time travel short story prompts

10 Ideas for a Time Travel Story

Here are 10 quick ideas for a time travel story, including everything from colonies in the distant past and future, to time traveling Jews, Jesus, and jealous husbands.

If one of these ideas inspires you to create a time travel story of your own, let us know and we’ll share it with out community!

1. Future War

A future dictator invades the past. He sends giant war machines into 19th Century London, Paris and Washington, and he demands that all world leaders surrender to him. It’s up to a team of time traveling heroes to stop him.

2. As Time Goes By

A scientist discovers that he can slow down time in a localized area. He can use this to visit the future (and stop off anywhere along the way), but he can never go back. At first, he uses the device to prolong his own life, spending a day inside the time-bubble as a month passes outside. Later, curiosity compels him to travel into the distant future in search of new wonders and a fresh start.

Our protagonist finds a future world full of wonders, and he begins to build a new life for himself. But when things start to go wrong, he finds himself traveling forward yet again. Eventually, the urge to travel forward becomes irresistible as he searches for perfection. Is he really searching for something, or just running from his own past?

As our traveler comes to the end of his life he realizes that, while he has seen more than most people, he hasn’t really lived at all. He’s spent his whole life running.

3. Doing Time

Using a time machine, a penal colony is established in Earths distant future – a future in which humanity is extinct and the sun is approaching the end of its natural life-cycle. When the end finally comes, do the guards evacuate the prisoners or leave them to their fate?

4. The Man You Used To Be

After his wife leaves him, a scientist travels back in time to be with her again. He’s determined to get it right the second time around, and thinks he knows what to do to keep her happy. But when he travels into the past he comes across an obstacle he hadn’t counted on – the past version of himself.

SEE ALSO: Travelling in time but NOT space

Desperate to be with his wife again, he plots to do the unthinkable – he plans to murder his past self and take his place.

There are two obvious ways in which this story could end, each equally as ironic. 1) He kills his former self and is happily reunited with his wife, but after spending one perfect day together the time paradox begins to kick in and he vanishes into oblivion. 2) He kills his former self, but his wife recognizes that he is not the man he used to be. Because of what he’s been through and what he’s done, he’s changed, and his wife can see it in his eyes. She leaves him again.

5. Future Tense

Fearing the extinction of humanity is on the horizon, a large group of humans travel into Earths distant future to avoid the catastrophe. They arrive in a time in which the Earth has recovered from the disaster, and in which all traces of human civilization have disappeared. Many animal species have evolved beyond recognition. In this new wilderness, they attempt to build a home.

Knowing that the end of human civilization is near, people are desperate to travel to the future colony. With a limited number of places available, people fight for the last remaining passes. Eventually, the future colony finds itself with too many mouths to feed.

6. Past Participants

With the destruction of Earth imminent, humanity begins colonizing the distant past. The colonization effort slowly begins to interfere with the timeline. Each group of colonists that arrives from the future has experienced a different version of history, with increasingly interesting results.

One group of time travel colonists is from a fascist timeline in which the Nazis won the Second World War, and they try to take over the colony. Another group reports having found the remains of the colony during a future archaeological dig, indicating that the colonization effort will eventually fail.

7. Populating Zion

A team of scientists rescue Jews from Nazi extermination camps by transporting them forward in time just before the moment of their deaths. Nazis are confounded when they open the doors to gas chambers and find that their victims have mysteriously vanished. In the future, thousands of rescued Jews struggle to understand what has happened to them, and they begin to hail the lead scientist as their Messiah.

8. Time Me Up, Time Me Down

After inventing a time machine, a scientist travels into his own future where he meets his beautiful future wife. Back in his own time, he meets his future wife for the first time (for her at least), but she isn’t interested in him. He tries his hardest to impress her but fails. How can this be when they are meant to be together?

Determined to win her heart, he travels back to their first meeting over and over again, trying something different each time. He even visits her past in an attempt to learn more about her, but nothing works. Becoming increasingly obsessed, he eventually resorts to kidnapping her. He takes her forward in time to show her their future life, but his actions have drastically changed the timeline.

9. Final Interview

A time travel agency sends a man to interview famous historic figures just hours before they die. The interviews are not only important to historians, they have also become a form of popular entertainment. After interviewing countless historic figures over a long and distinguished career, our protagonist has become something of a celebrity himself. One day, a younger man arrives at his home insisting that he be allowed to interview the protagonist. The protagonist realizes that the younger man is his future replacement, and that he himself is soon to die.

(Thanks to  Jorgen Lundman for this idea, the full version of which can be read here )

10. Jesus vs The Time Police

The technology needed for time travel exists, but it has been outlawed by most of the world’s governments. A special police unit or federal agency uses specialist equipment to track down illegal time travelers and prevent them from damaging the timeline.

Some of the time travelers are attempting to alter their own past for personal gain, others are rich tourists seeking a thrilling but illegal encounter with the past. One day, however, they track down a time traveler who has managed to evade them for several years. He has been living in the past for all this time, and he claims to have become an important historical figure. Doing a little research, they determine his claims to be true. The time traveler has had a profound effect on the timeline, and undoing his actions might have profoundly negative consequences. He has written himself into history – a history that the time-police have always accepted to be true.

The illegal time traveler might be a famous general, monarch, or president. He might even be a religious figure, such as Jesus (as such, he may not have had an entirely positive effect on history, but a profound one nonetheless). If the illegal time-traveler is Jesus, might his ascension to heaven actually be his forced return to his own time, staged by the time-police?The time-police are faced with a dilemma – set the timeline straight and undo his actions without knowing what the result might be, or allow him to continue living in the past.

This article was written by Mark Ball . With thanks to Jorgen Lundman.

Use our Random Story Idea Generator for inspiration for more stories.

Not Your Usual Time Travel Story Ideas (2024)

Looking for unusual time travel story ideas and writing prompts? You’ve come to the right place!

Read on for ideas like a world where time flows differently in different regions, a person with an ability to travel in their dreams, and more!

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• S tory ideas

Picture prompts

The time travel trope.

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Related posts: Tragic Love Story Ideas (2023) The Most Enticing Forbidden Love Story Ideas (Updated in 2023) 40+ Sad Backstory Ideas for Your Character (2023) 17+ Enticing Soulmate Story Ideas (2023)

Time Travel Story Ideas & Writing Prompts

Time travel has long been a captivating concept in storytelling, transporting us to narratives of endless possibilities. Now, let’s explore some unique and unconventional story ideas!

Please note that the genders in these prompts and story ideas are just placeholders and do not mean to enforce any hurtful stereotypes nor offend anyone.

Story ideas

From unexpected time travelers to unconventional methods of traversing through time, embark on a thrilling, time-bending adventure with these exciting ideas.

• Lost Time A group of explorers stumbles upon an alien-made, time-traveling elevator that can transport them to different moments within their own lifetime, at the cost of reduced longevity.
• Reversed A scientist makes a mistake in their time travel machine, which sends them spiraling into an alternate reality where time operates in reverse.
• Past and Future Memories In a post apocalyptic world, a person finds that they can jump into the past as well as potential future memories of others. Then, they navigate through different people’s experiences in the hope of finding a way to undo the effect of the apocalypse.
• Time is Money In a world where time flows differently in different regions, a society formed where time travelers exist and time itself can be a commodity. (Originally appeared in my post The Most Mesmerizing Fantasy World Ideas (2023) )
• Chronicler of Lost History A person wakes up every day in a different time period, with no control over when or where they’ll end up next. As they try to find out why, they realize that their purpose is to witness and document crucial moments in history that have been erased from collective memory.
• Time-Traveling Detective In a time when time travel is possible, a time-traveling detective agency specializes in solving crimes and incidents that occur across different points in time.
• Network of Selves There’s a new invention that allows people to split their consciousness into multiple timelines, creating a network of parallel selves.
• Tour Across Time Time travel is a regulated industry, and a tour guide accidentally takes a group of tourists to a time period that never existed, causing a ripple effect that alters the course of history.
• Time-Traveling Companion There’s a peculiar type of animals that have the innate ability to traverse time. Once they form a unique bond with a human, the bond will allow that human to time travel along with said animal.

• The Time Capsule After unearthing a long-forgotten time capsule, a tight-knit group of friends is transported back to their younger selves. (A similar concept appeared in my post Beyond the Mundane: Captivating Slice of Life Story Ideas (2023) )
• The Time Thief A physicist accidentally creates a device that allows them to move between parallel universes. They exploit this power to commit crimes across dimensions, staying one step ahead of authorities.
• The Reversed Time Traveler A time traveler’s machine malfunctions, causing them to experience life in reverse. Frustrated by their reversed existence, they seek to disrupt the flow of time itself.
• Cheering Through Time An alien with the ability to explore different time periods gets stranded on earth and befriends a cheerleader. But as the two jump between time periods, they unwittingly start a chain of event that might spell catastrophe for both of their home planets.
• Happy Days Specific emotional triggers can create a quantum leap, launching individuals through time to a moment in the past or future when a similar emotional event occurred.

Here are some time travel picture prompts, because a picture speaks a thousand words! What kind of time travel prompt or story jumps out at you when looking at the picture prompts below?

The concept of time travel has fascinated storytellers for generations, offering endless possibilities and narrative intrigue, allowing writers to explore the complexities of cause and effect, challenge the boundaries of linear time, and delve into the profound impact of altering the past or glimpsing into the future.

In time travel stories, protagonists often find themselves in paradoxes and moral dilemmas as they attempt to correct past mistakes, change the course of history, or prevent catastrophic events where the smallest alteration can have far-reaching repercussions.

Time travel narratives also provide a fertile ground for exploring themes of identity, self-discovery, and the relentless march of time, prompting characters and readers alike to ponder the nature of free will and the fragility of existence.

If you need more story ideas and prompts, please browse our Story Ideas & Writing Prompts category!

Have any question or feedback? Feel free to contact me here . Until next time!

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1158 Writing Prompts About Time Machines

March 24, 2021

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Have you ever wondered at least once in your life how it would feel like to have a time machine that would allow you to travel back in time to correct past mistakes or go to the future to see how your present decisions would affect the future? If your answer is ‘yes,’ maybe you should consider writing a story about it to satisfy your curiosity.

Enter writing prompts about time machines.

Below are some storyline suggestions and plot ideas that would allow you to write stories about time machines and time travel that would work for any genre, including sci-fi, adventure, historical fiction, and fantasy. May they inspire you to create short stories and novels.

