I have lived in my entire life. The room consists of a bed, old and rickety, a chair and desk, both are brown and worn and a small toilet. I find none of the qualities in these objects beautiful because they are not mine. I have only ever known the dry dusty room that is laid out so precisely before me.

I move through my room with a sense of nostalgia that finds me at the beginning of everyday. Eyes on my ceiling monitor me like old owls. I feel trapped under their gaze. At 8:40am, the desk in front of me materializes food on a shiny transparent plate and as I eat, I weigh my past against my future. Both are without change. I try to think about who I am and where I came from, but these thoughts lead me to the fact that my identity is defined by the confines of the space around me. I stare up into the eyes again. My whole life I have been under their withering gaze, stripped of my humanity, a captive and dying prey.

My clock shows 9:00am and I begin the next part of my day. The struggle of staying sane . I have no concept of years, months, weeks, or days but only the time that I get from my old clock. I have no control over my life, that is in the hands of creatures that watch me through their mechanical eyes. Time is transcendent, it proves to me that I exist. Do the white eyes control that as well?

Out of the corner of my eye a silhouette emerges, moving slowly. A spider crawls up over the chair looking about occasionally as he makes his way up to his web. The hairs on his legs shine silver and his black eyes reflect the grey room around him. I walk over to the chair to find the empty plate and I place it over the spider. At first the spider notices nothing of his new enclosure but he eventually realizes. He did not notice the plate or the change in air pressure but the spider noticed my piercing gaze burn through the plate. He felt surveyed and it was only then that the spider found his incarceration. Panic and claustrophobia enclosed the old grey spider like suffocating smoke. His black eyes darted about, his legs thrashed against the walls of the glass. Eventually the spider will die, but until then he would be stuck in a world fixed by the spaces around him. But I will never let that fate befall anyone and I release the spider.

At 9:30, something different happened. I was talking to the eyes in my ceiling when tears or fury and fire filled my eyes, and I wanted the creature in the ceiling to feel justice. A fire started, I felt incensed and betrayed I wanted somebody to understand. I wanted to communicate to the monster that what they were doing to me was wrong. I moved quickly across the room to use my strength against the worn chair and the brown desk. They were part of the reason that I was alive and trapped here. I was a fire, screaming, yelling and overcome with hatred. The sound of my voice became distorted and monstrous as it echoed from the walls. I was distraught and I wanted to become violent. A fire needs oxygen and I was running out of it in my enclosure.

After that it all changed. The light next to the eyes in my ceiling died. The light over my head burnt out. Everything around me was like infinite night. There was no sound but my racing heart and my rapid breathing. I am going to die. I had angered the creatures that kept me here. I had made them upset and they are going to kill me like I was going to kill the spider under the plate.

A part of the grey wall slid open revealing a long white clean open corridor. There was a wave of fresh cool air and smell that was pleasurable compared to the rancid stink in my room. I expected to die but nothing happened. I realized that just outside of was another world, outside of this room represents change. By stepping out of the room I would never go back. Somebody had released me. Somebody had felt enough pity or strength to free me of from my cage. Like a baby taking its first steps, I walked out of the Room.

100 Dystopia Essay Topics & Ideas

🏆 best dystopian titles, 📌 simple & easy dystopian title ideas, 👍 good dystopia essay titles, ❓ dystopian discussion questions.

