Romance writing prompts to get your swoons swooning and your happily ever afters guaranteed.
Love is all you need. Love is all around. Love is in the air. There’s a good reason why romance is the consistently highest performance genre in both traditional and indie publishing. We love love!
Good romance stories are not just about the hookup. They’re about connection and hope and triumph. They’re about people finding something satisfied in themselves through other people. They’re about the thrill of the chase. They’re about loss and longing and loneliness, all of those low, muddy human emotions explored and then thwarted by that one enduring fact of life that in one way or another binds every human on earth. Love! And all of that and more is just waiting for you to explore in this collection of romance writing prompts.
- A pair of colleagues who hate each other are forced into a conversation when they’re waiting for a bus.
- A man meets a woman hunting for gemstones in shallow rock pools.
- A widow swears she’ll never love again. And then she meets her husband’s brother…
- A geeky man falls in love with his supermodel neighbor.
- A grocery store worker strikes up a conversation with a regular customer about parsnips.
- While in the laundromat, an unlikely couple argues over who gets to use the last of the fabric softener.
- A pair meet in an elevator on their way to a support meeting for children of alcoholics.
- Two people have never met and have only seen one another every day through the window of passing buses.
- After his wife dies, a farmer wins a trip to New York City.
- A woman who works in a board game shop strikes up a curious conversation with a city employee who’s repairing a pothole out the front of her workplace.
- “I bet you never thought you’d fall in love with someone who thought so much about spinach.”
- A vegan falls in love with a competitive hot dog eater.
- “I would say I love you, but…”
- A deeply unlucky man keeps imagining his negative real-life scenarios as scenes from a romantic comedy.
- Unlucky in love, a woman swears she’ll never watch another romantic movie or read another romantic book again.
- A pair of strangers respectively do not want to go to their mutual friend’s housewarming party.
- A bicycle courier runs over a nun as he rides through the city.
- A dying man falls in love with his son’s kindergarten teacher.
- An unhappily married couple decides to give one another one chance each to have an affair to see what it does to their marriage. (Beware using this prompt as a central plot for a conventional romance story, as romance readers generally find infidelity universally unacceptable.)
- A pair of colleagues unexpectedly find an attraction when they’re forced into role-playing together during a workplace harassment seminar.
- A woman falls in love with her married employee—he’s married to her sister. (Beware using this prompt as a central plot for a conventional romance story, as romance readers generally find infidelity universally unacceptable.)
- A barista serves a customer who looks exactly like an unknown woman he had a dream about years before.
- A woman who has sworn herself to abstinence finds her convictions challenged by a TV personality.
- A bookstore employee gets into an argument with a customer about ebooks.
- After he moves into a small town, a lawyer finds himself attracted to the local baker.
- A long-term same-sex couple takes a romantic retreat as a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship.
- A divorced man finds himself attracted to his gay best friend.
- “Of all the things that have kept us apart over the years, who would’ve imagined it would be a goat that finally brought us together?”
- “If you tell me you love me, I’ll cry.”
- A pair meet in real life without realizing they are already online rivals.
- “I’ve heard of being unlucky in love, but never so literally as this.”
- A man tells his new girlfriend that he loves her, and her response horrifies him.
- You dream your soulmate says something to you. The next morning, a complete stranger on the bus says the exact same thing to you.
- A pair of strangers keep seeing each other around town over the course of a year, always reading the same book as each other.
- “He told me it was his job to show me that life wasn’t a fairy tale.”
- “I want to kiss you, I really, really do. But…”
- A woman hates a man, except he has the most alluring eyes she’s ever seen and she can’t stop thinking about him.
- “That single kiss changed the world. And I’m not talking metaphorically.”
- A personal assistant falls for his married boss during a work trip. (Remember, romance readers generally do not tolerate infidelity in central romance plots.)
- A couple has been married for 70 years. As the wife needs to make a decision to turn off his life support, she thinks back to the ill-fated way they met.
- A concierge at a hotel takes it upon herself to play matchmaker for her guests.
- “Don’t you dare tell me you love me.”
- A pair of rivals are going for the same prize. Before the final competition, they’ll fall in love and ruin both their chances at winning.
- A pair of friends marry for immigration administration purposes. As they prepare for the divorce they’d agreed on, one finds him/herself in love with the other.
- A man believes a woman has cast a love spell on him and therefore he can’t help himself around her. There is no spell.
- A divorced woman decides she’d like to try to develop a secret double life.
- A woman plans to end her marriage. However, something makes her fall in love with her husband all over again.
- A pair of hikers keep running into one another on a wilderness trip they are both trying to do alone. This annoys them both.
- A pair of workers at a seasonal resort fall in love one summer and then attempt to keep their relationship going when they return to their real lives.
- A divorced couple starts dating each other again.
- A writer starts to fall in love with her fictional hero and then meets a man who is like him in every way.
- A pair break up the day before their wedding. The next 24 hours makes them fall in love again.
- A long-term couple plans a romantic night to rekindle their relationship. Everything goes wrong.
- At the end of the night, they decide to give themselves one more month to fix what’s broken or go their separate ways.