• You use your time machine to go back in time and kill Hitler.
• You accidentally open a wormhole and find yourself back in the Middle Ages.
• You travel along a relative’s family tree to discover something unpleasant about your past.
• A sudden power surge transports you 400 thousand years in the future.
• A time traveler with the same machine as you asks to see the future, but in order to do that you must both target the exact same place at the exact same time.
• You develop a time machine but can’t find the main power button.
• When your time machine arrives, the city is enveloped in a black mist.
• You use a malfunctioning time machine to try to save someone you don’t like, only to find yourself doomed.
• You’re the first human to govern outer space.
• You discover a small vial of glowing fluid and a note stating that it can deliver anyone from a fixed point in time to another point in time relative to their own current position.
• By the power of God, your time machine crashes in prehistoric times and you are stranded there. After months, you encounter one of the creatures…
• You send your time machine to the future, and it explodes when it reaches its destination.
• You parallel park your time machine in a space that is much too small.
• An astronaut arrives from the future with a time machine. He shows you some things that may or may not happen.
• The past shows you a previously unknown superhero from the future who’ll be the next savior of mankind.
• You can’t stop yourself from using the time machine.
• While seated at breakfast, a time traveler sits down, telling you stories about the future.
• You strangle a loved one to death in the past to prevent a terrible future.
• A woman from the past shows up asking if you know the date and you do. Then she explains that people from the future made her travel back in time to ask you this question.
• Your grandchild hears you have a time machine and asks if you can travel to the moon to see if there is life there back in the ’70s before NASA sent a probe.
• A time traveler appears in front of you, takes you for a ride in his time machine and asks you to go to eight years in the past.
• You enter an uninhabited city with dozens of buildings in ruins. You wonder when it happened and what caused it.
• You travel back in time to meet an ancestor you previously only knew by name or reputation.
• You discover that changing something in the past makes your present and future different.
• In the future, fresh water can be purchased, but it is illegal to drink water from the tap.
• You want to travel in time to visit a specific person or event.
• Your future self tries talking you out of doing something, but you ignore your future self.
• Someone claims they visited you in the future with a time machine and that the events they described are taking place in your present.
• You travel off the end of the world and back again transforming your planet in multiple ways.
• You meet yourself in the past and stop yourself from doing something crazy.
• You accidentally travel back in time and ruin your own birth or your own death.
• You witness your favorite crime take place. You send yourself back in time to stop it.
• A person from the future appears before you in a time travel suit.
• But what writing prompt would be complete without an interactive presentation?
• You travel a million years in the future and return to find the whole planet has been ripped apart by the sun.
• You journey back in time and witness the death of your own mother.
• The time machine gets broken beyond repair. What did you do?
• You see into the past and find out your life is about to take a turn for the worst.
• Your final time travel expedition before retirement.
• It is 2064 and you have invented a time machine capable of going back fifty years in time. What have you been doing for the last fifty years that allowed you to build the time machine?
• You meet yourself in the past using your time machine.
• A small boy from the future steps into a time machine asking for his past life.
• Your time machine erupts in flames.
• A scientist steals your time machine and hides on top of Mount Everest.
• Someone steals your time machine. Possibly to go back in time and give you a nicer model.
• A dying homeless person asks you to take him 50 years in the future with your time machine. The drug addict is so charming you contemplate sparing his life, just to see what will happen. Or maybe you could help him recover. Or would it be better to help him now? If you bring him forward in time would he become cured automatically?
• You build a time machine to learn how grandma will react when you tell her your relationship.
• You are playing cards with Adolf Hitler and accuse him of cheating.
• What is your favorite thing about time travel? Remember that there are no bad answers to this– you just want to write right now!
• You visit yourself growing up through time with your time machine.
• You take your date to the future, but somehow end up back in prehistoric times.
• You accidentally visit and alter the past. A different version of you comes along with you and gives you sound advice that – with your original time machine – prevents the history disaster from happening.
• You’re on an island where everyone has a time machine, and yet refuses to use it on moral grounds.
• Someone you love time travels.
• Your time machine closes and then opens again a minute later, erasing a decade of your life. How do you survive?
• You plant your time machine into the back garden so your distant relative could use it to go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby.
• You find the vision you have just experienced a year ago to be true.
• You decide to fix the future by backtracking to the beginning of time and making sure the Big Bang never happened.
• You’re able to correct a fatal mistake before it happened. But when you return, what is the correction you don’t do that makes the fatal mistake be there anyway?
• You find yourself in the Stone Age and you use your time machine to make yourself his great leader.
• You travel back to a time where you have already been and see yourself doing something you’ve never done before.
• A person is inspecting your time machine and is just about to touch it when you beckon them not to.
• What good is traveling through time to visit prehistoric dinosaurs.
• Your biggest competitor is working on a time machine very similar to yours.
• Your last chance to see your dying grandfather in the hospital is in the past, when he was alive and well.
• You accidentally kill yourself with your own time machine and there’s no way to prevent it.
• All attempts at designing a time machine have failed, until your invention worked. What are your feelings on accomplishing a goal no one else could? A) Excited B) Angry C) Scared D) All of the above So, we designed the time machine correctly and built it. Now we’re going to send a person into the past… Who should be the first? How does he react to seeing yourself without knowing who it is? In the middle of a heist, you realize your temporally-oriented watch is working again. What would you do with your chance to do it over? Another inventor and you begin to have a rivalry. What steps can you take against her/him? Your logical time machine reveals that paradoxes are a basis for your universe. Will you continue to use your time machine or try another one? You travel to the future and see that from 2150 to 21505, humanity began to haven the universe until we encountered a powerful adversary. We lost
• You get the idea to use a time machine to overthrow your boss.
• A time traveller arrives in your time and claims he owns every book in a library you spent your life years building.
• You travel back in time to do something evil to yourself in the past and it all backfires.
• What historical event occurs three hundred years into the future?
• An inventor is working on their latest invention. It looks like a normal box but is much too small to fit any living thing inside. What does the inventor claim will happen when they turn it on?
• You’re been critically injured by a time traveler.
• You’re the only survivor after an atomic holocaust.
• Your time machine’s history shows you an identical machine knocking over the water cooler and spilling it all over your briefcase. What did you do differently?
• You’re being pursued by a killer, and take refuge in the time machine.
• A thick fog descends as you approach the spot where you left your time machine.
• You find a way to travel back into the past.
• You find a new use for your time machine.
• A dwarf appears in your time machine saying he is from a parallel universe. He says that his universe runs on a day length that’s half of your days. You adjust your machine so that you can time travel to his universe. What happens?
• The professor you write reports for is working on time machine technology. If you can’t tell him who you are, what do you do about it?
• Describe a weird thing that happened when you were traveling through time.
• You receive a message from the year 5023. What is it?
• What did you do with your time machine at first?
• You find out time travel is real and set off on an adventure to visit historic events.
• You travel to the beginning of time and observe the Big Bang with your time machine.
• You create a time machine so powerful that you create two of yourself. Two inventors. Where do you meet? What do you do?
• You encounter yourself out of the blue. You remember he’s trying to kill you, so you fight him. Who won your first fist fight with yourself and why?
• The movie Time Cop showed what a bad idea it is to mess with the timeline. Now, what would happen if you REALLY messed with the timeline?
• You are kidnapped by your doubles from the future.
• Earth is populated by colonies of time travellers constantly travelling back in time to change the course of history.
• A scientist tells you that you will never invent the time machine and he will never live to invent the time machine.
• While traveling back in time, you encounter yourself.
• You use your time machine to fix a mistake you made in the past.
• An unmanned time machine crashes into your home.
• You discover chimpanzees are the true but hidden masters of humanity.
• You discover you’re a character in a futuristic video game.
• You don’t know how you managed to survive for this long in the year…
• A time traveler approaches you on how to make time machines.
• You find a time machine but you can’t use it – you have to convince someone to use it for you.
• After you’ve traveled into the future a year, the world you observe seems to be stable. But in future year two, nuclear armageddon occurs. You go to your past year one self and tell them to warn their future selves to evacuate the world. But it wouldn’t work because now you yourself are the problem with the time travel.
• You design the perfect murder using your time machine to dispose of the evidence.
• A man who claims to be your father from the future warns you that you must prevent your family from getting in trouble with the mob.
• Someone tries to mess with the time-space continuum and sends you on a wild ride through time.
• You time travel to ancient Egypt where you help Joseph make the pyramids. You’ve studied Egyptian history all your life – how could you help Joseph?
• You travel back in time and accidentally kill your father when he was a little boy.
• You watch Abraham Lincoln give his famous Gettysburg address. How do you convince him that it is important?
• A magical genie appears and gifts you with a time machine. Upon activation the genie promises to appear each year on your birthday and grant you a single wish. The wish cannot involve the time machine.
• Write a story about yourself being given the power of time travel.
• When the time is right, you decide to go back and kill your own grandfather before he can conceive your mother.
• At the end of mankind, robots from the future come and transport humans to the far future.
• If your Kickstarter project is successfully funded, you have indicated you will send a personal time machine to backers who give a certain amount. Will the time machine be designed like a box? Why or why not? If so, can you share your design with us?
• The inventor of the time machine dies before he can reveal the secret of how to actually make it function. It’s in his head. The thought of a paradox makes your head hurt! Never mind.
• A time traveller from the future tells you how to become filthy rich.
• An alternative time line splits off when you decide whether to make cookies or brownies.
• You are arrested for sabotaging your own time machine, providing a one-way ticket to the past.
• You have the chance to go back in time and make either of your parents famous jazz musicians. Which one do you make famous? Who do you marry? What do you do?
• Your time machine requires one more fix before it’s finished. While days turn into weeks, months and even years, you’re still tinkering with it. What keeps you motivated to build it?
• A time traveller comes to you and predicts the past saying that everything is going to be alright.
• You see an advanced race who have developed a pocket sized time machine!
• Your path to the future is blocked by an increasingly steep hill. You climb it, unaware that it is no hill – it is a descending path and you will meet yourself at the bottom.
• A person arrives from the future and warns you not to return to 2003.
• A group of historians want to take a tour of the ancient savage world with your time machine.
• You invite a friend along on your time machine. Both of you pick dates in the future to return to.
• Try writing one or two paragraphs using the prompts.
• A perfect crime has occurred in another country. Using your time machine, you go back in time and stop the crime before it happens.
• You’re reading a book about time travel and turn to a page randomly and read the last few words.
• Corporal Matthews is driving around in his tank when it suddenly materialises in the middle of a World War One battlefield. How does he react?
• You use your time machine to give King Philip IV of France an unshaven face.
• You spend more time in the past than the present.
• You arrive in the future and find a society clone-based around a genocide you  perpetrated against a minority.
• You travel back in time and prevent yourself.
• You’ve secretly decided to manipulate things that happened in the past.
• The time machine repairs itself and launches you into The International Space Station.
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• You find a way to return to the past and tell yourself to avoid being arrested.
• You have the chance to travel to any point in your past.
• Imagine that you’ve built the first time machine. What mischief do you get up to after that? Write a story inspired by it.
• You find out you were actually allied with an evil dictator, whom you topple.
• You’re a dailiness reporter in Buenos Aires and you witness Hitler taking the bunker. He asks for your name and tells you to go back to tomorrow, when you’ll find a letter to you.
• Go on the moon with Neil Armstrong using your time machine.
• You claim to be an alien from the future.
• You’ve built a time machine but realize that someone has stolen the instruction manual.
• You’re late for work, and nothing can get you there in time.
• You’ve managed to travel back in time. In your quest to change history, you find a family photo of Adolf Hitler.
• A wormhole splits a town in half.
• You’ve only been married for three years but have been separated for another thirty. What was life like?
• The world is ending in a week and you’re kidnapped and told to stop a time traveller.
• You find yourself in the last time a specific event occurred, such as an apocalypse.
• You are tasked by the President of the United States to build the first ever time machine.
• You’ve never heard of “groundhog day” until you meet yourself in the future and learn about it.
• You accidentally step on a butterfly, and sends the earth off course, ultimately creating the apocalypse.
• You visit the time of Jesus, but have a hard time because He sees you as an angel.
• You are taken into the time machine. What would you say to the designer to improve it?
• Somewhere in the pit of your stomach, you feel something stir at the sight of your time machine rusting in the corner, ready to be used again.
• You meet a time traveler from a planet identical to Earth.
• You wake up from a magical coma centuries in the future.
• It’s Star Wars, but instead of the Force you–
• You use your time machine to make tons of money before returning to the present.
• Your time machine has malfunctioned and now your world is stuck in a new permanent dark age. What do you do?
• Using your time machine, you race ahead of important events or people and write eyewitness accounts of very important events.
• You arrive at a crossroads in time, where versions of yourself seem to be playing out opposite versions of your life.
• You travel to the future and discover that the human race has been wiped out.
• Everything is bleak and dark in the future world.
• A girl comes up to you and tells you she’s actually just travelled from the past to talk with you, then adds…
• You use your time machine to set up a sports betting operation in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon.
• You attempt to shove your annoying friend into the past, but accidentally send him to the future.
• How far into the future will you visit yourself? How will you react when you see yourself?
• A stranger drops by with a time machine similar to yours and says they are you from the future.
• You are abducted by aliens. They leave you on present Earth and let you keep your time machine.
• You’ve always dreamed of entering a time machine, and finally you win the lottery and you can buy one.
• A brilliant scientist says he can prove parallel universes exist.
• As you move through time, you notice you look different each day. Yesterday you were blond, today you’re Asian.
• You’re visited by your future self as a child.
• You discover that time travel is not a fluke of your invention but has been around for a while. Your inventor friends bet you a million dollars you don’t go back and kill their baby selves.
• Your future self reveals that time travel is actually removing your soul and popping it into your destination. Your future self also reveals that the only way to use this process is to kill yourself, which right now he is in the process of doing…
• A spooky person in a costume approaches you saying he knows that you created being the first time machine and goes on to make an Oprah-like self-help statement.
• You come back from your time machine to find your sister has become President of the United States. The weather and the rest of the world remains the same.
• You go back in time to take Napoleon’s place and save France.
• A professor wants you to invent a time machine so that she can see her son again.
• On your way to the bank, your time machine is broken by a monkey.
• You blackmail a time traveler that you are planning to publish his past in your blog.
• You create a device to travel forward through time just an hour. When you return, everything is different.
• The time machine you invented leaps into the past. But it’s been stolen by another inventor.
• While being chased by time police, you accidentally run through a time chrono-inversion.
• A baby is born and an old man dies simultaneously. Decide who is lucky and who is cursed.
• You meet your older self. He tells you a secret about the family that you didn’t realize until decades later.
• Wherever you go in time, the most influential person is always Henry Ford.
• Your time machine malfunctions and throws you back in time into an unknown world.
• While traveling through time, you lose all your stuff and have a chance encounter with the only alien ever to live on earth.
• A child who seems familiar to you follows you to your time machine.
• You hear a knock on the door one night and open it to find yourself there.
• Someone steals your time machine and takes it back a decade but doesn’t return.
• There exist time machines in the future but you suspect the alien invasion and so you go to the future and kill Hitler.
• Time travelling is not as easy as you once thought when you found yourself in ancient London where the Great Fire is occuring.
• Someone betrays you and erases your memories and your time machine.
• Using the time machine, you travel to the nearest possible future or the nearest possible past.
• You think your daughter might grow up to be a murderer. You’re going to make sure of it.
• You are monitoring a black hole to prevent its collapse. As you observe, it consumes your time machine. You must now decide what you want to do next.
• You’ve cracked the designs for the first time machine when you meet a stranger who wants to buy it.
• You attempt to travel back in time to kill God but you travel back to the beginning of time instead.
• Your time machine breaks down in the primeval forest of the Middle Ages.
• An agent from the future approaches you. Says the world will never be the same again.
• You help the time machine inventor you are working for with the first time machine. But she might not have your best interests in mind.
• You travel back to Armageddon and stop the apocalypse. You realize however that the universe is borderline rational and the apocalypse is actually a bingo tournament.
• Your time machine starts working and you get messages telling you to change your past.
• You use your time machine to travel back to the Stone Age.
• You travel back in time to your tenth birthday only to find out that you are yet to be born.
• You get trapped in a time loop again and again.
• Your brother invents a time machine. You steal it and ditch him in the past.
• You accidentally kill the wife of your past self while using the time machine.
• Your life is unfulfilled. In your time machine, you visit yourself in the past
• An alien with superior technology offers to send you back in time.
• You visit an alternate universe where everything is upside down and you need to escape.
• You somehow enter the time stream and return back to the moment when you were born.
• While time traveling you pursue a Neanderthal man going the opposite direction, and are mortally wounded.
• Find a frying pan, a banana, a sledge hammer and a spider.
• The person you defeat in a battle travels back in time to kill your ancestors.
• In the unimaginably distant future, humans create a time machine and through it discover that alien life has been visiting Earth for centuries.
• You find a time machine in Ancient Egypt and are the first ever time traveller.
• Clanking into the stables, you see a very old machine. Realising it is your original invention, you start to hear voices from inside the room …
• You visit future America using your time machine.
• You discover a remote cabin that is a tunnel to the stars.
• When you travel back in time you watch yourself living the week you just left
• You travel into the future to confront the villain who wronged you in the present.
• You use your time machine to force your very worst enemy to undergo a horrible transformation.
• You’re allowed to bring a single item of tech from the future or past.
• In ancient New York you meet a time traveler who has come back to warn you of a disaster that not even he can escape.
• You travel to the future and find that humanity has finally died off from a nuclear holocaust. The only being left is a clump of blue self-replicating goo in the middle of Australia.
• You design a time machine that only works in the day or the night and there is a switch over an hour during the transition. If you miss the switch you go to the wrong time period. What happens when you get a late start going home?
• Clinging to the side of a comet centuries away from Earth, you wonder if Earth as you knew it is still there.
• A man sat in the corner of a café is revealing to his friend that he has access to travel through time, but can only go to the future and is suggesting his friend make use of his services.
• The machine is designed with no safeguards. The last one you send away through it never returns.
• Suddenly, you get the opportunity to stop yourself from making the biggest mistake of your life.
• Newly-weds experience marital problems when the husband goes back in time and sleeps with the bride at her own wedding.
• You visit a time before humanity. All that you’ll ever do has already been done.
• A time-travel researcher tells you his project is being shut down by shadowy figures.
• You are arrested for stealing the Declaration of Independence, but you’re able to prove you did it with a time machine, and you’re set free.
• A man without a past murders you with a time machine and continues to murder you repeatedly in the past in random locations until he has a past.
• The Zombie Apocalypse is taking place in your time. You have a time machine and could spend the rest of your life hiding, however the government has control of your time machine and says you must help stop the zombie apocalypse. Do you do it?
• You build an army of time machines and conquer the earth.
• What is your time machine of choice?
• A deep regret starts troubling your mind to the extent where you want to erase it by traveling to the past. You know, however, that your very own self is responsible for the regret. How would you deal with it?
• The age of the dinosaur is peaceful. What does your newly discovered, peaceful existence make you think about.
• Writing prompt for time travel
• You go back to the future and miss your appointment with your own past self.
• You use your time machine to travel back in time and kill Hitler.
• You get a glimpse of how life a thousand years into the future looks.
• By using the time machine you realize that you have won the lottery by traveling back in time and buying your winning ticket.
• You find a time machine in a workshop.  After trying it out for yourself, you decide to tell your ancestors about it.