Saunders’s “The Red Bow”: The Dystopian Reality of Totalitarianism This essay will consider the relevance of the topic introduced by Saunders and provide actual historical examples that support his hypothesis.”The Red Bow” starts with a group of men going out for a dog hunt […]
The Planet of the Apes – A Dystopian Film Via the cinematic experience the entire infrastructure of people’s culture and the state of the world at large can be seen and experienced.
‘Se7en’ by David Fincher: A Film Steeped in Dystopia A professional model is found dead in her bed with her nose cut off, a container of sleeping pills in one hand, and a phone in the other; her death was the result of a […]
20th Century Dystopian Fiction and Today’s Society The author considers the fiction works of that era as an attempt to convey the destructive nature of violence and everything related to injustice.”The tone of dystopia is of despair and the feel it gives […]
Gender Issues in Dystopian Film “Children of Men” The significance of this source is validated by its contribution to the argument of the relevance of the dystopian genre in cinematography for unfolding social issues.
Dystopias “Brave New World” by Huxley and “1984” by Orwell The modern world is full of complications and the moments when it seems like a dystopia the darkest version of the future. In the novel, promiscuity is encouraged, and sex is a form of entertainment.
Genre: Science Fiction Dystopia The western genre is the most common movie genre used to highlight the dominance and development of both American and European cultures and economies to the rest of the world.
“WALL-E”: Dystopian Narrative In addition, genre conventions, along with the rules of science fiction, promote the engagement of the movie with the issues of programming and consumption.
The Concept and History of Dystopian Fiction Thus, the goal of this paper is to study the phenomenon of DF based on the examples of Orwell’s and Huxley’s fiction and determine the presence of the themes that overlap with the contemporary social, […]
Genre Assessment: Dystopian Genre Review Based on the Film “Children of Men” The current proposal implies the creation of a review that explores the key features of dystopia as a cinema genre and based on a prominent example of such a film.
Unhappiness of Society in Orwell’s 1984 Dystopia His character is a strong individual who will not transgress the ideals of his party and is fully committed to him.
Welcome to Your Nightmares: The Dystopian Vision of the World It is quite peculiar that both Orwell and Huxley chose the same tool to express the tension and the absurdity of the situation that the people of the future were trapped in, creating the abridged […]
Dystopia in “Gattaca” and “Never Let Me Go” Movies When people think about the future, in the majority of cases, they believe that science and technology should help to change the world. One of the goals of a utopia is to remove the overwhelming […]
Dystopias in “Animal Farm” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” In this regard, the aim of literary dystopias is to caution and warn society against the blind following of ideologies that lead to the breakdown of social order.
Dystopias by Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Silverberg The feature of the story The Pain Peddlers is in the fact that the situation in it reminds bureaucratic procedures in reality.
Utopia Versus Dystopia: Discussion However, the practical realization of Communist concepts in Russia, had resulted in millions of citizens loosing their lives and in those people, who managed to survive, during the course of Communist “social purges”, becoming the […]
The Dystopian Societies of “1984” and Brave New World The three features which are discussed in this respect are the division of the two societies into social strata, the use of state power and control over citizens, and the loss of people’s individualities.
Dystopian Fiction for Young Readers First of all, it must be noted that the article of the current analysis is devoted to the impact of dystopian fiction on young people.
Dystopian Future in the “Blade Runner” Film The foremost aspect of how the urban landscape is being represented in Blade Runner is that the director made a deliberate point in accentuating the perceptual unfriendliness of the environment, in the foreground of which […]
Dystopia Idea in the Movies and Novels If considering the rebels in the novel and the movies the “vermin” instead of the “prey,” the idea of the stories will change slightly.
A Dystopian State: Astutopia The education system reinforces the essence of the dungeons, and the aim is to instill fear within the children so they can adhere to laid down teachings and doctrines.
Popularity of Utopian/Dystopian Young Adult Literature The box is entrusted in the Mayor’s care and a tradition of passing it from one Mayor to the next is established.
Dystopian Social Contract The Hunger Games series 1 is a science-fiction drama that delineates the situation of enslavement among the citizens of Panem to the governing class that reside in a city called Capitol.
Subversive Literature/ Dystopia in science fiction novels In the endeavor to place a case in support of this line of argument, the paper considers the key traits of dystopian literature then showing how Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep possesses them in […]
Utopia and Dystopia in The Future City
An Analysis of Feminist Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Our Society is Becoming More Like a Dystopia Than a Democracy
Integrating Research for Water Management: Synergy or Dystopia
American Dystopia; American Spaces and Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’
The Brave New World’s Dystopia And Assimilation
Gattaca and Fahrenheit 451 – Technology and Dystopia
Dystopia: Science Fiction, Exaggeration, Or Imminent Reality
Thoughts on Feminism and Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale
Censorship in Dystopia in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
The Dystopia in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Dystopia Caused by the Massive Boom of Technology in The Hunger Games
The Theme of Feminist Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale, a Novel by Margaret Atwood
Somewhere Between Utopia and Dystopia: Choosing From Incomparable Prospects
The Causes of the Island’s Changes from Utopia to Dystopia in the Novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Cowardly Current Dystopia In Aldous Huxley’s Novel “Brave New World”
Searching for the Meaning of Life: Beckett’s Dystopia in “Endgame”
Comments on: Totalitarian Government: Discovering Dystopia in Matched
How Does Orwell Create a Dystopia in 1984
Utopia, Dystopia or Anti-Utopia? by Choloe Houston
Humanity And Dystopia In Anthem, By Ayn Rand
The Contrast Between Utopia and Dystopia in the Novels 1984 and The Dispossessed
The Role Of A Good City Thinking: Utopia, Dystopia And Heterotopia
Concept of Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale, a Novel by Canadian Poet Margaret Atwood
Similarities Between Dystopia and Harrison Bergeron
The Portrayal of Dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
The Beauty Of Dystopia By Aldous Huxley
Utopia and Dystopia in Harrison Bergeron and The Lottery
Utopia and Dystopia in the Futuristic Novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley’s Dystopia As Relating To Society Today
Utopia and Dystopia in The Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
The Handmaid’s Tale: Dissecting the Feminist Dystopia
Self-Repression and Dystopia: The Bumpy Road to Freedom in “Never Let Me Go”
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 Modern Dystopia Warnings
Utopia and Dystopia in Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Art of War: The Ancient Chinese Classic Adapted for Dystopia Circa 2032
The Evolution of Dystopia Fiction in Some Works of Literature
The Horror Of Dystopia Revealed By Neuromancer
Similarities Between Utopia and Dystopia
Contrastive Utopias: The Role of Nature and Technology in the Concepts of Utopia and Dystopia
The Dystopia of William Gibson’s Neuromancer
Analyzing Technology and Politics in The Blade Runner Dystopia by Judith Kerman
The Concept of Dystopia in Harrison Bergeron, The Giver, and Uglies
Utopia or Dystopia: The Future of Technology
Religious Dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale
Dystopia As A Literary Genre In A Handmaid’s Tale
Identity: Fighting Dystopia’s Cookie-Cutter Molds
Dystopia in the Novels of Ray Bradbury and George Orwell
Free Handmaid’s Tale Essays: The Handmaid’s Dystopia
What Are Dystopian Novels?
Which Writer Creates the Most Disturbing Dystopia Future Vision?
Why Are Dystopian Novels So Popular?
What Is an Example of a Dystopia?
What’s a Dystopia Society?
What Are the Five Characteristics of Dystopia?
What Are the Four Types of Dystopia?
What Are the Nine Traits of Dystopia?
What Is Another Word for Dystopia?
What Is Utopia vs. Dystopia?
What’s the Opposite of Dystopia?
What Is a Dystopia Person?
How Do You Recognize a Dystopia?
Why Is It Called Dystopia?
How Do You Survive a Dystopia?
What Happens to an Individual in a Dystopia Society?
What Type of Government Does a Dystopia Society Have?
What Is a Feminist Dystopia?
Who Invented Dystopia?
Is a Dystopia Society Possible?
Why Dystopia Fiction Often Paints a Frightening Picture of the Future?
Why Dystopia Literature Often Presents the Individual’s Quest for Meaning in Hostile and Oppressive Worlds?
What Are the Issues With Human Progress in Utopia and Dystopia Fiction?
How Does Individualism Manifest Within Utopia and Dystopia Novels?
What Are Dystopia Societies and Progression Towards Equality?
How Do Dystopia Novels Convey Humanity and Individualism?
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Anthony Cockerill

