The Brother in Ward Four
Write a story from the perspective of a nurse in a makeshift WW1 hospital. She receives a patient who turns out to be her estranged brother, believed to have died years before the war. Explore their reunion among the chaos and how the war has changed them.
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.
- Write it as a letter that took weeks to arrive.
- End with a choice that history would never record.
- Let your character believe something about their world that turned out to be wrong.
Writing historical fiction
Step into another time and feel what it was like.
Historical fiction is set in the past, usually at least 50 years before it was written. Real events and people often appear, but the story belongs to its characters. Readers come for the immersion: the smells, the rules, the dangers of a world that's gone.
What readers expect
- A vivid, well-researched setting
- Real events as backdrop or engine
- Characters shaped by their era
- Details that feel lived, not looked up
A tip before you start
Research deeply, show lightly. One telling detail in a scene beats a paragraph of facts.
More World War 1 Historical Fiction prompts
- The Pigeon's Wartime FlightWrite a story from the perspective of a carrier pigeon tasked with delivering critical messages between troops during the heart of a World War 1…
- The Poet Across EuropeAfter the war, a former soldier turned poet travels across Europe to find the locations where he lost his comrades. With each place, he writes a poem…
- The Soldier in the BarnThe main character is a young child who finds a lost soldier in their barn. Explore the friendship that develops between them and how it changes the…
- Letters Across the WarCraft a tale around two siblings who enlist together, only to be separated by their assignments. Communicate their story through letters they write to…
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