• A group of time travellers accost you. They want to borrow your time machine.
• You meet someone in the past with a time machine.
• You’re given the option to fix any problem with time. What are you going to do?
• A mysterious time traveler comes to you saying he teases time.
• Your time travels were successful, and human civilization went on well despite all the negative prophecies.
• A Time Traveller walks into your bedroom and scares the living daylights out of you.
• You’re a decorated soldier who has been sent to stay in the future for your company.
• After a night of debauchery, you wake up in the future.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you into the Mesozoic era.
• You bump into yourself from the future with your time machine.
• You enter your time machine and emerge again at the same place but just a year ago.
• You find an abandoned time machine in your garage.
• You step into your time machine as it’s nearing a critical singularity.
• What would you like to see in the future?
• After borrowing a time machine, you drop in on yourself on the other side of the world after you’re famous. What do you say to yourself ?
• Your boss requires you to prove the time machine actually works.
• Each day, every hour, someone is killed by a time machine. The authorities catch the culprit and you are needed to testify in court. Who is guilty?
• You visit the time of Jesus Christ and meet a side of him no one’s ever heard about before.
• You accidentally hit the “return home” button in your time machine which leaves you stranded in the past.
• You meet a man from the future who steals your time machine to travel backwards in time to 2023. When he does this, he takes away your access to a cure for your favorite dog of cancer. Worse yet, you steal the time machine to go to 2023 and find he got there first and imprisoned you in a subway to get away with the time machine and his crimes.
• A time traveller from the future tells you that you are doomed and that he can only accelerate the time when you will meet your end.
• A newspaper article is printed declaring you, the inventor of the time machine, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
• You’re the first person in the history of humanity to travel more than 10 years back in time. What do you do?
• You travel into the past to see the birth of your first pet.
• You are given a time machine by your future self. He tells you that you can raise a kid that will save the world. As a child, you make a terrible mistake, something that ruins your adult life. Using your time machine, you make the change so that the terrible thing never happens. But after making the change, you find that everything changed back.
• A criminal pursued by the police hides in your time machine.
• You get stuck in time with the ability to just pop back to the present when convenient. Time goes by really fast.
• During a time travel experiment you arrive in the middle of the road and accidentally force an oncoming vehicle swerve and rollover on top of a highway divider.
• While flying your time machine to see the dinosaurs, you fall back to the age of the dinosaurs’ reign.
• You find yourself in prehistoric times.
• You appear in a time where time machines are common and they already have mastered quantum physics.
• You take in a wrong turn in the time machine and wake up to realize the future is bleak.
• You see a flying car and kidnap the inventor.
• A woman appears in a flash of light, crying out that you are destined to save the future, and that time travel must never exist after you invent it.
• A love affair with a time traveler sends your life into a downward spiral from which you never recover.
• Butterfly effect. A butterfly causes you to step into the future with your time machine.
• A director is filming a time travel movie and wants you on set to give him some pointers about time travel.
• Travelling through time, you find yourself witnessing your own funeral.
• Your brother has met a good poker player ten years his senior, but then he breaks the heart of the girl living across the street. If he didn’t break her heart, she would have won the lottery.
• You’re stuck in the Dawn of Man era. A member of your tribe who just read “The Singularity is Near” and feels invincible due to the exponential increase in intelligence and strength of humankind comes and trashes your time machine.
• A time traveler visits you and warns you not to build a time machine.
• Your friend tells you that he has a time machine. You visit him from the past just to see for yourself, but there’s no mechanical impossibility that prevents him from referring to his time machine if he explains how it works. Your friend has no reason to lie. Still, you just can’t figure out time machines.
• You take your own tape recorder with you and ask famous people of the future to record their answers.
• You are approached by a man claiming to be a time-traveling Roman.
• You travel to the past and abduct your younger self.
• You add a “past” button to your time machine, but it overshoots and instead it takes you to the future.
• Your wife is dying of cancer in the present but you can save her with a time machine from the future. Meanwhile, you’re forty pounds too heavy, while your wife is a trim model.
• You build a time machine and travel forward a day in your calendar and the world has ended.
• Localized time paradoxes make time travel into specific time periods impossible.
• You go back in time and save yourself from an earlier accident.
• You’re thrown off your time machine by a no-good time bandit, causing you to land at random.
• You accidentally take 10 minutes instead of 7 minutes and find yourself another person.
• You pick up key structural elements from the Roman Empire and recreate them to design your time machine.
• Two versions of you use your time machine to meet each other, and you are in a position to gather some important information, but your younger version doesn’t know that you’re from the future. What do you do?
• Your time machine runs out of juice, forcing you to recharge it somehow.
• You are trapped in a time loop.
• You visit yourself in the past with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you find yourself stuck in the Middle Ages. How do you manage to survive?
• Your best friend just graduated. You borrow their time machine to travel back in time to tell them to major in something else.
• Your time machine’s power runs out in the middle of a crucial football game.
• You are torn between going back in time to save a loved one from death and going forward to see how the rest of your life will progress.
• Your time machine wipes your memory and you have to find a “time traveller” savvy enough to help you get back.
• You travel a billion years into the future and meet a god.
• A scientist invents a time machine and appears to disappear. The police question you to see if you are responsible for messing with the time-space continuum.
• A letter falls out of your drawer. It’s addressed to you by yourself from the future and contains advice or information.
• You have to stop a killer who knows your secrets, and who also has a time machine.
• Your time machine lands on top of a very tall building.
• A time traveler from the future confronts you and gives you two tasks.
• You discover writing from a mysterious woman who claims to be from the future.
• Describe a time machine disguised as something not expected.
• Your friend wipes their memory using your time machine.
• The first time machine tour guide is eaten whole by a bookshark.
• You and your kids partake in a major altercation over your time machine usage.
• What is time would be like to a tortoise and infinitely long, containing everything possible.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the distant past. You have to fend for yourself.
• You meet yourself in the past with your time machine.
• It is your loved one’s birthday anniversary.
• After building a time machine, you visit yourself on Friday. Friday acts like everything is everyday, even something as drastic as the transportation of matter from the past into the present. Do you tell him?
• A malfunctioning time machine appears to have sent someone from the future into a prehistoric age.
• Two men show up in a time machine, both claiming to have invented it.
• All the components of the first time machine you were developing disappeared in the middle of the night. Only a letter left behind instructs you to give up inventing, and is signed by yourself.
• The writing prompts in this article are just enough to get your creative juices going. But don’t stop there. Take out your journal, grab your pen, and wait for inspiration to strike.
• You win the lottery using a foreseeing device.
• Your uncle, a wealthy businessman, steals the time machine.
• The world ceases to exist. You use your time machine to set into motion events that will alter the past, therefore creating a new future for yourself.
• You build an abusive time machine that traps and tortures anyone stupid enough to use it. Who do you suggest first?
• You discover a time machine on the other side of the universe.
• A scientist in ancient Egypt transfers the soul of the pharaoh into a wooden puppet to save his life.
• You leap through time accidentally and lose the ability to return home.
• Your time machine accidentally creates a time paradox and a second time machine falls out of the sky emitting a loud “BANG”.
• You go back in time and arrive immediately after the Big Bang, allowing you to alter the Universe.
• The government has invented time travel and appointed you commander of a time army.
• You meet your parents when they were in their mid-twenties, and they start asking you questions about who you’re dating in high school, and you accidentally tell them that you’re gay, and the universe changes.
• You are thrown back in time and climb into bed next to your young parents.
• You run into yourself with your time machine. Explain.
• The time machine is used for divorce proceedings.
• You work together with your future-self in a project. You encounter a time paradox, and together, you have to solve it.
• Another time traveler steals a major piece of information from the future and threatens to change the course of history. Now you have to chase him down and retrieve the missing data.
• You set the time machine to return to your Birth Time by mistake and end up there as a baby.
• A pigeon steals your time machine and takes a trip into the past.
• Along your travels you’re confronted by a time-traveler from your future.
• You discover a way to travel back in time to kill Hitler.
• You find yourself in the same place again and again in time.
• You’re trapped in a house where you can see yourself outside through a window.
• A kaiju appears and starts destroying cities in your time after slowing down time.
• When you flee into your time machine, it transports you a few seconds back in time.
• You have a time machine, but decide that going into the future would be no fun with only one head — you could only imagine what would happen if your nose grew — so you went back in time. When you arrive at your house, a young lady tells you that she will marry you in fifty years. Will she still be single?
• You discover your time machine is the last machine on Earth.
• A strange traveller invites you to a feast and entertainment in his time machine.
• You’re flying home over the Pacific, when all of a sudden your jet’s engines cease to function. Panic sets in until you spot a gigantic floor fan a few kilometers away. You float over to it and get blown safely to shore.
• You join a resistance with a time machine and go back in time to stop the powerful.
• A bearded figure approaches you saying he comes from the future and tells a story of a vampire with huge fangs haunting you in the future.
• You achieve enough power to build a time machine. The first thing you do is…
• Your girlfriend is using the time machine to neglect her responsibilities on Earth. You’re angry, confront her about it, and she says you were the same way when you were with her.
• You’re visited by yourself from the past using your own time machine.
• The Scientist can always do one nice thing for the Hero when she has exhausted her Loyalty/Heroism/Sanity tokens.
• Your time machine is stolen and used by a madman. You had your mission to fulfill.
• You send a book back in time for yourself to read when the events in it take place.
• The cargo the government wants you to bring back is the memories of a woman who has committed suicide.
• You just won the lottery but used the money to buy a time machine. How will you use it?
• You accidentally destroy your time machine, only to discover you’ve already built a new one.
• You are given the opportunity to speak to a famous historical figure from centuries ago with the help of your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and puts you into the past instead of the future. Do you try to fix it or simply stay in the past?
• A wizard claims to have sent a message into the time stream to avert some disastrous event in the future. Is he telling the truth?
• You accidentally wind up in the past, right before your 16 th birthday.
• Your happily married, 60-years-young grandparents invite you to their place. They live isolated from the rest of the city in an old dilapidated building overlooking their sprawling garden.
• You end up as chopped liver.
• You try to go back in time to save a friend’s life. But strangely, that friend never existed.
• You discover another time machine and decide to steal it.
• One day you have a philosophical debate with Einstein about time travel.
• You attempt to change the past but discover that doing so is futile.
• You visit a parallel universe.
• You use the time machine to steal pretty things from the time you just arrived in.
• You plan to steal a treasure from a museum in the 1930s but you are distracted and return without the treasure or the time machine.
• You take your time machine out for a joy-ride and end up seriously injuring yourself.
• Your time machine causes you to run over your own self days ago.
• You stumble on a time machine part during your vacation.
• You save someone’s life, but the time ripple effect kicks in, causing your new found friend to become handicapped.
• The ghost of your great-great etc. grandmother visits you with a task to perform.
• In the 19th century, you encountered yourself from earlier that morning in a verdant part of the Amazon River basin. You catch a pig which your younger self is squealing after, for your morning breakfast.
• The clock is devoted to telling the correct time.
• You find a time machine in a pile of junk and take it home.
• You’re trying to get your pet chimp into the past to make him human.
• You visit yourself in the past before the birth of yourself.
• Your family hires a thief who claims that he can engineer a time machine.
• Your time machine breaks and you are stranded outside the present day.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the future.
• You bring yourself back to the past as a baby in an attempt to win the lottery with your newfound wealth.
• You find that your girlfriend from the future is now your ex, and you’re crushed.
• An old tramp from the 1800s tells you that he is your grandfather.
• Your time machine can only physically exist at one place at one time. It can only move through time when it is not occupying space. Where do you choose for the machine to be tethered to?
• In ancient Rome, you are captured by the emperor and made to fight against gladiators for survival.
• An old friend tells you this is the first time you two met.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you land in the distant past in ancient Egypt.
• After losing the election and feeling extremely depressed, you visit a future where the revolution has succeeded and there’s a tramp sitting on the throne and…
• After traveling into the distant future you are attacked by a spaceship from a rival time traveler on your way home. How do you find it?
• A time traveller from the future tells you he is invading Earth at present.
• You travel back to the past and give some experience to your younger you for the future.
• You’ve had a good run of it so far since designing your time machine — all gold, all the time. What happens the first time you use it and it gives you an unexpected bounce?
• You live in a society where it is a crime to use time machines.
• Your time travels attract too much attention.
• You build a time machine that only allows you to visit the same location and time twice. For instance, if you were in Paris in 1968 you can return the same time in 1968 to Paris. What do you do with this advanced technology?
• Write a story opening with a character using a time machine to try and correct a mistake. You know they can’t succeed.
• You meet yourself in the future.
• A scientist declares the impossibility of time travel, but he and his colleagues go ahead and build one anyway. What happens?
• Undo your wrongdoings
• Your mother-in-law/uncle-in-law/yourself asks to take your time machine for a spin.
• You vanish for half an hour and when you return, there is a zombie apocalypse.
• Things didn’t just change in the future, they changed more than anyone expected. You had a tendency to speak your mind to everyone, and got thrown into jail.
• We’ve smashed graphene into dust.  Worst is yet to come.  Write about it.
• An intelligence sends you a cryptic message from the future, which you can’t decipher.
• An inconsiderate kid dings your helmet with a toy laser gun and now you can’t see out of your time machine.
• You can never be sure that a piece of technology is truly intelligent. Or maybe you believe that inanimate objects can be sentient.  Write a short story about a  smartphone, or perhaps a  car  that explores its own  consciousness   or experiences an awakening .
• You specifically made a time machine to counter terrible things that were to happen in the future.
• You travel back in time and gather seeds of now extinct plants.
• Your story ends in one hundred words or less.
• Using your time machine, you travel to a place in the past. While there you meet two little angels on your shoulders and two little devils on your hips. How else did things change besides those four and your physical appearance while you were in that time? What if angels looked like tiny devils and vice versa? What if you can’t decide between good and evil? An angel and a devil aren’t exactly helpful as they’re constantly in your mind.
• You find a time machine and steal it, taking it back to your era.
• Your time machine malfunctions and suddenly you take several left turns within warped time and space.
• A friend takes the time machine to go back in time and win the lottery.
• You step inside your time machine and vanish. The only way to get back to where you need to be is to retrace your steps.
• A machine is invented that can reduce wash time from two hours to ten minutes.
• You travel to the future and your machine is destroyed. You must survive in this new world.
• You take an experimental time machine to a job interview and hope for the best.
• A criminal jumps into your time machine and disappears. You just know he’ll appear in the distant past where he’ll destroy evidence against him. He could already be back to his own time. Or, perhaps, he’s traveling around time killing you at intervals.
• There exists a society in the future which consists of the smartest people from throughout history.
• You decide to kill your arch rival when travelling in time.
• Future tells you about life changing technology.
• You pretend to be God with your time machine.
• Your dog, acting as a time machine, takes you on a trip to the Moon.
• The god of life, Yor, hates everyone you know and has sent you back in time to ensure that no one for whom you care is born. You have one year to find their ancestors and change their names to remove them from notice.
• A secret organization appears to be trying to destroy your time machine before you can fix it again.
• You use your time machine to exact revenge on a neighbor.
• You are able to time travel and create a duplicate of yourself.
• A time traveler arrives out of nowhere and shocks you by saying he’s already met you..in the future.
• You suspect the time machine will betray you, but with some modifications you convince it to take you back to the age of mammoths.
• Someone gives you a rare item from a time not yet witnessed. You collect it, what would it be?
• You gave yourself advice in the past. And then regret it.
• You travel back to the time of your parents’ high school prom.
• You stay in the past too long and instead of heading home to the future your matter degrades into a pile of dust.
• The Earth ran out of coffee and you must find a new solar system with this time machine.
• You become lost in time and find yourself in the very distant future.
• You claim to have designed the first ever time machine. A man stands in front of you, asking how you built it.
• You invent a time machine with your friends, and are looking for ideas on where to go.
• You get stuck in the past due to unexpected time machine failure and drop a message as a time capsule for future generations.
• A time traveler visits you and tells you to do everything you do except today.
• A time traveler who’s stuck in the past decides to sire a son and give him the time machine into your hands.
• Zombies are attacking people and only your time machine can get them to safety.
• Your time machine malfunctions while on a field trip with 30 of your students.
• The whole town is quarantined following a sloppy test of a new chemical that grants eternal life because all of the people turn into their Halloween costumes.
• The first time you visit your future home, you find it as a smoldering ruin. People you know are helping with the construction of additional buildings. When you see yourself carrying a large stack of lumber on your shoulder, you realize how you are responsible for the end of the world.
• You can only take one object with you if you are abandoning your home due to nuclear fallout. What is that object?
• Using the time machine, you travel back and prevent your house from being burned down.
• Your favourite goal of travel in the future with your time machine is to see other versions of yourself. Have you tried it? Are you comfortable with that?
• You visit Mars in the 24th century and have a good conversation with a robot from that time.
• Time detectives torture you to find out about your time machine.
• You find a note telling you to never use the time machine and to destroy it.
• A message sent from the future arrives just in front of you.
• You inadvertently landed in the time of King Arthur, but you were unlucky and ended up in a battle between King Arthur and some unruly knight.
• You are put in prison for murder. The judge gives you time travel as your sentence.
• You use your time machine to locate a missing person and save them.
• Do time machines work backwards in time? To answer this question, advance your time machine into the past and see if you can reach its entrance.
• You construct a time machine that allows you to change small details that are part of your life, but not your journey. You must decide whether you will do this or not.
• You get too close to a black hole and end up witnessing the big bang.
• Someone from the future reveals himself to you and announces that he is your greatest fan.
• You don’t die.  You only dream of dying.
• You land in a field you recognize as your own. You return to your time.
• Your family is present in a portrait from centuries before.   You feel a sense of dread at the foreboding.
• Your brother brings home a disturbing book from his school, and he may be thinking of living as an anarchist.
• You use your time machine to exact cruel revenge on a certain authoritarian figure from the past…
• Part 1. Your memory is erased every night when you sleep, and eventually-
• Your wife accepts a dinner invitation from Hitler. You suspect she’s going to sleep with him, and you think it’s your duty to kill Hitler, but you’re unaware of any means of preventing your wife from following through with the plans.
• People in the future are using skins of animals as if they were human clothing. What’s your first reaction?
• You need to travel back in time to eliminate a younger version of yourself before you can be born.
• You’ve been given the honour of piloting the first ever manned mission to the closest star. What do you say to the time machine driver?
• An alternative version of yourself travels in time to warn you about the end of the world.
• Much to your horror, you see your kids acting as vampires and drinking your blood when you go back in time.
• A time machine appears before you. It is tempting but you recognize it as a trap and throw away the key.
• A time traveler from the distant future complains to you about the direction of the present day to help him complete some books he’s been writing.
• You are given the entire future to be filled with whatever you’d like to do.
• Your time machine stops, but you don’t know how to figure out why.
• Your time machine slowly begins vibrating.
• A friend builds their own time machine. Their first thought is to go back in time and kill Hitler.
• A time machine is found on a desert island. What’s inside it?
• You travel to the past but find yourself unable to return as your time machine does not work anymore.
• Your future and past selves meet.
• What if the ancient Mayans didn’t miss the deadline to stop building their dam of suns and asteroids ended up pulverizing their civilization?
• You meet your ancestors from the past with your time machine.
• Visiting the future, you find people attached to giant machines that keep them alive indefinitely.
• You travel to look at dinosaurs in the past.
• You always wanted to work as a shopkeeper in the days before credit cards. But your time machine has malfunctioned and thrown you back into the past. How will you survive?
• You order a ride with a time machine company.