| Writing | The written word | Teaching English |

How to teach dystopian creative writing through a ‘creative construct’

I was intrigued to see how the provision of a ‘fictional construct’ might bring about effective learning connected to story-telling..

Early in my teaching career, I taught as part of the Key Stage Three curriculum, a sequence of learning to Year Eight, delivered principally from a text book, which was based around the premise of students as applicants for an interstellar space mission. As part of the sequence, students were exposed to a range of non-fiction texts, such as applications, CVs, persuasive letters and non-chronological reports, and would learn the codes and conventions of these texts and how to use them.

At the same time, I had began my first year of teaching A-level media studies. I set the students from this class an exercise which involved story-boarding, scripting and shooting sequences based around the same scenario the Year Eight students were working on, with the intention of using these moving image prompts as part of the scheme of learning.

Some years later, I was still using these moving images as part of the scheme of learning, but this had by now evolved into something different. The focus was no longer wholly on non-fiction text types but rather on the science fiction genre and its associated codes and conventions, to which students would respond creatively. As a recently qualified teacher, I had stumbled up on the idea not only of moving image as a creative writing prompt, but also on the idea of what I called the ‘fictional construct’, an immersive narrative arc which is ‘seeded’ by the teacher, but developed and made whole by the students.

My Year Nine group had fond memories of this process from when I had taught them in Year Eight, and when it came to the summer term, during which there was some weeks of freedom, I asked whether they’d prefer to spend those weeks reading and studying an existing text (I was thinking about a drama version of The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) or whether they’d prefer to collaborate on a brand new story. They unanimously chose the latter.

