The Letter in the Bottle
Write a story about a group of high school friends who discover an old, unopened letter in a bottle while cleaning the beach for their community service project. The contents of the letter lead them on a wild adventure to solve a decades-old missing person’s case.
Suggested length: A short story: 1,500 to 5,000 words, or flash fiction under 1,000
Start the clock
Pick a sprint, press start and keep going until it stops. Momentum beats polish on a first draft.
Make it yours
Three ways to take this prompt somewhere nobody else will.
- Let your hero make a big mistake for a reason the reader understands.
- End with a choice only this hero would make.
- Make the adults well-meaning but wrong.
Writing young adult books
Ages 12 to 18: firsts, identity and everything at stake.
Young adult fiction is written for teens, with protagonists usually 14 to 18. Every genre lives here, from fantasy to thrillers to romance. What makes it YA is the voice: immediate, intense and inside a teenager's head.
What readers expect
- A teen protagonist
- An immediate, close voice
- Identity and independence
- Big feelings, taken seriously
A tip before you start
Write from inside a teen's head, not from an adult looking back. That immediacy is what separates YA from an adult book with a young hero.
More YA Mystery and Thriller prompts
- The Camera's Old PhotographsWrite a tale about two siblings who find an old camera at a yard sale. When they develop the film still inside, they find pictures of people they…
- The Coded Treasure GameCreate a story where your main character, a teenage amateur coder, receives strange, coded messages on their computer. As they begin to decode the…
- The Diary at the CampsiteTwo teenagers camping in the deep woods stumble upon an old, abandoned campsite with items scattered everywhere, but no signs of the former campers.…
- Messages in the MuseumWhile working a summer job at a local museum, a group of teenagers stumbles upon a series of hidden messages scrawled in ancient languages on some of…
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