• You send your neighbor Sonic the Hedgehog back in time to be eaten by a Tyrannosaurus rex.
• A pornographic movie is made in the future with the technology from your time machine.
• A disturbing figure demands the time machine and takes it away.
• Your father invents a time machine, which he never finished, and you’ve been working all week to build it. At 11pm on the 11th day, you finally finish it. You turn it on and a blinding white light surrounds you. Before you know it, you feel intense nausea and feel like you’re falling over but you’re still standing. You fall to your knees and everything goes black.
• Your time machine malfunctions again, this time sending you sixteen years into the future. Reflect on this.
• You find yourself lying on a hospitable planet next to a time lodged robot.
• You visit a parallel universe where everyone is living the opposite of your existence.
• You are trapped on a desert island. You have a time machine.
• The universe runs on a finite clock of time.
• You have the chance to interview great political figures like Hitler or Gandhi but you have the added ability to travel back in time to watch them at work. What do you do?
• Your psychic ability gets out of control and you see the future -and it’s not good.
• You accidentally travel through time and witness your own funeral.
• You realize the time machine breaks a fundamental law of physics.
• You go to a costume party dressed as a time traveler. After you have arrived home, you realize that you came dressed as someone who was alive in the 1800’s. Explain how this could have happened.
• You find a mysterious clock marked with golden numbers. It seems to govern the flow of time.
• Access the Dark Future Through Time Travel Plot Line Generator
• You’ve died and been reincarnated through time. You don’t wear the glove in this life though.
• You are working on a time machine and decide to take a break with a cup of coffee. You return to find your friends have become ants.
• You want to prove time travel works, so you take the time machine on a test run…where are you going?
• A strange girl with a curved ear beamed into your living room coming from an alternate time. She gives you a cryptic message.
• The latest trend in technological advances includes transporters that can take you back in time to place you exactly where you were seven seconds ago. A mishap occurs during your seventh trip.
• You can say anything you want to a young you.
• You have the chance to kill Hitler as a baby with the time machine, but minors cannot go back.
• You build a time machine that always fails you.
• You travel back in time and stop yourself from inventing the time machine. So now you never invented it. Uh-oh!
• A farmer who hates machines claims he once saw a time machine.
• Your time machine is malfunctioning. During your visit to the past you discover you have saved Hitler. What do you do?
• What would you do if your time machine gave you a warning that the country will experience a catastrophic event? Hope you enjoy/find this free list of time machine writing prompts useful!
• You find a time machine.
• You meet your future self when you have just acquired the time machine.
• You are absolutely amazed to see your own biography on sale in a futuristic bookstore.
• Your time traveling partner is kidnapped with a time machine that is stolen from you. Go into the past in your own time machine and rescue him/her.
• You approach a black hole and find a time machine that you use to escape before your ship is destroyed.
• Somebody wants to buy the patent for your time machine.
• You travel back in time and see what your life was like before you were born.
• You go back to the past to discover the origin of your favourite game, but realize it didn’t originate with you.
• You mess up the past by accidentally bringing a butterfly into the present…
• You invent a time machine and use it to go back in time dozens of years to tell your father the exact lottery numbers for him to save a bunch of money. But one number he refuses to reveal is the secret code for launching World War III through Bluetooth devices.
• You find a time machine, whose location is unknown to you, but you suspect that it belongs to someone you know.
• Two copies of you are made from different futures with time machines.
• You join a time traveling race and can only move forward in time.
• You discover the secret origin of time travel and attempt to change history to make the world a better place.
• Time-traveling villain tells you the world will be destroyed after he kills your friends.
• You use your own time machine to change history.
• You witness a future war and you’re changed forever by it.
• What is the strangest thing you can imagine is hiding in the UFO that crash- lands on your roof?
• You are told that clones of yourself automatically appear in other lifetimes once you die. How do you react?
• You bring a book about time travel with itself stuffed inside.
• You create a time machine that brings you back to the time of your childhood.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you vanish from the future, you reappear in the past.
• An eccentric gentleman makes an explosive offer to build you a time machine if you’re willing to pay the price.
• You go into the past for revenge. You find the one who wronged you. But instead of killing him, you use your time machine to digitally record and forward the exact moment he wronged you to thousands of other people, causing them all to wrong you equally in the same way. Are you satisfied with how you dealt with it?
• You’re having dinner with your favorite celebrity in their time machine.
• Three men in black suits approach you saying they’ve seen you around town and they want to talk.
• Your great-great-grand-daughter gives you a tip that turns you into a successful person.
• A boy from the past arrives in your present using his time machine. You try to help him find his way home, so you can go to the future.
• Your son is sent years into the future because of nobody’s fault.
• A person appears from a distant era stating they need your help to avert a disaster.
• Your time machine is destroyed and the universe is collapsing so you have to rely on wormhole technology to escape but this accelerates time – the world is now like it was many years in the future.
• The inventor of the time machine is not a quantum physics expert, but an expert in transportation.
• A strange room appears from within your time machine.
• You are revealed to have been the only man on Earth at one time in the future.
• You travel back in time and find yourself on the battlefield of Gettysburg – the American Revolution.
• You arrive in the past and taught primitive man how to talk and perform acts of kindness.
• The one particular day of your life ends up being constantly repeated. You decide to go back in time and stop the one specific incident from happening.
• Your time machine malfunctions and places you in the wrong time and place.
• Paranoid, you only go forward in time and when you see what the world will look like, you decide not to go through with time travel at all.
• You think you’ve seen Hitler’s greatest secret, so you’re about to go back in time to stop him.
• You freeze your dead dog and toss it in a machine that digitizes it, uploading the data to a computer in the future in order to reanimate it.
• An Amazonian tribe recruits you to fight off enemies with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you to the Middle Ages.
• A future version of yourself uses a time machine to travel to the past to meet his younger self.
• You travel back in time using a computer wormhole. A female version of you shows up and asks you on a date.
• The ability to travel in time inspires a new form of entertainment called the killing-spree industry.
• You witness yourself from the past use your time machine. Describe the moment.
• You’re visited by your future self. Present day you describe something to the future you that once happened today. Future you doesn’t believe you.
• You begin to tell your friends and family what a great writer you are.
• A young woman is being chased by her angry ex. Your time machine is the only place of refuge.
• You create another time machine so you can stay in a romantic relationship with a person from the future.
• The universe is about to explode, and you have a time machine. There’s a way to fix the impending annihilation of the universe, but you require too many pieces of a very rare material which will be completely destroyed in the destruction of the universe. Luckily, you have a time machine.
• The characters travel back in time a few days to stop a gunman from shooting President McKinley.
• You think you’ve made a huge discovery when you find an advanced civilisation in the past.
• Machines from the future started hunting humans and they are almost completely wiped out, except for you and 1 million others. The future reveals that there were 2 evil versions of you, which was the reason behind the machines hunting you down. You have the option to choose which of the 2 versions of you will live. What do you do?
• While traveling with your time machine, you look into the night sky and see a constellation that hasn’t been formed yet.
• Someone steals your time machine.
• Your time machine lands in a purgatory inhabited by creatures that love humans.
• A paranoid inventor of a device that controls the weather starts World War 3.
• Having found a better time machine you visit the future of the time machine maker.
• There’s a man on the street corner yelling at people. He tells you that you must go back to your own time or else risk setting in motion an apocalyptic chain of events.
• A voice from your time machine says to you “Remember that the time machine is your friend!”
• You use your time machine to commit a murder that goes unsolved.
• You invent a time machine and later realize an evil dictator has constructed one as well. And he plans to use yours to travel back in time and change history. What do you do?
• Your time machine malfunctions and you visit an alternate reality instead.
• You challenge your alternate-self to mortal-combat in the arena of time.
• After discovering a time machine, you travel back in time to tell yourself something that isn’t so random.
• You plan to bring someone back from the past as a souvenir as a joke, but they change everything and almost cause disaster.
• A machine on your desk malfunctions and you’re flung back in time with a chance to prevent all the horrible things that’s been happening to you lately. Everything else is the same except for one small detail. Who do you hug the moment before you go back in time and what was about to happen the next moment?
• In a modern country, Neanderthals have survived.
• A lowly future version of you appears out of nowhere and warns you that if you do not change your current course of action that the world will come to a horrible end.
• You’re informed by the government that your time machine is a security threat and decide to hide it in an impregnable location – and you haven’t gotten it back ever since.
• You go back in time to prevent your great, great, great, great grandfather’s murder
• Your time machine transports you to the same place over and over until you stop it.
• The three of you begin arguing about existence and end up destroying yourselves and your time machine forever.
• While visiting the past, you are prevented from returning to the future by some future familiar to you covering the time machine.
• You decide to become a time traveling law enforcement officer.
• You reveal to the public the existence of time travel.
• Your time machine malfunctions and sends you back to a pivotal time in history.
• Your future self is a lot different than what you imagined.
• A time travelling stranger gives you advice that changes your life and allows you to benefit from it in the present.
• While on another planet you come across a giant cave filled with artifacts. A pedestal on the far side is handing a vial containing a dark green liquid.
• You’ve armed your time machine with a newspaper that predicts the outcome of the great war.
• Your time machine malfunctions and throws you directly into your own childhood, before you have a doubt of what the future is like or imagined you would create the time machine.
• You worship an entity known as Time. All your technological advances flow from this belief.
• You discover an enigmatic time wand on the beach. Presumably bought by tourists in ancient times.
• You travel back in time to the day your parents were born.
• There is a contest to see the most interesting person in the universe, and the winner goes to the moon.
• A time-traveler from the 22nd century tells you a disturbing tale.
• You were dead all the time. You just didn’t remember. But remember at the end when you wanted to take a look at yourself so you used a time machine only to look at yourself when you were dead in the present.
• A savant that you’re visiting tells you that you shouldn’t have been born.
• A meteorite devastatingly knocks you and your time machine off course, before landing in prehistoric times.
• Your time machine crashes, and its inner mechanisms are revealed.
• You travel into the future but your time machine malfunctions and sends you to a different century than you a…
• You crash into the west gate of ancient Rome on the day that Titus unites it. What is the result of you introducing yourself to the people?
• The time machine needs to be regularly recharged with a special potion invented by you.
• A lone traveller arrives in your time and says he’s from the much distant future, asking for food and shelter.
• Your dog travels to the far future with your time machine, which is now ineffective.
• In an attempt to go back and change the past something goes wrong and brings you face to face with yourself.
• You visit a future where time travel doesn’t exist, yet you are still alive.
• You design a time machine capable of taking you into the future instead of the past.
• You are living your life again and again.
• Werewolves.
• You’re standing at the end of a platform waiting for a train, when a time machine whisks you off for a quick visit in the past.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the past, just after the dinosaurs became extinct.
• After travelling to the future, you stay there for a year and return to your original timeline. How does the world differ?
• Your two best friends discover your time machine and use it to sabotage your projects in life. A rich madman offers to help you in your work. You only find out later that he intends to use you to take over the world. A better looking, richer guy offers to help you deploy your time machine. Turns out what he wants to do is use it for his own social engineering projects.
• An elderly man walks into your time machine office.
• Would the past and the future ever meet?
• You explore the future as an old man.
• You decide to visit your future self. What do you do there?
• This time machine has a few suspicious features which you’ve never noticed before. You walk over to it and . . .
• One of your friends has a time machine. It malfunctions and sends you back in time. What happens?
• A mad man with a torch opens the lid of the time machine where you and your son are. What do you do?
• You find that you cannot see the future as it is happening as easily as you thought.
• The laws of physics completely break down and the flow of time ceases to exist.
• You’re on your way to a job interview and your time machine breaks down in the present.
• The enigmatic figure you collided with comes from the future to ask you a question.
• People have discovered how to travel back in time and undo the events of the Second World War. That means you must disappear from the face of the Earth. How do you do so? Your visit to 2016 prompted you to start a student revolution.
• You kill your past self with your time machine, hoping to shape your destiny.
• Once you return from the past, and you look around where you live. It has changed…if only a little.
• You travel back in time before you were born. You must stop yourself from being conceived.
• What do you say to yourself when you meet yourself in the future?
• With your time machine, you go back in time and do something to prevent a tragedy.
• You travel back in time to witness the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
• You’re engaged in a dicey battle with a mad scientist. Your time machine malfunctions.
• Your time machine malfunctions while on a trip to Paris.
• What would you say to your future self when he sees you?
• A sci-fi “tech noir” game inspired by film noir, smog, and Blade Runner…
• You attempt to modify a time machine, hoping to find a way to return to the past.
• You are sent back to the stone age, your time machine is destroyed and you must find a way to go home.
• The same prompt is posted in four different places scattered about the house, each written in a different hand. Given no knowledge of the others, how do you spot the fifth?
• You find a perfectly working time machine and go back in time to give yourself advice.
• You discover an alien machine that looks like a time machine.
• You ask yourself to lend you a book, but your future self never responds and you never see the book again.
• Returning to the present with a lot of sweat and tired muscles, you’re greeted by your friends. “I’ve spent time in the future”, you say.
• A time traveler approaches you and asks to borrow your time machine.
• Your time machine just landed.
• You ask someone from the past for a light.
• An old woman pleads for you to turn up at her great-granddaughter’s birthday party.
• You attempt to travel back in time to the era of pirates to explore their treasures, but you end up in jail instead when you’re mistaken for a stowaway.
• You’re trekking and you discover a puddle of a gooey substance, you set off a time machine in the past and it arrives with a man who is calling himself a god.
• Your pet has been taught how to use a time machine.
• You become lost from your time machine and can’t find your way back home.
• Buy the entire Time Machine Story Bundle!
• You wish you were smart enough to invent a time machine.
• A tragic accident occurs and you only have 10 minutes to decide how to react.
• Someone is murdered, but you found a time machine to arrive on the crime scene three minutes before the murder occurs. You find yourself immediately confessing to the crime, even though the victim is still alive! Explain why so in the comments section.
• Lightning strikes the time machine momentarily giving you superpowers.
• What did you say to your past self?
• You’re part of a time machine tourism agency and you pick up two groups of famous people.
• You’re plagued by your jealous friend who travels to the past to alter your history.
• You’ve investigated some disturbances in time and need to ask your future self just one question to give you a nudge in the right direction.
• You go back in time and see what would have happened were your parents to elope.
• Time travelers observe your humble offering in the desert.
• You use your time machine to “visit” the afterlife.
• Delaware is hit by a nuclear bomb targeting Foggy Bottom in 1986 but you and your friends survive because your time machine had you surfing on your backyard pool.
• You travel back in time and take over the life of your great grandfather before he met your great grandmother.
• You use a time machine to save a person from committing suicide.
• Your time machine malfunctions, and you are sent back to World War I.
• According to multiverse theory there are an infinite amount of copies of you travelling through time. One day you meet one who is a detective running around with a gun trying to catch the crook.
• Inherited your great-great-grandfather’s time machine.
• The holy book tells you that the most important task of man is to perfect time machines. With the first time machine built, the chronoknights arrive from the 21st century.
• You land a time machine on your wedding day. Your future self tells you that you picked the wrong suit.
• The world is on the brink of total annihilation and only you have a time machine that can save humanity.
• Upon landing, you wake up in bed. It is the next day.
• An impossible time paradox rears its perplexing head and makes you question your own existence.
• Captain Picard and the Enterprise encountered time nexus points in the The Next Generation episode “Remember Me”.
• You decide to introduce the concept of the time machine to society. You do, and then everything changes.
• Someone from the future takes your time machine and sends you far in the past.
• You’ve found another time machine. Describe how you show it off to your friends.
• Adventure game design frequently revolves around avoiding death. The game could feature a serious subject line or a tongue in cheek title. Games recently released or popular with the Quest studio are listed below along with a few of us from the Quest team who could possibly run/lead a game. If you sign up and someone from Quest leads or runs your game, you will also receive a coupon for a $5 discount off any future Quest games.
• Every part of the time machine malfunctions and then breaks after just a single use.
• You’re supposed to go to a party but decide to hit a baseball instead.
• While wearing your time machine, you bump into a friend you went to high school with and have to convince them that it’s still you. Tell us how that went down.
• You find a time machine. How do you feel?
• You’re in a writing slump and pick up a book about time travel. It seems to have the answers you’re looking for, but to write your own ending, you must follow the rules of the book.
• You go back in time and stop a tragic life event that was about to happen.
• One day you wake up to your alarm and find that even when you look at the clock it’s broken.
• You find a time machine belonging to your schoolmate. She never knew it would belong to her.
• You’re in charge of the time machine department of a big corporation and you think you’re about to be replaced by a more junior employee.
• You and your friend take your time machines to the test track. What if everything isn’t quite as you thought?
• You learn that tomorrow will be the last day of your life. Tomorrow. What do you do?
• You meet Shakespeare.
• You’re the only person left in town because everyone else was killed in a time machine experiment gone wrong.
• Your family desperately needs money in order to keep the house, but due to unfortunate circumstances, you cannot make any more money.
• You, and all of your ancestors are seated in your living room after you purchased your first time machine.
• Your time machine traps you in the past.
• Someone’s taken your time machine from you and is playing pranks on your family and friends.
• What if your time machine changed the world as you knew it, and can never be used again? What did you see?
• You’re hurriedly trying to put together the pieces of a time machine when suddenly, a 10-foot-tall cock speaking in backwards sentences appears.
• You travel back in time and meet your one great great grandfather.
• Make one dream or nightmare come true with your time machine.
• King Arthur’s time machine was reportedly recovered from the peat bogs and is on display today.
• Supersonic jets are invented in your 30’s, ushering a new age of travel and intercontinental entertainment.
• You’re trapped in a timeless escapism reality and you must escape.
• Your father accidentally tampers with history, creating havoc.
• Your sister comes over for tea and tells you a story about how the two of you, when younger, would drive your parents crazy by fighting for control of the time machine.
• You accidentally travel back in time and change something, altering your future.
• Until the Whale Comes Inker Productions presents …
• Tomorrow you are going on holiday to the past. How do you convince your boss that this is a wonderful investment, besides of course for the fact that it’s your duty to the company to get the much needed experience.
• You steal one of the time machine parts from your former friend who claimed ownership of the time machine.
• People are chasing you and you run into a time machine and escape.
• Your dog has been run over. You build a time machine to go back in time to save Fido.
• You meet yourself in the future and regret the mistakes you made in the past.
• Time goes backwards while you are using your time machine.
• You get into an argument with yourself from the past future.
• Suddenly, the world’s most benevolent dictator comes to power while you are in your time machine. What’s your next move?
• After that you want to ask some specific questions.
• You want to know the cause of your future world but the future you are scared to tell you.
• You are approached by a maniac suffering from amnesia who insists he comes from the past.
• A strange metal object falls from the sky. When you touch it, it transports you into an unrecognizable land.
• Your time machine, on a non-specific spring night, takes you to the future on your birthday the day before you plan to celebrate.
• You travel back in time to meet your parents as teenagers.
• You’re racing a motorcycle to New York from LA, while your loved one is in labor.
• Someone asks you about time travel and you explain your point of view on the subject.
• You’re given the opportunity to travel back in time to your first big break.
• Your future self gives you advice that betters your life.
• A time machine is stolen from you and you must chase after the culprit.
• A time-traveler from the future appears to you and asks for help in saving the world.
• The future where you come from is a horrible dystopia ruled by mutant abominations.
• When you visit yourself you do so as a mouse living under the stairs.
• You ran over a beautiful antelope. You effortlessly summon forth your time machine to go back in time and replace the antelope with a live one.
• You’ve had a time machine all of your adult life. There’s one glaring evil you could have done to change history as we know it.
