Six Word StoryA SIX WORD WONDER COMMUNITY
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Write six words
START WITH PRESSURE, NOT AN ANSWER

Six-word poetry prompts

These prompts do not hand you a topic and walk away. Each one gives language something useful to push against: an image, a hidden emotion, a contradiction, a sound or a constraint.

Edited by · Editorial standards

Choose the kind of difficulty you need

If an idea feels vague, begin with an object. If a line feels flat, hide the emotion and show its evidence. If every first draft sounds familiar, add a contradiction or a formal constraint. Prompts are starting pressure, not subjects you must obey.

Begin with an image

  1. An empty chair facing a window
  2. Something melting in a closed hand
  3. A light left on downstairs
  4. One forgotten shoe beside water
  5. A closed bedroom door at noon
  6. Steam leaving a cold kitchen
  7. A cracked cup still being used
  8. Bird tracks crossing fresh snow
  9. A photograph with one person missing

Hide the emotion

  1. Write jealousy without naming it
  2. Show relief through one physical action
  3. Make regret visible on a table
  4. Express desire using distance
  5. Describe loneliness with one object
  6. Show anger without heat or shouting
  7. Write joy without smiling
  8. Let embarrassment change the weather
  9. Make tenderness sound mechanical

Start with contradiction

  1. Something beautiful but frightening
  2. Something tiny but overwhelming
  3. An ending that feels hopeful
  4. A welcome that sounds like goodbye
  5. A crowded room that feels empty
  6. A gift that takes something away
  7. A silence louder than machinery
  8. A stranger who feels remembered
  9. A victory that resembles surrender

Open a memory

  1. Your childhood bedroom after leaving
  2. A phrase one parent repeated
  3. A smell that restores a year
  4. Something small you once lost
  5. The first lie you recognized
  6. A family recipe without measurements
  7. The sound of an old home
  8. A photograph remembered incorrectly
  9. A game whose rules disappeared

Listen for sound

  1. Use a repeated opening sound
  2. Let one word echo once
  3. Build rhythm from three paired beats
  4. Make a hard sound turn soft
  5. Use internal rhyme without forcing it
  6. Write a line meant for whispering
  7. Let punctuation create a pause
  8. Use one onomatopoeic word
  9. End with the quietest word

Accept a constraint

  1. Use no adjectives
  2. Use only one-syllable words
  3. Include exactly three concrete nouns
  4. Repeat one word three times
  5. Use no punctuation
  6. Write only a question
  7. Use six verbs
  8. Begin and end with opposites
  9. Make the final word a color
PRIVATE, NON-AI WRITING TOOL

Six-Word Poetry Lab

Combine an image, a sense and a technique in exactly six words.

IMAGEmoonlight
SENSEsight
TECHNIQUEmetaphor
0 / 6Your six words begin here.

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Reach six words to submit

What to do after the first six words

Read the line aloud. Circle the least surprising word. Replace an abstraction with something a reader can see, hear or touch. Then compare your draft with the transformations in the practical writing guide.