- A doctor falls in love with his heart transplant patient.
- A woman discovers the burly, curmudgeonly man next door is actually the author of her favorite romance novels, which he has been writing under a female pen name.
- An optometrist falls in love with a blind man.
- A musician falls in love with a deaf artist.
- A relationship therapist suggests some non-conservative ways for a conservative couple to reignite the spark in their long marriage.
- A cantankerous filmmaker who does not believe in romance is forced to adapt a romance novel to a screenplay and falls in love with its author.
- A pair falls in love after one random magical night together while they’re on vacation. They decide to pursue an exclusive long-distance relationship.
- A lifelong spinster and a lifelong bachelor decide to get married in their 70s.
- A pair of friends makes a pact as teenagers to marry each other if they’re alone at 30. They get engaged and then both meet someone else.
- “That proves exactly why romance is nothing more than a social construct.”
- A woman starts to fear she has settled for her husband and regrets never really falling in love with him.
- A couple who have been arranged to be married (but don’t like one another) each fall in love with a member of the wedding planning crew.
- A pair of diehard fans at a rock concert hook up on a one-night stand. Decades later, they unexpectedly meet again at a revival concert for the same musical act.
- A pair who seem destined to be together keep missing the opportunity to meet. When they finally do, it turns out it might not be such a good idea after all.
- A woman has been stewing over her ex for years, trying to find the perfect thing to say to him if she ever sees him again. She eventually gets over him, meets a new guy, and is happy. Until her colleague introduces her new boyfriend… the woman’s ex.
- After a bad breakup, a man pours his heart out to the girl working at his local deli. She counsels him through the breakup and then finds herself falling for him while he looks to move on in other directions.
- A recently divorced couple meets each other at the end of two respectively awful dates.
- A woman finds a phone on the street. She looks through it and pieces together an image of its owner, who she finds herself falling for. When she returns the phone and meets the real-life man, she gets a surprise.
- A woman takes a job in an Australian outback mining town and finds she cannot stand the misogynist culture and wants to leave. She then meets a man who tries to convince her to stay.
- A bookworm and a professional athlete are forced into sharing a hotel suite after an airline mix-up.
- The respective siblings of a pair of best friends are brought to a party reluctantly. They form an instant dislike for one another and spend the whole night ruining one another’s chances of meeting anyone at the party. By the end of the night, they find they have something in common after all.
- A pair of rival coworkers meets unexpectedly at a speed dating event in a faraway city.
- Two neighbors with nothing in common form an anonymous relationship with one another on the internet, neither realizing who the other is in real life.
- A pair of strangers on a skydiving plane starts arguing just before they jump. What happens next makes one feel obliged to ask the other out for a drink.
- A pair of strangers meets underwater while scuba diving. It’s not a friendly meeting.
- After a minor car accident, a woman is enraged at the man who ran into the back of her. She’s offended when he asks her out but accepts his invitation, at first with ulterior motives.
- A woman falls in love with the idea of a woman after following her blog. When they meet in person for the first time, it’s anything but romantic.
- A pair meets through a mix-up on a dating website.
- A man keeps finding his new neighbor sleepwalking in his backyard. She infuriates him, but something about her story makes him want to know more and more about her.
- A pair of fictional characters from books written centuries apart falls in love in the real world of modern-day Sydney, Australia.
- A man is attracted to the nanny his ex-wife hires. He believes a relationship would be highly unethical, so he refuses to act on his feelings.
- “You had me at tube socks.”
- A box of brushed potatoes is the catalyst of what will turn out to be an 80-year relationship.
- She looked into his eyes as he smiled, warmly, tenderly, and she knew she’d never hate anyone as much as she hated him at that moment.
- A couple has been dating for a few weeks and everything is going wonderfully. On the night they decide to take things to the next level, an event involving his sister-in-law, a bowl of oatmeal, and a teddy bear threatens to derail everything.
- A woman finds she’s allergic to her new boyfriend.
- A pair of strangers meets in an airport lounge during a long flight delay. Mutual attraction sparks, but after a long time talking, they realize they not only know each other but hate each other.
- A man decides to perform a daily act of grand romance for a year to win back his girlfriend. By day 364, it’s not looking like it’s going to work.
- An actress falls for the real-life person she’s portraying in her new role.
- A man decides to start telling only absolute truths on every date he goes on. When he meets an equally brutally honest woman, he starts to regret his decision.
- “I knew I had been bewitched by you from that first moment.”
- “I wasn’t sure I believed in perfection until I met him. Now I’m even less sure what I believe in.”
- A religious man falls in love with an atheist at a peace rally.
- A man saves a drowning child at the beach and then reluctantly accepts the child’s mother’s invitation to dinner.
- A three-times divorced man proposes to his new girlfriend. She has always wanted to get married and feels her time is running out, but she’s uncertain how to respond.
- A cat-loving animal rescue worker meets a rich surgeon, and it’s hate at first sight.
- A pair meets when working on an election campaign.
- “I don’t care how perfect they are, you just can’t marry someone you met in a bar!”