Having taught drama as well as English, I was intrigued to see how the provision of a ‘fictional construct’ might bring about learning connected to story-telling, to unpack the concepts and structures we all know are implicit in stories but the schema of which we rarely pause to deconstruct.

My first instinct was to establish a scenario that created a mystery of some kind. This was around the time I had spent many hours watching Lost (2004-2010; Jeffrey Lieber , J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof ) on television, and I was inspired by the questions it posed, not just in terms of the enigmas at the heart of its own storyline(s) but also about the nature and structure of stories themselves and how the viewer or reader can easily find their perception of narrative outcome, protagonist and antagonist obfuscated for dramatic effect.

I rather liked the idea of a sinister leader. Benjamin Linus from Lost was obvious inspiration. I played around with various contexts, such as a remote, desert-based cult. I even took this idea as far as pricing up gospel choir style robes. But then a different scenario emerged. What if the students were inhabitants of a strange community; ostensibly survivors of some kind of apocalypse?

In creating this ‘fictional construct’, I lay the ground in advance. I display teaser posters around school with embedded QR codes which the students can scan and learn clues about the origins of the narrative.

Once the teaching sequence begins, the students explore their new characters, attempting to ‘recover’ memories of their barely remembered, pre-trauma past lives, in a kind of ‘going clear’ process.

We explore the idea of narrative equilibrium in our community, describing the daily routines, relationships and tasks. Discontent is sowed, through my role as a sinister leader-type figure and the exemplar texts I write each week. Writing is focused around narrative voice and building tension through, for example, events such as the characters being forced to leave the confines of the community to repair a malfunctioning radio mast. The sudden departure of my character, David, from the narrative allows the students to write a climactic piece that details their escape from the community and the their characters’ realisation that the world they believed they were part of is a conceit: they are essentially the subjects of a psychological experiment conducted by an overarching pseudo-scientific research organisation.

When I first taught the scheme of learning, I was careful to shape the narrative conceit so when the week of the sequence was taught, the revelation that the students’ ‘personas’ had been duped would engender genuine surprise and outrage. This was successful. But for the second time of teaching, a year later, I was both surprised and pleased to note that rumours about the narrative t rompe-l’œil had already spread amongst the class members. Therefore, to what extent, I wondered, should the students become responsible for shaping the narrative into its final form?

This is the question I’ve faced for the last couple of years each year now, and I find myself giving the students more freedom to experiment with possible climaxes and resolutions, which feels like a much more exploratory way of learning.

Some other questions persist:

How can I use drama as a way of probing and prompting character and monologue? I have done this successfully as part of the sequence. Exploring scenarios through the teacher-in-role method really helps to palpably build the ‘fictional construct’.

To what extent can this ‘creative talk’ be helpful in developing writing?

As a unit essentially focused around skills – ‘reading’ a genre and ‘writing’ in response to it, how can I ensure there was sufficient ‘knowledge’ or ‘content’ – terminology and concepts – as part of the sequence of learning? I want the students to become au fait with those ideas, devices and concepts connected to story-telling: the idea of the narrative arc; of climax; of .

I think there are a lot of strong aspects of progressive teaching and learning here: collaboration; group work; drama as a stimulus to creative writing; allowing productive ‘talk’ to generate ideas. The teacher plays a keep part in being an active role model as a writer – and throughout the sequence, modelling is key at every step. Ultimately, there is a feeling that we are collaborating to produce something new that has value.

To some degree, this sequence of teaching and learning has encouraged me to think about how I can resolve the paradox of whether we approach our classroom practice as a ‘progressive’ – encouraging collaboration, group work and discussion – or from a more traditional standpoint – knowledge based and rooted in independent work. To this end, thinking about our practice pragmatically – and understanding that there is space for a variety of approaches – is really valuable.

Featured image: Photo by Paulo Silva on Unsplash

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Essay Samples on Dystopia

Feminism and totalitarism in 'the handmaid's tale' dystopia novel.

Dystopia is the opposite of the ideal society, which is a utopia, that often appears in literature and artistic creation. Dystopias are typically post-apocalyptic or totalitaristic, but there are other forms of dystopias as well such as feminist, cyberpunk, off-world, etc. With 'The Handmaid's Tale'...

Literary Criticism
The Handmaid's Tale

Futuristic World in Dystopia: the Illusion of a Happy Society

A utopia is an imaginary society where all citizens are treated equally and with dignity, and citizens live in safety without fear. Since utopias do not exist, attempting to create one can have detrimental consequences. The utopia can become a dystopia. A dystopia is a...