• Using this time machine, you can perform altruistic duties, like saving a loved one’s life.
• You come across a photo showing yourself in a familiar but future place.
• Global warming has changed everything.
• You can bring one article of clothing with you into the future. What do you choose?
• You are given a mission by an enigmatic wizard. He says only a sentient time machine will be able to do it.
• Your team raises enough money to develop a time machine and have it manufactured. The first thing you do with it is to time travel to Ancient Greece and conquer the cradle of civilization. When asked why you want to do this you reply that, “All will be answered in time.”
• Someone steals your time machine, dipping into all sorts of mischief while you’re trying to get it back.
• You visit the future expecting a good time. What happens instead?
• You are trapped in a room with no doors or windows with  one person and a time machine. Your best friend/killer/killer. Two of the buttons on the time machine are ‘go back 50 years’ and ‘go forward 10 years’. You can’t go back in time further than around 1949 or go further ahead in time than September 22nd of the year you are born in. Your only hope is to turn your friend/killer/killer into your slave. What do you do?
• You’ve been asked to stop time-travellers from ganging up on your time machine and destroying it.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into the Viking age. You communicate with the locals by writing.
• You see a modern sewer tunnel morphs into a tunnel from the past.
• Aunt May is visiting and accidentally steps on your time machine which sends her to the beginning of the universe.
• After using your time machine you realise you now know something no one else does.
• A time traveller appears out of nowhere telling you of your secret origin before disappearing again.
• You have the power to either go back in time or forward. You can’t use the same power twice in a row, so pick wisely.
• You meet a mysterious time traveling inventor who offers to tell you their secrets, but it may have consequences for your present day.
• “The Time Machine” still ranks as one of the greatest science fiction novels. What’s your opinion?
• You tricked your grandfather into stepping into your time machine and now regrets it.
• You’ve aged one hundred years and no longer remember what you named your time machine.
• You travel to the Stone Age but you aren’t able to build a fire and end up as a human meal.
• You enlist the help of Albert Einstein to help devise a time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you end up five billion years in the future.
• Someone visits you with their own time machine and convinces you to go back in time in your own life to kill Hitler or to invent something that will change the world.
• You discover an autonomous time machine that you didn’t build.
• Little Miss Naughty of the Year starts taunting your sex life using time travel, and gives you an ultimatum.
• A prophetic dream leads you to build a time machine, but the journey into the future shows you the doom of the world.
• The first time machine malfunctions and destroys the world. You are the only one who knows it existed. Can you and will you tell everyone?
• You’ve been fired and lost all your money. What entry-level job are you considering doing in the future?
• You use the time machine to alter the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg.
• A time machine is an impossible construct–yet someone has demonstrated the concept. Who could it be and where is it being kept?
• You encounter a Weeping Angel when using your time machine.
• You ride a time machine into the past so that your grandparents fall in love.
• You’ve been studying your great-great-grandfather’s family history. They decided to immigrate to the United States in the mid-18 century. You can travel back and bring one of them back with you. Who do you choose?
• This list of five becomes ten then 30…
• Your best friend mysteriously moves away. How do you get them to come back?
• A dog barks at your time machine while you’re setting it up.
• Your time machine breaks down and you get stuck in prehistoric times.
• An ex-girlfriend appears to you with a time machine and asks you to travel with her for a quick trip into the future.
• You time machine malfunctions and you inadvertently destroy the world. What will you do now with your time machine?
• The Earth and the solar system have been destroyed by a past version of yourself. What do you do?
• A science fiction writer from the country of your nationality visits you and says he comes from the future. Is he lying or telling the truth?
• The more years you spend in the future, the younger you get.
• A mad scientist kidnaps you, but you manage to escape with your time machine.
• You and your mentor build a time machine together, but anything you try to bring back is always incinerated by the hot time winds. However, your mentor has no problem.
• A group of people steals your time machine and visits another era with it.
• Your friends discover your time machine and decide to play some pranks on people from the past. Who do you prank?
• You become good friends with Richard Nixon.
• You’ve just got back from the future with an answer to the question that made your career a success, after all it won’t be long until it’s published. When you return you find nothing has changed – why?
• You find a sentient time machine with the ability to make alterations.
• You meet a mysterious man in a bar who says he comes from the past.
• You’re given a time machine to jump from the past to the present. What do you do?
• You take a long awaited fishing trip with a beloved relative and can’t seem to catch anything.
• Different people from different times try to understand the concept and use it.
• Someone sends you a time machine and you decide to play pranks on all your friends.
• Your time machine malfunctions and tosses you into World War II.
• Your boss tells you to choose a vacation spot today or be fired in the near future.
• You’re actually from the future – and have traveled back in time to warn yourself, even though you know you’re going to dismiss what you’re about to say.
• Your time machine has artificial intelligence which is outright malevolent.
• A co-worker discovers your time machine and wonders what he’ll do with it.
• Traveling through time becomes a fad. Do your friends or family members try to go back in time to make different decisions?
• Your time machine breaks and suddenly you’re trapped in an airport. Later, you learn your fiance is soon to marry someone else.
• Which of your ancestors will you visit next using your time machine?
• Your time machine lands you just a few minutes before the start of the Battle of Hastings.
• You wake up in your time machine travelling through time.
• You cross paths with your future self.
• A futuristic robot approaches you. He tells you his time machine has malfunctioned and wiped out humanity in the year 3303. The robot asks for your time machine to jump back in time dimension and fix the situation. You already knew the robot was trying to trick you, so you destroy the robot.
• Your deceased grandma approaches you from the past through your time machine and advises you on your life.
• You decide to clean your time machine to perfection. You are so anal about it that you end up killing the person you were supposed to save. Explain.
• You’ve developed a cure for the common cold. Along with time travel, your amazing invention could eradicate a global health concern. Could you do it?
• The timer malfunctions and you are transported back a second before the machine is activated. The situation is exactly the same, except you remember how devastating the consequences will be.
• You ask people what they were like in the past and they respond.
• You use your time machine to save yourself a long time back.
• You return through your time machine to a year before you were even born, and must decide which of your parents get to have you, and which parent abandons you.
• A tachyon signal has been found from the Age of the Dinosaurs that you accidentally travel to.
• You are trapped in a situation that will only happen in the future.
• Try to explain time travel to a 10 year old.
• You use your time machine to look up the love of your life.
• You reveal a time machine to friends and yourself step inside, never to  be seen again.
• You disobeyed the laws of time and went fifteen years back in time. What are the consequences? Your family is not rent with grief? You returned home fifteen years ago and there was no change?
• You’re given tickets for two to a Broadway show in the past. Two of you arrive, but there’s only supposed to be one.
• Your time machine harnesses dark matter, but will these butterflies unleash a terrible plague into the future?
• A Martian approaches you on a lonely road and says he could use a good time machine, like yours. What happens?
• Your time machine drops you off at a random time in history.
• Three characters meet and discover that each of them has a time machine.
• The future you saw yourself in turns out to be false after your return.
• You’re kidnapped by a mad psychopath who threatens to kill you unless you take him back to the stone age.
• You use the time machine to film a music video.
• A future self arrives in a time machine to give you advice.
• You give your future self very specific instructions.
• Your time-travelling partner retrieves something from the past. However, on returning to the present, you discover that not as long ago, you had done the same thing.
• You are a marine archaeologist. Find me a time machine!
• You land in the future where all machines are now organic.
• Travel back to the time of the Sumerians.
• Your time machine ravages the universe by transporting matter in and out causing the universe to collapse on itself.
• A bunch of marauders are after you. They crash a bunch of ships everywhere and one of those ships gets sent messages back in time to when the Mayans were building Machu Picchu. They run around Machu Picchu and you’re pissed off the brand new structure is going to get destroyed before you can see what happens. Then you get transported to the future. What’s the first thing you do?
• There is a being on Earth that was made using your DNA and they’re behind your disappearance.
• You prepare to go into the past and visit the place you grew up in. The only problem is that you…
• Your first stop on your time travel vacation is the dawn of civilization.
• The world throws a festival inviting people from different time periods to the same party for the first time. Which moment do you visit?
• You find you already settled the argument that has plagued you since high school.
• You travel back in time in order to teach yourself how to design a time machine.
• Time travel is about to completely obsolete the Internet.
• A guy from the future shows up at your door with a time machine and says you will have a child together that will be a great writing talent.
• You are visited by your future self with a time machine and warned to stop what you’re doing.
• You’ve finally figured out how time travel works. But a new paradox makes all your efforts useless.
• You cannot help laughing maniacally all of a sudden for no reason. What had happened?
• You travel all the way back to the prehistoric period and have to fight a leaping T-Rex.
• Returning from another time, you find we’re all gloriously happy.
• You inherit a time machine from your grandfather. He has one condition for you to receive it, that is never use the machine. You can’t resist and ride the machine into the past. You witness a traumatic event in your past which changes your life completely. Where to place your time machine when you live in a one-room apartment.
• You receive the mysterious invitation to visit a rich stranger in the future.
• An old beggar woman approaches you saying she is your grandmother who was flung into the future for loving a beggar man.
• Your favorite celebrity says they can invent a time machine and wants you to be a history consultant. Do you take the job?
• You accidentally witness yourself die in the future.
• You’re robbing the house of someone you hate and time-travels back to kill you before you rob them.
• You find a time machine that was abandoned in a field with a hastily written note on a nearby rock.
• You get yourself lost in a time of your past which was exactly like your present. You’re getting accustomed to living in that age. But despite being in such a vivid age, you feel like something is missing. Your phone does not work, you don’t know what a word processor is, and cars are nowhere in sight. And what’s worse is that you can’t stop thinking about your future and your family. You spend the whole day crying. What has happened? Is this some sort of paradox? Your future has been erased.
• You realize that you’ve traveled back in time and no longer have your music player or cell phone.
• Someone steps into your time machine and begins travelling wildly through time.
• You travel back in time and encounter your favorite historical figure.
• You use your time machine regularly to celebrate your birthday every year. Will you continue to do this even if you turn 1000?
• You’ve just made a hot discovery in your lab. You run out to inform your chief. At this most opportune moment, your time machine malfunctions and you vanish. What are the reflections of your chief on the mystery of your disappearance? Returning to the present to process further on your discovery, you cannot believe the change. How do you return to the past? When you’re done remember to wipe away the five minutes of writing. This kind of writing involves only simple writing in which you have to develop your attention to specific subjects. Your approach differs when you develop a new take on an existing idea and allow your thoughts run like a river. Writing prompts about material interests and desires elicit this kind of writing. By looking at the mind’s deeper, wheeling thoughts leads to rousing writing reveals a lot of your personality. It enables you to bring forth your ideas with breathtaking results for you or someone else depending on your area of interest.
• Technology from your time machine deteriorates as it ages.
• You can leave your body out to die and let it move on when you don’t need it anymore, or at least try to.
• You accidentally take yourself back in time with your time machine.
• A little child finds your time machine and gets stuck in the past.
• A time-travelling visitor tells you to bring him food and water that you somehow do not already have. What do you do?
• You and your arch nemesis are fashion time machines. You race each other into the past.
• You can go to any era, real or fictional, what do you pick and why?
• You receive a text message from your future self with a date and time. You realize this is the time you will die.
• You accidentally travel into the future before developing a time machine and can never get back to your time to recreate getting the time machine.
• We have free time travel. What do we do with it?
• Comment below and let me know how your writing session “went”.
• The only weapon that will destroy the world’s oldest man.
• You’re taking a walk when you find yourself and your time machine inside a giant interdimensional transition wormhole.
• You want to take revenge on your last unrequited love by inviting her to your wedding.
• One day you decide to take a time machine journey, but you end up with the wrong time.
• You’ve been cryogenized in the future and brought back to now for spare body parts.
• You accidentally kill yourself in your time machine.
• You have the opportunity to make a wish in front of the church where 5 black crows are perched. What will it be?
• You use your time machine to prevent your childhood accident and thus erase yourself from existence.
• A crazed traveler from a different dimension destroys a nearby town before you realize he is on a misdirected time tour to the future.
• Your girlfriend is on her way to your house and if she doesn’t find you at home she’s going to dump you. You call yourself in the future and ask your future self to stall her.
• You visit the future.
• Your grandfather offers you a chance to tell him about the future.
• The Titanic sinks and your time machine gets destroyed as a result of the collision. You are now stranded in the past where you see the Titanic crash, as you try to swim away from the sinking wreckage you hear faint coughing.
• Your time machine goes haywire, and you travel back in time, helpless until you return to the present.
• The time machine you designed turns out to be a major disappointment.
• You meet your twenty six year old clone and become jealous.
• Elemental Powers is a new superhero, the first ever to gain their powers from all the elements. What do you think about the first superhero?
• When something morally wrong happens, you use your DIY time machine to erase it.
• Your time machine makes your mom give birth to you when you were born.
• You and a really old guy with wild hair are the only two humans left alive in giant ruins of the Time Machine construction facility.
• By flying through different eras, you have found a time machine blueprint in the Age of Dinosaurs. You return to the present and share this information with the World.
• You have arrived in Pompeii moments before Mt. Vesuvius erupts.
• Mother Nature takes your time machine on an adventure through time and space.
• While you were spying on your enemies with your time machine, you had it malfunction and you were stuck in their house.
• Time travel is so common now that you take it for granted. You get frustrated with tourists who visit the past just to marvel at what’s used to be.
• You invent a charming device that instantly transports the user to any point on the globe. The device is available commercially. What happens?
• You’ve inherited a time machine that was developed by your eccentric uncle.
• You invent a time machine and start fixating on specific time periods and lose track of the present.
• Your family builds a time machine to join you in the future.
• The clock you’ve invented, freeze time.
• You challenge Doc Brown to a race in your time machine.
• You try to use your time machine to send a letter back in time.
• You discover that someone from the future has been stalking you everywhere.
• You discover yet another time machine.
• While traveling through time, you encounter a paradox and manage to screw up the whole world. What stupid thing did you do to cause this?
• You meet up with a famous inventor, have dinner together, and then, the next morning, you tell them the invention they’ll be known for came from you.
• An abused kid asks you for a ride in your time machine to visit his rich self in the future and expose all the lies told to him.
• Wonderful, now the machine’s broken and you can’t go home.
• You get transported into the past and see yourself kill your grandparents.
• You discover a time loop in the time machine you used.
• As a time travel researcher, you receive an alarming report.
• You invent a time machine and use it to steal money from your own bank account yesterday.
• Your dead friend Willis returns from the future to visit you on your birthday… as a zombie.
• Unplug your time machine to find several copies of yourself waiting to use it. The more you witness the same event, the more this world vibrates with events before your eyes and waits to be witnessed. In this world, are you the original? Do you move on from one world to the next? To what end? Time travel continues indefinitely…
• Your time machine gets stolen.
• You get stranded on the moon. You have no supplies and only the moon’s supplies to survive. What do you eat and how do you avoid getting ill?
• What do you decide to do about the people who ruined your life?
• The time patrol says that you have changed time and now they have to destroy you.
• You approach a special cabinet in the basement of a museum and open it. You are not seen, though, and you enter it…
• A friend asks to borrow your time machine to travel to the future to read tomorrow’s newspaper.
• Come up with a famous use of time travel in a novel, a movie, a TV show, or a video game, and describe how it resolves.
• How would you describe your past life to someone else.
• You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the best thing about it? You are stuck in a time capsule for fifty years. What was the worst thing about it? Time Machine fashion shows are popular. A time capsule opens. You forgot to include any clothes. What do you do?
• You find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with your time machine.
• Someone invents a time machine before you, and when you find out who it was you wish you had invented it.
• You have the opportunity to set people free from the 9 to 5 rut from the past by reviving communism. You do this by walking into the time machine and doing it manually.
• Undesirable elements from the past come back to wreak havoc in the future.
• You visit the year you were born in with your time machine. Perhaps your parents spent their first anniversary with you or perhaps it’s the day you were born.
• The spaceship you were travelling in crashes on a remote planet in the past.
• Your primary mission is now accomplished but you’ve been unconfident in accomplishing your secondary mission.
• You invent a magic wand that lets you transport anywhere in time. So where are your favorite places in time that you would visit?
• Against your better judgment you use your time machine to head back into prehistory. The trip is a complete and total failure and you end up in 1000 A.D.
• You go back in time and watch yourself fall in love with the man or woman of your dreams.
• Your girlfriend tries to get you in on a time travelling threesome with you and another version of you from the future.
• You sell your time machine to the government for a large sum of money only to be told the government has also built a time machine.
• After speaking to the future you realise you’re destined to marry your favourite celebrity.
• You tune into the secret signal for time travellers and are transported as a spy from one war to another.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you end up back in time.
• You witness the Time Traveller.
• You win a Nobel Prize for designing the first time machine.
• The detective tries to reason with the professor to no avail and threatens to have his time machine seized.
• Using time travel, you’ve corrected an old mistake you made.
• You’ve just traveled back from the future, and before you arrive in the past you drop an important item. When returning to the past, you realize that you must give the object away to yourself, in the past.
• A time-traveling serial killer is on the loose.
• You accidentally take your time machine with you and wind up in the future—the far future.
• The last person on Earth is in a deep sleep. Using your time machine, you move him to the present day.
• You have the ability to travel to any time period you choose. You have arrived at a crucial period in history and need to contact friends about something really important.
• Inventors of a time machine grow rich and famous from fortune where they become controlling tyrants.
• You overhear two acquaintances plotting to kill your self in the future.
• Your time machine malfunctions and you double wound yourself. What else goes wrong?
• You find yourself at the moment of conception.
• You are stranded in a G major universe.
• Your time machine is on the fritz and you have a party with your future self.
• You find you can travel into the past and become your ancestors. Why do you immediately think of helping yourself? Does it make you feel ashamed regardless?
• You find out you’re destined to commit murder in six days.
• You discover two unknown time portals in your city, one leads to the past, the other to the future.
• You’ve traveled through time to a future date and discover that people living in that era already have time machines and can travel through time. How do you feel about this?
• A time traveller from the future travels back and asks you for one chance to save his family.
• The future you show you in a time machine is awful in many ways but exactly how you predicted.
• You’re a time traveller. A frightened young woman on the run takes shelter in your home while her pursuers are looking for her in the wrong direction.
• You use your time machine to go back in time and catch a murderer.
• You are trapped in an empty black room with your time machine.
• Your time machine malfunctions and unleashes Skynet into the world.
• Your time machine sends you decades into the future, but when you return your machine remains where it was.
• Unable to return to your own time, you use your time machine to tour the ages.
• A beam of light from a time machine appears overhead. You realize that you are stuck.
• You’re visited by a man and woman in the future, claiming they are your kids.
• A dog tags along with you when you’re testing the time machine. 20 years later, the time machine malfunctions and returns you and the dog to the present. The dog has then aged 200 years.
• Visiting yourself in the future goes wrong, but you get to keep the time machine.
• Someone suggests you save Hitler.
• The army of the future has time machines at their disposal.
• You’re jumped by a gang and wish yourself to be in your own time machine’s storage place to retrieve a weapon so you can defend yourself.
• A time machine is built based on your design, but you’re found dead, slumped against the time machine. You are declared a martyr.
• You find a time machine on your nose.
• While in the distant past, a saber tooth tiger appears out of nowhere.
• Your pet accidentally gets sent to the future. You have to be content with a slightly evolved animal.
• The person you love ends up marrying someone else. You journey all the way back into time to stop this from happening.
• You use your time machine to track someone across alternate universes. What happens next?

