Creativity has abandoned me. I hope it’s temporary. I googled ‘romance writing prompts’ to jump start my creative mind and got some interesting results.
The Write Practice. 20 Romance Story Ideas.
These are interesting and a little twisty with a gender-bender thrown in. A cop and a jewelry store owner who is tripping his alarm on purpose. Humans and aliens communicating through a plant. There is only one tried and true – the hero who has sworn off love falls for the spunky rookie with a joie de vivre.
Writing Forward. Fiction Writing Prompts for Romance and Love Stories
These are all pretty vanilla. Two characters at odds because they both want the same thing. Human falling for an alien (The Shape of Water anyone?). Casting a love spell. Mortal enemies fall in love.
eadeverll.com. 52 Romance Story Ideas to Write Now
There are some interesting ones here (and some stock ones). A clockmaker who falls in love with a fairy they find in an antique clock. Two beachcombers who come together when they find two pieces of an ancient artifact. A lexicographer who incites a “manhunt” when they use their unrequited love as the subject for a series of puzzles for a local newspaper. Two paranoiacs who invent their own secret language to communicate with each other (kinda funny). Two gods from different mythologies who meet after the end of the world.
Bryn Donovan. 50 Romance Plot Ideas.
These are vague ideas. She’s already ruled him out. They are competitors or straight-up enemies. He already won (inherited the estate/got the job that she wanted). He broke her heart in the past. He did her wrong in the past. He did something wrong in the past, period.
It didn’t immediately jumpstart my creativity, but it gave me some ideas. Any other ideas to get the creative juices flowing?
Eight Ladies Writing 
I’ll check these out!
How I wish it were really true that we could just go to Sears and pick out a few ideas! Some of these sound like fun and totally do-able. Good luck with sparking your creativity!
So much fun looking through ideas! Sometimes two different ones can crash together and spark something really juicy for me.
Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt came up with 100 cards known as Oblique Strategies which introduced new information into the creative act (in Eno’s and Bowie’s case, it was the albums known as the Berlin Trilogy). Stuff like, “Use an old idea” or “Gardening not Architecture”. They can be taken many different ways, and I suppose one could flip through them until something struck a chord. There are a few random generators on the web. The one I got just now was, “Think of the radio.”
For me, that means historical romance. Dancing in the hero’s bachelor pad to the sound of the radio. Waves coming from the radio and transforming into sound when it hits the ear drum.
It’s a nice trigger, because it takes the stuff floating around in my brain already, and organizes it into a story element. For example — I’ve now got a setting and two characters. (-: Just need a conflict, and there I go!
Neighborhood gossip can be useful. I am a student writer with a strongly religious neighbor who was struck by lightning twice, another who called 911 when an unmoored pier floated near her shoreline, and a third whose now-husband’s mother bought her a wedding ring and told her that she was getting married. Linda literally carried her eighth child down the aisle.
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