Literary Genres
Literature Review

Technology Myth In "The Circle" By Dave Eggers

The Circle: The Technology Myth The novel begins on a glistening, sunlit day in June, Mae Holland cruises campus on her first-ever day at the Circle (Eggers, 1). The company is a creative and strongly favorite web organization, which has seized the globe by a...

Impact of Technology

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Dystopian Fiction

Published in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale emerged during an auspicious time for dystopian fiction, following works such as Adoux Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. These dystopian narratives provided readers with captivating examinations into bleak,...

Presentation Of Authoritarian Control In George Orwell's 1984 And Brave New World

In the two novels ’Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley and ‘1984’ by George Orwell, authoritarian control is a recurring theme throughout both plots. The two authors, who were influenced by their experiences of war on a large scale during the twentieth century were saddened...

Brave New World

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Survival Is Insufficient In Novel Of Station Eleven

Societies can interconnect human life but can also isolate people from each other with the technology within. Station Eleven is a novel about a society devolving into a Dystopia, but it also explores what a society is. Mandel explores society through different perspectives by describing...

Station Eleven

The Lifetime Memories Of The Past And Present In Station Eleven And Monkey Beach

Individuals experience many things over their lifetime that make them who they are. Joyful, stressful, exciting and traumatic experiences are often things every individual goes through; the one thing that connects all of them is memory. Memory allows one to reflect on experiences that are...

The Theme Of Gratitude As A Beacon Of Hope As Seen In Station Eleven

Station 11, by Emily Mandel, revolves around the topic of gratitude and reveals that people, when they lose certain privileges, realize the gravity of the things that they actually have. In the book, before the pandemic, society is presented as unremarkable. In the golden age...

The Comparison Of Dystopian Worlds In 1984 And Brave New World

Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 are both Dystopian novels written ahead of their time that, in their own way, frighteningly predicted the western world of today. 21st Century western society has turned out to be a combination of both Huxley and Orwell’s visions...

The Expression Of Memories Through Art In Station Eleven

Magazines in houses that were deserted in order to try to recollect the world she was once living in and keen memories about the people she once knew and cared for. Lost memories sometimes are results of post-traumatic experiences and in Kirsten case it was...

Comparative Analysis Of Station Eleven And War For The Planet Of The Apes

The history of humanity has been riddled with new diseases and mass pandemics that have threatened the collapse of society. In today’s media, artists like to imagine a world where this disastrous event does happen, when medicine fails and the world is thrust into a...

Hope and Faith as the Tools for Survival in "Station Eleven"

The doomsday book Station Eleven by Emily Mandel has the theme of faith and fate, demonstrates how in events of struggle and fear, such as an epidemic, people turn to faith for help. The author represents faith as something that has similar importance in the...

Dystopian Society In Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go, written by Kazuo Ishiguro in 2005, is about the perspective of a female named Kathy who grows up knowing how she will die and her friends. They attend a boarding school called Hailsham that raises them from birth and is informed...

Never Let Me Go

Feminism in Dystopian Novels: Parable of the Sower, Woman on the Edge of Time, and Binti

Feminism has been changing the way people think about gender since the 1960’s, and this change can be seen in the writers of different novels. Feminism and gender roles are portrayed in the characters in Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, Parable...

Parable of The Sower

Trepidant of Dystopian Societies: Brave New World and V for Vendetta

Throughout the novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and the movie V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue, the author and director both reveal and display significant messages about how dystopian societies function and maneuver of how dictatorial governments rule the civilization. Through the...

V For Vendetta

Thebes’ Dystopian Aspects in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

While the definition of dystopia is being debated by scholars to this day, Gregory Claeys provides a broad definition as to what the concept of dystopia is: something that showcases the “negative visions of humanity generally” (Vieira 3), is opposite to what is regarded as...

Oedipus The King

Critical Appreciation of Dystopian Themes in The Children of Men

The ‘Children of Men’ presents the various dystopian tropes through the use of the linguistic techniques in order to question society’s troubles and create a parable to our own reality. PD James introduces the dystopian trope of the uncanny through this setting. By using similar...

Children of Men

The Dichotomy of Dystopian and Utopian Societies in "The Giver"

Lois Lowry's novel "The Giver" explores the concept of a society that strives for perfection, leading to both a utopian and dystopian reality. In the novel, the protagonist, Jonas, lives in a seemingly perfect world, where everyone is content and there is no suffering or...

Analysis of The Truman Show Through the Ideas of Utopian and Dystopian Society

What if the reality you are used to see is not the real one? How would you feel if you discovered that during your whole live you have been controlled and used as entertainment? The aim of this essay is to compare the film The...