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158+ ‘Time travel’ Writing Prompts

Time Travel Dilemma

You invent a time machine but it only makes one round trip. Where and when would you go and why?

Time Travel Destination

If you could time-travel to any era in history, which would it be and why?

The Time Travel Calendar

Imagine you have a calendar that can time travel to any date. What dates will you choose and why?

Adventures of the Time Traveling Carolers

Create an adventure story where a group of Christmas carolers accidentally time travel while caroling.

Christmas Journey Through Time

Detail an imaginary Christmas journey through different historical periods.

Transcendent Tyranny

Write about a villain who aims to harness time travel, potentially altering history to favor their reign.

Time-Travelling Bloodlust

In a world where time travel is possible, a vampire is chasing victims through different eras.

Time Travel Tales

Create a story about a time machine that allows you to travel anywhere in history.

Time Travel Daylight

Imagine waking up on the day of daylight saving time change and finding out you’ve traveled to a different era.

Historical Time Traveller

If you could go back in time to any historical epoch during your 7th grade history lessons, which would it be and why?

Time Travel Tourist

Imagine you can time travel to any historical event or period. Write about where you would go and what you would do.

A Way Back Into Time

Imagine your character has the ability to travel back in time to a period and place, where and when will that be and why.

Treaded Eternity

Design a story where deceased souls must time travel to atone for their sins in life before they can pass on.

Dystopian Restoration

A superhero born in a dystopian future uses their time travel abilities to prevent their world from descending into chaos.

Accentuate the Positive

Write about a time-traveller who uses his power to spread positivity by preventing negative events from happening in the past.

Grandfather Paradox

Write a story in which a time traveler meets his own grandfather back in time and their actions directly impact the present.

Dinosaur Days

Your protagonist has the ability to time travel back to the prehistoric era.

Your protagonist is part of a special task force that goes back in time to prevent crimes that have yet to happen.

Epochal Time Travel

Describe a chase scene across different periods of history as both the protagonist and antagonist can time travel.

Historic Time Travel

Write about a time-travel journey to a significant event in history.

Sands of Time

Imagine a beach bonfire that has the mystical power to show the past or future. Write a story revolving around a character who discovers this power.

Ghost Words

Construct an epistolary short story where letters from the past mysteriously appear in the present.

Journey Through Time

Imagine navigating various epochs of human history with the aid of a time machine.

Time Travel by Virtual Reality

Imagine using a virtual reality headset that can transport you to any moment in history. Which period would you choose to go to and why?

Puppeteer of the Past

Create a scenario where time travel allows individuals to alter historical events for personal gain.

The Inevitable Horizon

Imagine a future where time travel is possible and document an adventurous expedition a group of explorers undertake to witness the end of the world.

Borrowed Time

A character has found an artifact that allows them to time travel, but each trip shortens their life.

Journey to the Tomorrow

Write a suspenseful story of a time-travelling detective who prevents future crimes.

Chase through Time

Create a suspenseful cat-and-mouse chase between a relentless detective and a criminal with the ability to time travel.

Time Travel Summer Disaster

Write a funny tale of a time traveler who miscalculates and ends up in the middle of the hottest day of the year.

Time-Traveling Diary

Write a story about a diary that allows you to time travel whenever you write in it.

Caverns of Time

Write a story about a group of adventurers who find a mysterious cave that leads them back in time.

Time-Traveling Train

You’re the conductor of a steam-powered locomotive that can travel through time.

Time Turbine

Imagine a steampunk mechanism that could transport its operator through time.

The Timekeeper’s Paradox

Spin a tale about a master clockmaker who invents a time-traveling pocket watch, but everything goes awfully wrong.

Time Travel Agents

Time-traveling teens who work as secret agents to preserve the past.

Rewrite History

Choose a historical event and reimagine it with a speculative element, such as alien intervention or time travel.

Time-Travel Tourism

Imagine a future where time-traveling is just as ordinary as going on holidays.

Time Terror

Picture a teenager who finds a time machine, but every jump into the future reveals something terrifying.

Across The Time Continuum

Your story’s setting isn’t in a physical place, but across different periods of time.

The Paradox Experiment

Write about a scientist who makes a breakthrough in time travel, but creates a paradox that alters reality in unexpected ways.

Time Traveling Santa

In a world where time travel exists, Santa Claus uses this technology to deliver presents. How does he manage it?

Love Transcending Time

Write a romance story where one of the characters can time travel.

Time Travel Target

Imagine a detective with the ability to time travel who must solve the murder of their future self.

Lost in Time

Write a narrative about someone who has discovered a time machine, which only travels forward.

Sleeping Beauty and Time Travel

Sleeping Beauty wakes up not 100 years later from her own time, but in the 21st century after a scientific experiment goes wrong.

Jingle All The Way Back to Past

You are sent back in time to the filming of a classic Christmas movie. What happens, and how does it change the movie?

The ‘What If’ Scenario

Imagine if you were able to travel in time for a day. Where would you go and what would you do?

Time Travel

If you could time travel only once, would you go to the past or the future? Write about your decision and what you hope to see or do.

Back In Time Travel

If you could travel back in time, what era would you go to and why?

Time Machine Adventure

Write a story where you have the ability to time travel.

Imagine you have a time machine, describe where you would go and what you would do using new vocabulary words.

The Space-Time Anomaly

You encounter a space-time anomaly that sends you back in time upon contact. Describe the adventures you experience in the universe’s past.

Love Through the Ages

Compose a poem that traverses time, detailing a love that has lasted throughout centuries.

Images in Time

Write a poem that captures a specific moment from your past.

The Time Machine

Compose a poem about time travel, describing the era you’d love to visit most.

If you could time travel to the future, what age or era would you choose to visit, and why?

Time Machine Mix-up

In their first-ever time travel, a novice time traveller misinterprets the controls and ends up at a dinosaur-themed amusement park.

A Paradox In Time

Describe the dilemma of a time-traveler who accidentally altered the course of history.

Time-Travelling Phantom

Write about engaging in a mission with a time-travelling ghost.

Time Machine Journey

Write a story about finding a time machine and deciding to travel to a period in history.

Space-Time Slip

You accidentally find a device that transports you to different timelines. Write about your time-travel adventure.

Time Travel Mishap

Accidentally, you have landed in the wrong era due to a time machine error. Write about the wonky adventures you’d have.

The Time-Travelling Diplomat

Write a series of dispatches from a modern-day diplomat who has accidentally time-traveled back to ancient Rome.

Time Travel Tourism

You run a time-travel tourism company in the future, write about an average day in your life.

Time Travel Tour

Choose a historical period and pretend you are a tour guide for time travellers. Write a journal entry about it.

Chrono Travel Device

Write about a superhero who exploits a cutting-edge time-travel device.

Adventures with an Ancestor

Pen down the exciting adventures you could see yourself having if you traveled back in time to meet an adventurous ancestor.

Each person chooses an era, and together, write a story where characters time travel between these selected periods.

Artistic Time Travel

Choose a historical painting or sculpture. Write a fictional story about what was happening when the artwork was created.

Travel Through Time

Imagine you have a time machine. Describe a journey to a past or future era, detailing the sights, sounds, and experiences.

Musical Time Travel

Choose a period in history and create a song that would be a hit during that time.

Time-Travelling Adventures

What if you could time travel? Where would you go and what would you do?

The Tenses Time Travel

Write two short stories of the same event, one using past tense and the other using present tense.

Nightmare of the Time Traveler

Your protagonist can time travel, but every time they do, they see horrifying premonitions.

From Fiction to Fact: A Science Perspective

Choose a piece of science fiction technology or concept and discuss the feasibility in reality.

Time-Traveling to the Past

If you could time travel, describe a day in the life of your parents (or grandparents) when they were your age.

Unexpected Superpowers

Imagine waking up one day with a superpower of your choice, what would it be and how would you use it?

Journey to a Different Era

If you could travel to any time period, when would it be and why?

Fourth of July Through Time

Imagine you have the ability to time travel and attend any Fourth of July celebration in the history of America. Describe your experience.

Time Travelling Adventure

Imagine you have a time machine, write a comic strip about the different eras you visit.

The Time Travel Watch

Imagine if you invented a watch that could teleport you to any time period. Which period would you choose and why?

School Time Machine

If you had a time machine and could travel to any time in the school day, where would you go and why?

Maccabean Time Travel

Marry past and present by writing a time-travel story that involves characters from the original Hanukkah story arriving in the present day.

Tales Across Timelines

If could have a conversation with your future 25-year-old self, what would you ask or discuss?

Secret Door in the Basement

Your character discovers a hidden door in his basement which leads to a world he never knew existed.

Time Travel Love

Write a narrative involving one character traveling across time to find their destined love.

Time Travelling Musician

If you were a musician whose music could transport anyone to any time period, what songs would you play and why?

Time Travel Adventure

If you could travel back or forward in time, where would you go and what could you do?

Craft a narrative as if you’ve just arrived at an ancient version of today’s modern cities. How is it different? How is it similar? How do you feel about it?

Comic Time Travel Hypothesis

Compose a tale about a scientific experiment gone hilariously wrong, leading to an unintentional time travel mishap.

Hero’s Timeless Quest

Design a story where the hero embarks on a quest that transcends time.

Chronological Conundrum

Travel forward in time to uncover a secret that could save humanity.

A Timeless Easter

Craft a time-travelling adventure that throws the protagonist back to the first Easter.

Imagine traveling back in time, only to realize you are being haunted by a vengeful ghost that insists you amend a mistake from the past.

Time-bending Love

A lover returns in a time where their partner has aged, but they haven’t.

Time-Traveler Chronicles

Imagine if an elder in your community had the ability to time travel — detail their journey.

The Time Machine Invention

You have invented a time machine. Write about where you would go, what you would do, and who you would meet.

The Time Travel Letter

You find a letter written by you in the future. What does it say?

Write a story imagining you’ve traveled back in time to an important historical event.

Summaries, Analysis & Lists

Time Travel Short Stories: Examples Online

The short stories on this page all contain some form of time travel, including time loops. Some of them contain time machines or other technologies that makes the trip possible; in other stories the jump in time doesn’t have an obvious explanation. They don’t all involve obvious trips to the past or future. Sometimes, the story simply contains an element that is out of place in time. See also:

Short Stories About Time Travel

“caveat time traveler” by gregory benford.

The narrator spots the man from the past immediately. The visitor identifies himself. He’s surprised to find he’s not the first visitor from the past. He wants to take something back to prove he made it.

“Caveat Time Travel” can be read in the preview of  The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF.

“Absolutely Inflexible” by Robert Silverberg

A time traveler in a spacesuit sits in Mahler’s office. He’s informed that he’ll be sent to the Moon, where all visitors from the past have to go. The man tries to get out of it, but Mahler explains why no exceptions are possible.

“Absolutely Inflexible” can be read in the preview of  Time and Time Again :  Sixteen Trips in Time.

“Yesterday Was Monday” by Theodore Sturgeon

When Harry Wright wakes up on Wednesday morning he realizes that yesterday was Monday. Somehow there is a gap. He notices that his environment doesn’t quite seem complete.

“Yesterday Was Monday” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

“Death Ship” by Richard Matheson

The crew of a spaceship is collecting samples from various planets to determine their suitability for human habitation. While nearing a new planet, Mason spots a metallic flash. The crew speculates that it might be a ship. Captain Ross orders a landing to check it out.

“Death Ship” can be read in the preview of  The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

“The Third Level” by Jack Finney

The narrator has been to the third level of Grand Central Station, even though everyone else believes there are only two. He’s just an ordinary guy and doesn’t know why he discovered this unknown level. He relates how it happened.

“The Third Level” can be read in the preview of  About Time: 12 Short Stories.

“A Touch of Petulance” by Ray Bradbury

Jonathan Hughes met his fate in the form of an old man while he rode the train home from work. He noticed the old man’s newspaper looked more modern than his own. There was a story on the front page about a murdered woman—his wife. His mind raced.

This story can be read in the preview of  Killer, Come Back To Me: The Crime Stories of Ray Bradbury.

“Rip Van Winkle” by Washington Irving

Rip Van Winkle is lazy at home but helpful to, and well-liked by, his neighbors. He’s out in the mountains one day to get away from things. With night approaching, he starts for home but meets up with a group of men. He has something to drink and goes to sleep, which changes everything.

This story can be read in the preview of  The Big Book of Classic Fantasy .

“Twilight” by John W. Campbell

Jim picks up a hitch-hiker, Ares, who says he’s a scientist from the year 3059. He says he traveled millions of years into the future, but came back to the wrong year. Life in 3059 is trouble free, with machines taking care of everything. Future Earth is in trouble, with all life extinct, except for humans and plants.

This is the second story in the preview of  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol 1 .  (49% into preview)

“The Man Who Walked Home” by James Tiptree, Jr.

An accident at the Bonneville Particle Acceleration Facility decimated the Earth’s population and severely damaged the biosphere and surface. Decades later, a huge flat creature emerges from the crater at the explosion site and promptly disappeared. There are other sightings in the years that follow.

This story can be read in the preview of the anthology  Timegates .  (18% into preview)

“An Assassin in Time” by S. A. Asthana

Navy Seal Jessica Kravitz recovers from the effects of the time jump. She’s done it before, but there are always side-effects. She’s on a highly classified, very important, and expensive mission. Previous jumps have familiarized her with the grounds. This time, she should be able to reach her target.

This story can be read in the preview of  AT THE EDGES: Short Science Fiction, Thriller and Horror Stories .  (17% in)

“The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” by Ted Chiang

Fuwaad, a fabric merchant, appears before the Caliph to recount a remarkable story. While looking for a gift, he entered a large shop with a new owner. It had a marvelous assortment of offerings, all made by the owner or under his direction. Fuwaad is led into the back where he’s shown a small hoop that manipulates time. He also has a larger gateway that people can walk through. The owner tells Fuwaad the stories of a few who did just that.

This story is on the longer side but doesn’t feel like it. Most of “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” can be read in the Amazon preview of  Exhalation: Stories .

“Time Locker” by Harry Kuttner

Gallegher is a scientist—drunken, erratic and brilliant. He invents things but pays them little attention after. His acquaintance Vanning, an unscrupulous lawyer, has made use of some of these inventions, including a neuro-gun that he rents out. During a visit he sees a locker that is bigger inside than out. Fascinated with the item’s possibilities, he offers to purchase it.

Some of “Time Locker” can be read in the preview of  The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century.

Time Travel Short Stories, Cont’d

“All You Zombies” by Robert A. Heinlein

A young man explains to a bartender that he was born a girl. He (she) gave birth to a child and there were complications. The doctors noticed he (she) was a hermaphrodite and performed an emergency sex-change operation.

A lot of this story can be read in the preview of  “ All You Zombies—”: Five Classic Stories .

“The Hundred-Light-Year Diary” by Greg Egan

The narrator meets his future wife, Alison, for lunch exactly when he knew he would. His diary told him. Everyone alive is allotted a hundred words a day to send back to themselves.

Most of this story can be read in the preview of Axiomatic .  (Select Kindle first then Preview, 57% in)

“The Dead Past” by Isaac Asimov

Arnold Potterley, a Professor of Ancient History, wants to use the chronoscope—the ability to view a scene from the past—for his research on Carthage. The government maintains strict control over its use, and his request is denied. Frustrated, Potterley embarks on a plan to get around this restriction, which is professionally risky.

Some of this story can be read in the preview of  The Complete Stories, Vol 1 .  (6% in)

“Signal Moon” by Kate Quinn

Working with the Royal Naval Service, Lily Baines intercepts radio communications to enemy vessels for decoding. One night, everything changes when she picks up an impossible message—a plea for help from another time.

