Futures Writing Prompts

A creative writing prompt built to provoke the futures imagining of teachers and learners. You draw a Time, a Subject, a Mood, and an Object, then write toward the opening: “The future is… You are… You are feeling… You focus your attention upon…”

The draw is deliberately chancy. Because no one chooses their own combination, the writing tends to land somewhere the writer would not have gone deliberately — which is the point. The prompt has been used in a futures-literacies creative writing workshop adapted for teacher educators at UBC and for learners in the Maskwâcis Cultural College open microlearning series.

There are two decks. The first is painted as tarot — birds, moons, roots, zodiacs — and asks for a Time, a Subject, a Mood and an Object. The second is gentler, made for younger writers: robots in meadows, clocks growing moss, and simpler questions — when you are, who you are, how you feel, what you are looking at. Both deal the same way, and both open onto a page to write on.

The adult deck also drives Rewriting the Future, where a short questionnaire gives you a futures archetype before you draw.