The Truman Show

Station Eleven: Exposing the Fragility of Society Through Fictional Characters

Station Eleven is a novel about a society devolving into a Dystopia, but it also explores what a society is. Mandel explores society through different perspectives by describing events prior to its downfall. For example, Arthur and Miranda’s migration from a small island into a...

The Terryfing Ideas of Change in V for Vendetta

Politician Jerry Brown once said, “Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.” V for Vendetta (2006) originated from a graphic novel written by Allan Moore and is set in a dystopian Great-Britain...

Blade Runner as one of Cinematic Masterpieces

‘Blade Runner’ film by Ridley Scott is an adaptation of the book ‘Do Andriod’s Dream of Electric Sheep’ by Philip K. Dick. The story follows the main protagonist Rick Deckard, a retired police officer who retired NEXUS 6 replicants, living in a dystopian LA, 2019....

Blade Runner

Impact of Dystopian Regime on Individuality in Huger Games and Divergent

Introduction The 2012 film “The Hunger Games’ by Gary Ross and the 2014 film “Divergent” by Neil Burger use a range of similar and different techniques to explore the themes of oppression, empowerment and rebellion and its impact on individuality. Ross and Burger’s sci-fi thrillers...

The Control of Life by the Government in the Dystopian World of "Divergent"

In the novel Divergent, it tells about a dystopian society and how they separate each other into five factions, the factionless, and a wall. These five factions all have a different role and a different way of life. Dauntless are the brave and fearless, Abnegation...

Social Control

The Constraints of Realism as a Democratic Art

Introduction Realism, as an artistic movement, emerged as a response to the idealism and romanticism of earlier periods. It aimed to depict the world in an objective and unembellished manner, presenting an authentic representation of reality. However, despite its intentions, realism faces certain constraints as...

Depiction of Dystopian Worlds in The Handmaid's Tale and 1984

Dystopian literature questions the power of language, both Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty - four’ showcases a variety of qualities necessary to advocate one’s freedom. Whilst both novelists share the common theme of language limiting both freedom and knowledge the two texts...

The Impact of Cinematography on Portrayal of Dystopia in Film

It is in the creation of dystopian film that universal issues of a political, social and cultural concern are made more widely relevant and accessible to a contemporary audience. The value of such dystopic representations of society derives from the filmmaker’s ability to timelessly comment...

Film Analysis

A Comprehensive Analysis of Dystopian Genre in Literature

Dystopian genre blossomed in literature during the nineteenth century and developed significantly as a critical response and an antithesis to utopian fiction and shows utopia gone awry. The word ‘dystopia’ can be translated from Greek as ‘bad place’ and usually it depicts something a society...

Feminist Dystopia in Margaret Atwood “The Handmaid's Tale”

Feminism is a political and social movement; it shares a recurrent goal which is to achieve political, economic, personal, and social equality of sexes (IWDA). A dystopia is a society that is crumbling, decaying or in a tyrannized and terrorized state. They divulge the public’s...

The Handmaid's Tale and Animal Farm: Defamiliarizing Reproduction and Totalitarian Regimes

In his book, Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide, Professor M. Keith Booker argues that the principle literary strategy that dystopian literature utilizes is defamiliarization. He states that 'by focusing their critiques of society on imaginatively distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on...

Animal Farm

A Comparison of the Current World to Huxley's Brave New World

Is the Modern World in Danger of Becoming the Brave New World? In his 1932 dystopian novel, Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a future “World State” government that models its civilization on the principles of community, identity, and stability. The inhabitants of this world...

Bioengineering

We By Yevgeny Zamyatin: The Terrible Consequences Of The Abandonment

In this 20st century novel it can be inferred that the story is an allegory on the early Soviet Union. The story is taking place in the future and is a dystopia. Totalitarianism and conformity are characteristics of the Soviet Union society of that time....

Book Review

Sacred Games And Black Mirror: Crafted Dark Stories Opening Doors To Reality

The age of cliffhangers rewrites the style of stories being told “Kabhi kabhi lagta hai apun hi Bhagwan hai!” If this line rings a bell in your head, then you too, are probably among the majority whose minds that got influenced by Sacred Games. The...