Preview of “Signal Moon”

“Journey to the Seed” by Alejo Carpentier

An old man wanders around a demolition site, muttering a string of incomprehensible phrases. The roof has been removed and, by evening, most of the house is down. When the site is deserted, the old man waves his walking stick over a pile of discarded tiles. They fly back and cover the floor. The house continues to rebuild. Inside, Don Marcial lies on his deathbed.

“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury

In the future, a company offers guided hunting safaris into the past to kill dinosaurs. Extreme care is taken to ensure nothing happens that could alter the present.

Read “A Sound of Thunder” (PDF Pg. 3)

“That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French” by Stephen King

Carol and Bill, married twenty-five years, are on their second honeymoon, driving to their destination. Carol experiences déjà vu; voices and images keep coming to her mind. Their drive comes to an end and she finds herself at an earlier point in their trip.

“The Clock That Went Backward” by Edward Page Mitchell

The narrator recounts the discovery surrounding a clock left to his cousin Harry by his Aunt Gertrude. As young boys they witnessed a strange event. Late one night Aunt Gertrude wound the clock, put her face to the dial, and then kissed and caressed it. The hands were moving backward. She fell to the floor when it stopped.

Read “The Clock That Went Backward” 

“Soldier (Soldier from Tomorrow)” by Harlan Ellison

Qarlo, a soldier, is fighting in the Great War VII. He doesn’t expect to be able to go back. The odds are against it. Qarlo anticipates the Regimenter’s order and gets warped off the battlefield. He’s not sure where he is but his instincts kick in.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

Henry Hassel comes home to find his wife in the arms of another man. He could get his revenge immediately but he has a more intellectual plan. He gets a revolver and builds a time machine. He goes into the past.

“Cosmic Corkscrew” by Michael A. Burstein

The narrator is sent back to 1938 to make a copy of a rejected story by an unnamed writer. Unknown to Dr. Scheihagen, the narrator adjusts his arrival to three days earlier. He wants to make contact with the writer.

“Time’s Arrow” by Arthur C. Clarke

Barton and Davis, geologists, are assisting Professor Fowler with an excavation. The professor receives an invitation to visit a nearby research facility. Barton and Davis are curious to know what goes on there. The professor says he will fill them in, but after his visit he says he’s been asked not to talk about it. Henderson, from the research facility, returns the visit. Something he says starts the geologists speculating about a device that could see into the past.

“The Final Days” by David Langford

Harman and Ferris, presidential candidates, are participating in a televised debate. Ferris is struggling to connect with the audience while Harman relishes the attention. The technician signals Harman that there are fourteen watchers. His confidence increases.

Read “The Final Days”

“Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim

When Hwang is in a time he likes he tries to stay awake. Hwang jumps ahead in time when he sleeps. It could only be a few days; it could be years.

Read “Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters”

“Fish Night” by Joe R. Lansdale

Two traveling salesmen, a father and son, get broke down on a desert road. They sit by the car and talk about how hard it is to make a living. The father tells his son about an unusual experience he had on the same road years ago.

Read “Fish Night”

“The Fox and the Forest” by Ray Bradbury

William and Susan Travis have gone to Mexico in 1938. They’re enjoying a local celebration. William assures Susan that they’re safe—they have traveler’s checks to last a lifetime, and he’s confident they won’t be found. Susan notices a conspicuous man in a café looking at them. She thinks he could be a Searcher, but William says he’s nobody.

“A Statue for Father” by Isaac Asimov

The narrator tells the story of his father, a theoretical physicist who researched time travel. He’s celebrated now, but it was a difficult climb. When time travel research fell out of favor, the dean forced him out. He continued the research independently with his son. Eventually, they succeed in holding a window open long enough for the son to reach in. He brings back some dinosaur eggs.

“The Pendulum” by Ray Bradbury

Layeville has been swinging in a massive glass pendulum for a long time. The people call him The Prisoner of Time. It’s his punishment for his crime. He had constructed a time machine and invited thirty of the world’s preeminent scientists to attend the unveiling.

Read  The Pendulum

“Who’s Cribbing?” by Jack Lewis

A writer has his manuscript returned by a publisher. The story he submitted was published years before—he obviously plagiarized it. They warn him against doing this again. The writer has never heard of the author who first wrote the story and claims it’s an original work.

“Who’s Cribbing” is in  Time Machines: The Best Time Travel Stories Ever Written.

I’ll keep adding short stories about time travel and time machines as I find more.

Fiction Writing , Writing Prompts and Exercises

Time travel writing prompts, by lisa  •  may 3, 2019  •  0 comments.

What if you could travel back in time and live your life over again starting from the point you went back to? Would you do it?

To sweeten the deal, what if you retained the memories of everything that you had lived through and experienced in the future? Now you could avoid all the stupid mistakes you had made. Everything would turn out better, right? But would it?

Every decision we make, whether good or bad, sets into motion things that will happen. Each decision we make, the bad ones as well as the good ones, helps to form us into who we are.

The following quote is from Towards Zero , one of my favorite books by Agatha Christie: When you read the account of a murder – or, say, a fiction story based on murder – you usually begin with the murder itself. That’s all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. […] The murder itself is the end of the story. It’s Zero Hour.

That quote pertains to murder, but the same can be said for just about any other circumstance in our life. If we had the ability to go back in time to relive parts of our life over, it would change the future and maybe not for the better.

Writing Prompts:

Look at your own life and choose a decision you made in the past that you would like to change. Now pretend that you’re able to go back in time while retaining all of your present memories and change that decision.

How is your future affected? Since you remember what your life was like before you changed a decision you made in the past, you can see how different it is now. You can see the ripples that were put into motion by that one changed decision.

What is different?

Is your family life the same? Is it worse? Or is it better?

Do you have the same parents? How has you changing the one decision affected them? Do any of the family members you once had no longer exist? Are there new ones?

If you were married, are you still married to the same individual? Do you have the same children?

What about your job? Do you have the same job or do you have a better job?

Do you have the same circle of friends? Do any of the friends you had no longer exist?

Has your financial situation changed?

I’m sure there are many more ways you can think of that your life would have been changed by that one changed decision. Make notes on all of these things and write a story.

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Sci-Fi Story Ideas and Writing Prompts

Hannah Yang

Are you excited to write a science fiction story but unsure what to write about? Using a writing prompt is a great way to get started.

We’ve created writing prompts in eight popular science fiction subgenres: aliens, biopunk, dystopia, high-tech, robots, science fantasy, space opera, and time travel.

You can start with the categories that you’re most excited about, or read through all of them to see if anything unexpected tickles your imagination.

This article has 80+ science fiction story ideas that you can use for your next novel, screenplay, or short story. Happy writing!

Alien Story Ideas

Biopunk story ideas, dystopia story ideas, high-tech story ideas, robot story ideas, science fantasy story ideas, space opera story ideas, time travel story ideas, tips for using sci-fi story ideas.

The alien subgenre is a classic in science fiction literature. Different writers have envisioned countless scenarios for what might happen if we discovered other life in the universe.

• You run a hotel on Earth where various alien species come to stay on vacation
• A child finds out her pet has been an alien all along
• Alien students come to study on Earth for a foreign exchange program
• An alien race comes to planet Earth to help solve global warming
• Humans invade a peaceful alien planet to steal their secrets
• Aliens speak a language you have to learn how to decipher
• Aliens can mind control the human race, except for a certain demographic of people
• Aliens have taken over the Earth, and a family must try to survive against all odds
• A human falls in love with an alien and they have a child together
• Alien parasites can infiltrate the human body and make people commit crimes
• Aliens take over Earth’s prison systems so they can use human criminals as slaves
• Scientists dig up alien technology that has been buried in glacial ice for centuries, revealing secrets nobody expected

Biopunk is a subgenre that grapples with the implications of biotechnology. What happens when humans learn how to engineer and augment their own bodies?

• People steal organs to sell them on the black market
• You can raise a genetically identical version of yourself to give you spare organs
• A scientist recreates her dead family out of grief
• A technology company hides your memories behind a paywall, so you have to pay to access them
• A young woman and her twin sister agree to be genetically modified in two different ways
• You meet someone who looks exactly like you, and find out you’re actually a clone they created
• Every family is only allowed to have one child, and terrible things happen if you break that rule
• Parents are forced to genetically optimize their babies, and those who refuse are forced to work menial labor
• Thieves steal genetic skill sets, such as math skills and gymnastics skills, from the rich
• Evil scientists create a terrible pandemic and unleash it onto enemy countries

If you like critiquing the state of our society or political system, dystopian world building is a great way to do it. This subgenre lets you interrogate the dark side of government control and the erasure of individual autonomy.

• The government, which controls all media, lies about an important historical event to try to erase history
• Nobody is allowed to go beyond the wall that surrounds the city, and nobody remembers why
• The government mandates a hive mind so they can see everyone’s thoughts
• Everyone has a ranking to show their status as a citizen, forcing them into class tiers
• You work for a rebel organization trying to take down the global dictatorship
• The government sets up high-tech surveillance programs that watch everyone 24/7, but only you know how to get around the cameras
• The government decides who you marry and have children with, but you fell in love with someone else
• Nobody is allowed to eat the old foods, but you inherited a recipe book from your grandmother
• The government outlaws a new invention that some people desperately need
• Citizens are forced to participate in brutal competitions
• The government creates a strange new technology for punishing dissidents
• A mechanized police force prevents crime, but also commits atrocities

Many science fiction stories imagine new types of futuristic technology that might change the way we interact with the world, from virtual realities to extreme social media. If you like inventing new things, this sub-genre could be an exciting one to try.

• Someone creates an app that lets people buy, sell, and trade emotions
• Social media gets pushed to the extreme
• A dating app becomes sentient and starts forcing its users to date the people it chooses
• Humans figure out how to upload their minds into computers, effectively achieving immortality
• Everyone begins spending most of their lives in a virtual reality
• Humans are allowed to choose their own VR afterlives
• People can selectively remove some of their memories
• Babies get created and raised in artificial wombs, raising ethical questions
• Laws try to ban an invention that lets you change people’s memories
• A technology can heal any affliction…with a cost
• An inventor tries to patent his invention, only to find that big corporations who want to use his invention are out to kill him
• Someone invents a technology that lets you swap bodies with someone else

Robots and artificial intelligence are another classic science fiction subgenre. What happens when people create machines that are smarter than we are?

• A woman creates a robot boyfriend, but feels guilty when it starts having an existential crisis
• A young boy and his best friend discover that their babysitter is a robot
• A loophole in the programming of an AI robot causes it to go rogue
• All jobs are taken over by AIs, and humans must find meaning in other pursuits
• Human military officers have designed a robot to serve as a super weapon, but the robot doesn’t want to kill anyone
• The planet has been split into territories ruled by humans and territories ruled by machines
• A lawyer fights for civil rights for androids
• Years after the robots overthrew human civilization, a small group of humans survive
• Robots learn to fall in love, either with humans or with each other
• A robot seeks revenge against the people who killed the family it protected
• The androids don’t know they’re androids, because they’re told they’re humans
• The narrator is a sentient house that takes care of a family
• A child gets raised by robots and learns robotic mannerisms

Science fantasy lives at the intersection of science fiction and fantasy. Who says stories based in science can’t have a little magic too?

• A war breaks out between scientists with incredible technologies and the witches and wizards who have been hiding on Earth for centuries
• Spaceships are controlled by people who have magic powers that allow faster-than-light space travel
• Scientists figure out how to create mythical animals in laboratories, such as dragons, unicorns, and pixies
• After a spaceship landed on a distant planet, the natives of that planet have formed a new religion which worships space travelers as gods
• An inventor creates the technology to bring children’s dreams to life, including their nightmares
• A scientist creates a fortune teller that can create magical prophecies
• Using modern technologies, scientists discover the lost city of Atlantis and the ancient magic it holds
• Time travelers go back to ancient Greece and meet mythical beasts such as the hydra
• An experimental government program combines humans with other animals, creating creatures like mermaids and angels

Space opera stories are adventures set in outer space, full of action, drama, and romance. There are a lot of different directions you can take these stories.

• Five people wake up on a deserted space station with no memory of how they got there
• Earth competes in an interplanetary art contest against multiple alien races
• Someone stows away on a spacecraft to run away from home and gets discovered by the crew members after they’ve landed on a distant planet
• A war breaks out on a generation ship, causing the last survivors to reach their destination without any of the skills or resources they were supposed to have
• Intergalactic bounty hunters look for fugitives on faraway planets
• A space pirate lands in your backyard and tries to recruit you
• A galactic empire tries to colonize your peaceful planet, so you team up with other species to fight back
• Single people try looking for romance at an interplanetary club
• Navigators use special powers to plot courses through the stars
• Write a retelling of your favorite fairy tale…in space!

Time travel is an exciting element of science fiction! If you’re a history buff, you might send your characters back to big events in the past. If you like logic puzzles, you might want to figure out a tricky series of actions in time.

• Humans learn how to communicate with their past and present selves
• Time travel journalists go back in time to document historical events with modern technology
• You travel a hundred years into the past and accidentally kill your own ancestors
• A secret society of time travelers patrols different time periods to protect the way history unfolded
• A high school student creates a time machine for a science fair
• In a small town, someone is born with the special ability to visit the same town in the past, present, and future
• A woman befriends her childhood self to try to change her own past
• Someone uses time travel to commit untraceable crimes
• A time traveler meets an immortal vampire and becomes best friends with them
• Knowing that the human population is about to be wiped out, the last survivors on Earth travel back in time as refugees

Remember that a prompt is just a starting point. You still need to decide how you’re going to put your own unique twist on the story.

Most of these science fiction ideas have been used many times before, but that doesn’t mean your story can’t be original and unique.

For example, E.T. and Lilo and Stitch are two movies that could conceivably have originated from the same prompt—“a kid discovers an alien and keeps it as a pet”—but they’re very different movies.

Here are some tips for how to use these prompts to create exciting and original stories.

Tip #1: Combine Multiple Ideas

You can consider combining a prompt with an idea for a character or setting, or even with a second prompt.

For example, maybe you want to take an alien prompt and a time traveler prompt and include both in the same story by making the aliens turn out to be humans from the future. When you let two ideas collide, new and exciting possibilities can arise.

Tip #2: Write What You Know

“Write what you know” is a great adage that applies even to science fiction. That’s how you create an original, authentic story that resonates with readers.

If you’re an insurance salesperson, perhaps you can write about an alien who sells insurance to other planets. If you’re a high schooler, perhaps you can write about a high school student discovering time travel.

Using your real life as a starting point for a story can imbue it with your own perspective and voice.

Tip #3: Don’t Forget the Basics

An interesting premise is important, but there are other skills you need in order to flesh out your writing. Craft elements like character development and world building are still crucial for creating a good story.

Tip #4: Write with a Friend

Writing doesn’t have to be a solitary activity! It can be fun to write the same prompt with a friend and then trade stories. Chances are, you’ll be surprised by the different ways you and your friend can use the same idea.

If you’re excited to try some of these prompts and meet other sci-fi writers, don’t forget to register for our free Science Fiction Writers’ Week .

Happy writing!

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Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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45 Time Travel Writing Prompts

Time travel has fascinated people for centuries. It’s one of those things that makes us stop and think, “What if…?” Below, you’ll find a list of time-travel-themed writing prompts to get your students thinking about the possibilities of time travel.

Using This Guide

You could use this guide in your classroom when you read a book about time travel. Here are a few ways to use these prompts:

• Assign these along with required reading in your ELA class.
• Challenge students to use one prompt a night every week for an entire school week.
• Keep these handy for students who finish work early.

The Prompts

• If you could go back in time and meet any musician, who would it be? Why?
• Write a story about someone using time travel to cheat on a test.
• Write a poem about time traveling.
• Write a story where the main character travels back in time to warn their younger self about something.
• If you could go back in time and meet any actor or actress, who would it be? Why?
• What is a historical event that you would like to time travel to? Describe what you would see.
• What is your favorite movie about time traveling? What do you like about it?
• What is your favorite book about time traveling? What do you like about it?
• Write a story about a librarian who time travels via books.
• If you could go back in time and meet any prominent woman from history, who would it be? Why?
• Write a time travel story that involves a dog and its owner.
• Write a story where the main character travels back to the same morning every single day.
• If you could travel back in time to a certain summer memory, what would it be? Describe your day.
• Write a time travel story about superpowers.
• If you could travel back in time to any period of history, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a time trial story about video games.
• If you could go back in time and stop any major historical event, which would you choose? How would you stop it?
• Write a time travel story about school.
• Write a time travel story about your favorite season.
• Write a time travel story about a person who is nervous.
• Do you think time travel really exists? Explain your answer.
• Explain the pros and cons of time travel.
• If you could travel into the future, what do you think it would be like?
• If you could go back in time and try any food, what would you eat? Why?
• If you could go back in time and protect one endangered animal, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a story where the main character goes back in time to meet a relative or ancestor they never got to meet.
• Write a time travel story that takes place in a big city.
• Write a time travel story that takes place in the countryside.
• Can you think of a moment when you should have stood up for someone and didn’t? If you could, would you go back and change it?
• If you went back in time, would you purposely try to find your younger self?
• If you went ahead in time, would you purposely try to find your older self?
• Write about your favorite cartoon that features time travel.
• Do you think the time travel aspect of the  Harry Potter  series makes sense? Why or why not?
• Which time travel trope do you think is overused? Why?
• If you could travel back in time to see any band or musician live, who would you choose? Why?
• Write a time travel story featuring superheroes.
• Write a time travel story about your favorite holiday.
• If you could travel back in time to meet any artist in history, who would it be? Why?
• Why do you think society is so intrigued by the thought of time travel? Explain.
• Write a story about someone who only thinks they’ve time traveled, but they actually haven’t.
• Write a time travel story about science.
• If you could go back in time and witness any important event in history, which would you choose? Why?
• Write a time travel story that takes place 200 years from now.
• Write a time travel story that takes place 200 years ago.
• Write a time travel story that takes place during the year one of your parents were born.