Best topics on Dystopia

1. Feminism and Totalitarism in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Dystopia Novel

2. Futuristic World in Dystopia: the Illusion of a Happy Society

3. Technology Myth In “The Circle” By Dave Eggers

4. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Dystopian Fiction

5. Presentation Of Authoritarian Control In George Orwell’s 1984 And Brave New World

6. Survival Is Insufficient In Novel Of Station Eleven

7. The Lifetime Memories Of The Past And Present In Station Eleven And Monkey Beach

8. The Theme Of Gratitude As A Beacon Of Hope As Seen In Station Eleven

9. The Comparison Of Dystopian Worlds In 1984 And Brave New World

10. The Expression Of Memories Through Art In Station Eleven

11. Comparative Analysis Of Station Eleven And War For The Planet Of The Apes

12. Hope and Faith as the Tools for Survival in “Station Eleven”

13. Dystopian Society In Never Let Me Go

14. Feminism in Dystopian Novels: Parable of the Sower, Woman on the Edge of Time, and Binti

15. Trepidant of Dystopian Societies: Brave New World and V for Vendetta

A Raisin in The Sun
Hidden Intellectualism
Sonny's Blues
William Shakespeare
A Christmas Carol
A Long Way Gone
Babylon Revisited
A Farewell to Arms

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56 Dystopian Writing Prompts & Story Ideas
Dystopian writing prompts. To help you create a powerful story about a society in crisis, here are our 56 dystopian writing prompts: In the year 2,121, sea levels have risen at an extreme rate. 98% of the Earth is now underwater. The remaining 2% is made of small islands scattered across the Earth. With resources at a scarcity, the islands must ...
Best Dystopian Writing Prompts of 2023
To get you started, here are our top ten dystopian writing prompts: Write a story about a character who is certain the world is going to end today. In the end, it wasn't humankind that destroyed the world. It was (fill in the blank). Write a story about a group of zombie friends who go adventuring together after the apocalypse.
100 dystopian writing prompts
Welcome to our 100 dystopian writing prompts. Let your creativity run wild envisaging sinister agencies, social manipulation, banned contraband, restricted freedoms, underground resistance, and daring escapes. Buckle up for a thrilling ride into menacing speculative worlds where you'll encounter thought police, memory black markets, mandated ...
Dystopian Writing Prompts: 45 Dark and Edgy Ideas to Get You Started
5. Show, don't tell. One mistake many writers make is telling their readers what they should be feeling instead of showing them through their words. If you want your readers to feel scared, don't tell them, "this city is scary.".
Dystopian Story Ideas: Writing Inspiration
43 Dystopian Writing Prompts. The joy of writing dystopian stories is that the ideas and possibilities are endless. You can be didactic and political, or you can send your readers on a magical, crazy adventure. As long as your story is set in the future, in a world that is suffering or post-apocalyptic, you have yourself a dystopian novel.
37 Dystopian Writing Prompts
37 Dystopian Writing Prompts. Dystopian novels had a big upswing in popularity a few years back with series like The Hunger Games. While there has been a remarkable dip in the genre, it's important to remember that trends are cyclical. With the current tumultuous state of the world, we can expect another jump in interest for dystopian novels.
16 of the Best Dystopian Writing Prompts » JournalBuddies.com
Dystopian fiction is not new. With 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, The Handmaid's Tale, and other classics in the genre, dystopian stories pushed novels into modern times and new directions. These books provide the perfect inspiration for dystopian fiction writing prompts. If you are unfamiliar with this genre, we will give you some ...
How to Write a Dystopian Story: 3 Tips for Writing Dystopian Fiction
From Veronica Roth's *New York Times* bestselling *Divergent* trilogy to James Dashner's *Maze Runner* series, dystopian stories offer lessons about the present by looking ahead to the future. Dystopian novels can challenge readers to think differently about their social and political climate—and in some instances can even inspire action.
872 Dystopian Writing Prompts
Writing a dystopian story can be fulfilling because it allows you to explore global issues and technology while delivering empowering messages creatively. ... Be creative but also be able to stretch your fingers to the max. ... Brain, Stop! An Essay of How to Marry the Miraculous; A man runs by toward you, people run out in warning after him, a ...
16 Dystopian Writing Prompts
Below are 16 writing prompts for dystopian story ideas. Surprisingly, this is the first post I've done specifically for dystopian writing. Dystopian Government Control In a dystopian future United States, where the government controls every aspect of life, a group of rebels fight to overthrow the oppressive regime and bring freedom back to the people. […]
13 Dystopian Writing Prompts
13 Dystopian Writing Prompts. While most suited to older students or writers looking for a dark yet thought provoking topic, dystopian stories can be a rich area to explore. Often involving troubling subject matter such as authoritarian government control of the population or devastating climate damage, these stories can be great tools to look ...
49 Amazing Dystopian Writing Prompts
I hope you have enjoyed these 49 Dystopian story ideas. Feel free to take any of these 500 writing prompts and use them as inspiration to craft your next best-selling dystopian novel. Remember that we have a full series of free adult writing prompts that you can check out in other genres. If you like these then make sure to check out the rest.
The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Dystopian Short Story
Writing a dystopian short story is a thrilling venture into the realms of speculative fiction, offering a canvas to explore the darkest corners of the human experience. By focusing on world-building, character development, plot intricacies, and thematic exploration, you can craft a narrative that captivates readers and leaves a lasting ...
How To Write Dystopian Fiction: 5 Storytelling Steps
Step 1 - Worldbuilding. The foundation of a well told dystopian story rests on the skill of world building. In this process, writers must construct a fully immersive and believable environment that shapes the dynamics of the story. From the political structure and cultural norms to the technology and geography, every facet of the dystopian ...
How To Write Dystopia
Episode 69 of Creative Writing Advice, with JJ Barnes. I do my first video on how to write dystopia. I explore the frequently occurring theme in dystopian fi...
How to Write a Dystopian Story: Definition, Tips, and How to Publish
Tips on Writing a Great Dystopian Story. The tips below can help you balance these factors to keep readers turning the pages. Consider Oppression in Any Form. While you want your story to be about the humans living in your dystopian society, you do need to put some serious thought into the backdrop of the story.
Dystopian Writing (Definition, How To Write + Examples)
Dystopia can be majorly found in modern literature. With the rise of technology, wars, despair, and psychological alienation of individuals, the future seemed hopeless and offered no way out. Dystopian writings in English can be traced back to the French Revolution of 1789 and earlier. With the Industrial Revolution, life became mechanical ...
Dystopian Creative Writing: The Room
Here is an excellent exemplar of creative writing based on the conventions of Dystopia. This is a student piece written by Mohamed Zakaria bin Mohamed Said. It is entitled, 'The Room'. Thank you for sharing your writing. The Room The small dull-grey clock read 8:30am. I rise from the simple white linen and I look….
100 Dystopian Essay Topics & Ideas
Dystopia in "Gattaca" and "Never Let Me Go" Movies. When people think about the future, in the majority of cases, they believe that science and technology should help to change the world. One of the goals of a utopia is to remove the overwhelming […] Dystopias in "Animal Farm" and "The Handmaid's Tale". In this regard, the ...
How to teach dystopian creative writing through a 'creative construct
As a recently qualified teacher, I had stumbled up on the idea not only of moving image as a creative writing prompt, but also on the idea of what I called the 'fictional construct', an immersive narrative arc which is 'seeded' by the teacher, but developed and made whole by the students. My Year Nine group had fond memories of this ...
Dystopia Essays: Samples & Topics
Feminism and Totalitarism in 'The Handmaid's Tale' Dystopia Novel. 2. Futuristic World in Dystopia: the Illusion of a Happy Society. 3. Technology Myth In "The Circle" By Dave Eggers. 4. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as Dystopian Fiction. 5. Presentation Of Authoritarian Control In George Orwell's 1984 And Brave New ...
Descriptive Essay On Dystopia
Dystopian Setting The city that once had homed thousands and been the most economically successful country ever, was now a contaminated wasteland. The land looked dry, destroyed and lonely. The morning breeze felt like crying sorrows, and the grey deceitful sky awed down at us. In the deepest corner of despair lies dystopia where hope dies.
Dystopian Fiction
Essay writing guides ... Creative writing question: ... Dystopian Fiction - Practice 2. This website was created by the Southend High School for Girls English department. It is primarily designed to support our students through our curriculum, but other students are welcome here too. Unless you're from Westcliff, obviously.

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100 Dystopia Essay Topics & Ideas

How to teach dystopian creative writing through a ‘creative construct’

Essay Samples on Dystopia

Futuristic World in Dystopia: the Illusion of a Happy Society

Technology Myth In "The Circle" By Dave Eggers

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Dystopian Fiction

Presentation Of Authoritarian Control In George Orwell's 1984 And Brave New World

Survival Is Insufficient In Novel Of Station Eleven

The Lifetime Memories Of The Past And Present In Station Eleven And Monkey Beach

The Theme Of Gratitude As A Beacon Of Hope As Seen In Station Eleven

The Comparison Of Dystopian Worlds In 1984 And Brave New World

The Expression Of Memories Through Art In Station Eleven