Looking For More?

Whether you’re looking for writing guides, substitute teacher forms, or something in between, you’ve come to the right place. Our site is home to a number of educational resources to use in the classroom and at home. 

The Writer's Workout

Be a better writer..

• Susan Matteucci
• Dec 22, 2022

Tips and Tricks to Writing Time Travel Into Your Story

Time travel and time manipulation is a very common conflict in science fiction, fantasy, and even more action-based genres of fiction. However, despite it being so common, it is possibly one of the hardest supernatural qualities to write effectively into a story.

Time travel can be very confusing, and you can lose your readers if you are not careful about how you approach it. Not only that, but since time travel has been done so many times, authors may feel the need to be original in their works which can cause even more confusion.

However, writing time travel can be fun and easy if you know what you’re dealing with! When writing a story with any sort of time manipulation, make sure you first answer the question: what are the rules of time travel in my story? Once you’ve asked this, there are common writing tips that can help you write these rules effectively into your story.

Rules of Time Travel

Before we worry about what your characters understand, let’s focus on you, the writer. Before writing a story with time travel, we want to make sure that you understand exactly the type of time travel you are writing (there are many different kinds!).

But what exactly is a rule of time travel? Well, since you’re the one writing the story, the rules are what you make them. However, there are common types of time travel that writers tend to fall into, whether they are trying or not.

The Different Types of Time Travel:

When discussing time travel, there are four categories to choose from:

Traveling back in time

Traveling forward in time

The gift of foresight

Of course, within each of these categories, there are many subcategories and creative possibilities. But looking only at the broad strokes, every time travel story has one of these.

In choosing which type of time travel to include, it’s important to consider what you want from your story. A story of time loops, like Groundhog Day , usually focuses on the character development of the person in the loop. Meanwhile foresight and traveling forward usually deal with morality. And traveling to the past is a great way to discuss free will. It’s all about what you want.

There are so many options with time travel. The important thing is to find the type of time travel that fits your story best, create rules for it, and stick to those rules . This leads us to the first tip in writing time travel:

Consistency

These rules are just for you. You don’t necessarily need to tell your readers about them. There’s no need for some sort of exposition explanation (although if you want to, feel free). But deciding what time travel can and can’t do in your story will stop plot holes from forming. Keeping your time travel consistent is important.

For example, let’s look at Supernatural . Supernatural is great at giving us examples of what not to do.

In season 4 of Supernatural , Dean Winchester is sent back in time to when his parents were his age. Dean attempts to kill a demon that will kill his mother in the future. At the end, he fails and ultimately causes the events that will happen (classic unchangeable past time travel rules). Castiel tells him that it is impossible to change the present by traveling to the past.

We then jump to season five. Anna, a runaway angel, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before they can have Sam. Castiel and the brothers become worried about this. But why? If we can’t alter the past, then what’s the problem? Even if Anna doesn’t realize her goals are futile, why would Castiel be concerned?

Backstory :

This leads us to our next point. After you decide your own time travel rules, you have to consider how much each character knows about these rules . If you have decided that a seer has unchangeable visions, and they know this, then that character should never try to change their fate.

The time travel rule of Twelve Monkeys is that you cannot change the past. However, the movie only has a plot because the main character doesn’t know this. He believes he can change the past until the very end when he realizes his goal is fruitless.

However, the Prisoner of Azkaban has the same rules of time travel and Dumbledore and Hermione both know they can’t change the past. There is still conflict in the book because that is not their goal.

If a character has a backstory where they studied time travel for years, and has traveled hundreds of times before, they shouldn’t be shocked by the rules of time travel. Withholding the information from your characters can create interesting conflict, but make sure each character understands a plausible amount.

Show, Don’t Tell:

Having your characters have a long conversation about time travel can be fun to write, but it’s important to remember that the best way to ensure your audience understands time travel is to show characters traveling through time .

As long as you stick to your rules, your time travel will eventually make sense to your audience. And, when it comes to time travel, you’d be surprised just how long your readers will be okay with being in the dark.

In Avengers: Endgame , Hulk/Bruce Banner goes on a long explanation about how time travel works in this universe. They bring up Hot Tub Time Machine and Back to the Future . But in the end, did anyone in the audience completely understand what that time travel was about from the Hulk’s rant? From what I can gather, no.

About the Author: Susan Matteucci is an author, editor, and reader currently finishing up her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. She has two publish short stories and hopefully has many more on the way. She has a passion for Sci-Fi, particularly time travel, and fantasy. It is her belief that straying from the realistic is the best way to comment on society.

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The Rules of Time Travel for Fiction Writers

Time travel is a staple of great fiction—when it’s done right. When it’s done wrong, you’re turning wormholes into  plot  holes instead. Here’s how to get a handle on the mechanics of time travel for fiction.

Doing Fictional Research

Start off by researching tales of fictional time travel and go through all the short stories, books, and movies you can get your hands on. Feel free to take your own notes on the story while you do this. If there’s a time paradox, ask yourself which—and  why . Excellent examples from film are  12 Monkeys ,  The Butterfly Effect ,  Project Almanac  and  Back to the Future . (There are plenty more, including  Hot Tub Time Machine .) Good books include  The Time Traveller’s Wife ,  The Time Machine  and  22/11/63 .

Family Guy’s  Back to the Multiverse  does a good job at explaining what’s called the multiverse theory, where people aren’t just traveling through time, but skipping through alternate realities as they do so—here, the “rules” of the universe can be a little different, like the point where Family Guy’s Brian and Stewie find themselves going through a Disney-like alternate reality where there’s, well, a lot of singing.

Sounding “Sciency” the Right Way

We all remember the “flux capacitor” from  Back to the Future . You’ll have to choose a  method  of time travel first. You can be creative: The most obvious solution is a time-machine—but remember to ask whether the time machine stays in one place (as in  22/11/63 ), travels with the time traveler (like  Back to the Future  or  Family Guy ) or is simply  really  weird—in  Butterfly Effect , the protagonist has to be reading from his diary to jump in time.   

Explaining Paradoxes

Paradoxes occur when things contradict each other; time travel paradoxes are plenty, and often part of the fun when writing it.  Just don’t lose track . What counts in one chapter, has to count in another chapter—and if ripples  can  be felt throughout your storyline because of a character’s reckless time traveling, make sure these ripples in time continuously make sense.

The Grandfather Paradox  is a popular example and one best illustrated by  Back to the Future . If you go back in time to kill your grandfather, do you effectively kill your father—and thusly yourself?  The Hitler Paradox  is another example: If you go back in time to kill Hitler, then Hitler doesn’t exist—and you wouldn’t  need  to kill Hitler in the first place. That’s pretty damned trippy, don’t you think?

The Predestination Paradox  is something I’d like to illustrate with a scene from  The Matrix , where Neo meets the Oracle; she warns him to look out for the vase. When he asks ‘what vase?’, he knocks it over. This, simply, is when your past self is the very  cause  of needing to travel back in the first place. This creates an endless loop (hence this also being referred to as a  closed causal loop ) of travel.

The Bootstrap Paradox  happens when something is sent back (often to the traveler themselves), negating the need for its creation in the first place.  Astronomy Trek  explains the Bootstrap Paradox in terms of George Lucas going back and giving  himself  the finished scripts. (Yes, we  really  had to think about that one, too.)

Taking Notes & Mapping Timelines

Obsessive note-taking is always advised for writing fiction, down to the last little plot detail. Outline beforehand, and have an outline of where your story is going to go. This is the secret to many great authors you’ve likely picked up this week, and there are very few authors who can just pull a plot twist out of nowhere.

When writing time travel, your outlines might have to become a little more focused on timelines and consequences. Create a mind map however you like, even if you have to clothespin some twine across your office and start hanging up notes.

Real Studies in Time Travel (and Real Life Oddities)

Don’t discount real science when writing  science fiction . A recent computer simulation managed to come up with a  possible solution to the grandfather paradox   and even more recent studies have shown that, at least in terms of mathematical theory, time travel is  entirely possible . In 2014, scientists studied the  behavior of photons  beamed through time.

Real-life oddities have also popped up from time to time:  John Titor  notably posted on internet forums in the early 2000s, claiming that he was a time traveler from the year 2036 who came with the purpose of warning mankind. In 2006, a man called Håkan Nordkvis claimed that he had found a worm-hole through to meet his 72-year old self under his sink—yes, that does remind us just a little of  Being John Malkovich , but somehow still not as weird…

About the author

Alex j coyne.

Alex J Coyne is an author, freelance journalist and language practitioner. He has written for international publications and blogs, been featured on radio and appeared in NB Publishers’ Skrik op die Lyf, an Afrikaans horror collection. Visit his website and get in touch at http://alexcoyneofficial.wordpress.com.

22/11/63 was so bad I could barely read it. I gave up on it. The book was written for a reason but it seems sure to me at least it wasn’t to investigate time-travel. Time-travel is a conceit, simple as that – an often dumb idea made somehow interesting whatever paradox it comes up against or overcomes or attempts to overcome.

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How to Write a Time Travel Story Without Paradoxes

The concept of time travel has long been a popular theme in fiction and film. Traveling back in time to alter the course of history is an alluring idea that has enthralled not just fiction writers but scientists as well. Yet, if you've ever seen or read a time travel story, you're aware that time travel is a tricky concept to grasp. It might be challenging to stay faithful to your worldbuilding concepts while simultaneously incorporating suitable temporal paradoxes.

For this reason, we will explore different paradoxes and go through various tips to help you write a time travel story without the risk of paradoxes.

Where does the idea of time travel come from?

Traveling across time is a shared universal dream. But where did the fascination with time travel begin, and why does the concept appeal to so many people? The lure of time travel has deeper origins. Appearing in some of our oldest stories , it is woven into the very fabric of our language and imagines a world without constraints of time and space. Its roots may be traced back to ancient tales of time travel found in numerous civilizations throughout the world, giving the notion its distinct characteristics derived from different cultures.

We come across time travel stories in ancient cultures throughout the world , although we cannot claim to know where the concept originally came from and who pioneered it. However, we can observe that the genre rose to prominence in the nineteenth century. From this time period comes Charles Dickens' classic novella A Christmas Carol , in which Ebenezer Scrooge travels both ahead and backwards in time. Around the same period, H.G. Wells popularized time travel in literature with his timeless novel The Time Machine , which featured the concept of a "time machine," which featured a vehicle that could travel purposefully and selectively in time. Inspired by this emblematic icon, many beloved time-travel stories published after this have incorporated some form of the time machine. Such is the famous TARDIS in the long-running BBC classic series Doctor Who , a blue box that can transcend time and space. Doctor who interestingly explores time travel paradoxes, with time paradoxes taking a center stage for many of its episodes.

Time travel paradoxes

There are many logical contradictions when it comes to time travel. Here are some of the major paradoxes:

Bootstrap paradox

The Bootstrap Paradox is a theoretical paradox of time travel that arises when an object transported back in time becomes locked within an unending cause-effect loop. This occurs as the travel in time takes place as a response to a specific event.

Consistency paradox

Consistency Paradoxes , such as the Grandfather Paradox , or the Hitler paradox , a type of timeline mismatch that arises from the prospect of changing the past. These paradoxes change history in such a way that time travel into the past, which caused such action in the first place, is no longer possible. To simply illustrate the paradox, in the film The Time Machine , a protagonist builds a time machine to travel back in time in order to save his fiancé from death. Her rescue, on the other hand, would lead to a future in which the machine never existed since her death was the direct motivation for its creation. But then, how is it you can go back and save your fiancé if her death hasn't given you the push to create the time machine? It results in a paradox. The timeline is no longer self-consistent.

Butterfly effect

The Butterfly Effect is based on Chaos Theory , which states that seemingly minor changes may have massive cascade responses over extended periods of time and that even minor changes can fundamentally reshape history. The name "Butterfly Effect" originates from Ray Bradbury's short tale " A Sound of Thunder ," in which a character in prehistoric times walks on a butterfly, causing massive changes in the future.

How to avoid these paradoxes

The self-healing hypothesis.

Writers seeking to escape the paradoxes of time travel have devised a variety of inventive methods for presenting a more consistent picture of reality. The self-healing hypothesis is one of the most basic solutions to any time travel paradox, implying that no matter what is changed in the timeline, the principles of quantum physics will self-correct to prevent a contradiction from arising and sustain the existing flow .

Because events would adapt themselves, a paradox would not occur. So, changing the past will trigger another alternative chain reaction that will keep the present unaltered. This effectively states that the likelihood of a paradox arising in any given circumstance is zero. The self-healing hypothesis simply indicates that no matter what a traveler has done in the past, the end outcome is the same in terms of global conditions. This does not rule out the possibility of changing the past, but it does eliminate the prospect of minor changes having the power to generate massive ones. Most crucially, as an author, you are not obligated to describe the particular events that repair time. It is enough to affirm that they take place and ensure that your event sequences and their conclusion are consistent.

Time traveling monitor

Another way to avoid temporal paradox would be creating the time traveling monitor that would follow the timeline protection hypothesis , which posits that any attempt to create a paradox would fail to owe to a probability distortion. The monitor would adjust the probability in order to avert any damaging events occurring, which would also give you free rein to come up with creative scenarios. Nonetheless, to prevent an impossible event from taking place, the universe must favor an improbable event occurring.

Balancing the timeline

The paradoxes themselves are intertwined and they can as well occur simultaneously. No one knows if a real-life paradox would result in a large-scale timeline alteration, or if the closed-loop is kind of automatically self-correcting since everything works out equally in the end. Going back to the Consistency Paradox, yet another approach to avoid it is to acknowledge, regretfully, that you can't and shouldn't attempt to change the past. That is unless you can rule out any chance of a bad domino effect as a result of your activities. In this manner, you can attempt to alter the past while keeping the chronology intact. This means following up the time-change event with another change that balances out the activities and ensures that the outcome remains the same despite the intervention.

The notion of a time loop is one of the most prevalent strategies to get away with time travel in science fiction. You may travel through time here, but any changes you make are predetermined. For example, suppose you were pushed out of the way of a car one day. You return to your timeline from the future and realize that that person was in reality you.

Paradoxes are avoided with this method of time travel, but everything is predetermined. If you wish to prevent a tragic incident from occurring in your past, there's nothing you can do since even if you could, it would still happen in the time loop. Whatever you did, the key events would just re-calibrate around you. This could be the solution for the Grandfather Paradox — that would mean that the event propelling you back in time would happen regardless of your actions, providing your younger self with the incentive to go back and stop it. To put it another way, a time traveler could make adjustments, but the original conclusion would still occur — perhaps not exactly as it did in the initial timeline, but near enough.

Parallel universe

There is also another possibility: creating a parallel universe . The future or past you visit might become a parallel reality. Consider it as a huge fortress where you may construct or demolish as many castles as you like, but it has no bearing on your primal stronghold. When you travel back in time, the future is gone, it never happened, and the universe will evolve anew, even if you do nothing to influence it. It does not affect the future you experienced, but it does affect the future of the reset world. That can entail creating a scenario in which the protagonists travel to the past and discover themselves in a parallel world or multiverse, with no change to their original chronology.

Countless science fiction stories have examined the conundrum of what would happen if you could travel back in time and do something that would jeopardize the future. Please note that you are free to make your own rules for it. This is your work of fiction. The universe will be as you will design it in your story. If the paradoxes do not exist in your story, then you may make up your own rules around it. You can as well bypass the rules your worldbuilding has established if you have a valid cause for doing so and if this is what your writing demands.

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10 Time Travel Science Fiction Ideas

• Posted on 22 Aug, 2018

Future Invisible Inhabitants

A scientist creates a time machine and travels into the future where he finds a world that looks far more advanced than ours (which it should… it’s the future). However, despite everything looking clean, organized and new, he can’t find anyone. But they are there. He just can’t see them because they’ve discovered how to remain invisible. And the reasons they feel the need to be invisible are terrifying.

Time Travel Cures

A man from the future uses a time machine to offer sick rich people a trip into the future where their illnesses can be cured. But his motivations are different than they appear. And while most of them are cured of their illnesses, they’ve brought something from the future back with them.

Forbidden Future Technology

A man from the future secretly sells future technology to wealthy individuals. But some of it is technology that we’re not quite ready for.

Missing Time Travelers

To save his children a mad scientist sends them into the future. Now 20 years later he’s ready to greet them in the place and time that he sent them. Except they don’t arrive.

Time Travel Plagiarism

A famous and wealthy author in the year 2120 has run out of ideas. He’s hit writer’s block hard. So he buys a two way ticket to travel thirty years into the future where he stays for a month taking notes on recent best sellers from that time in order to plagiarizer them.

Time Traveling Android God

The year is 2018 but vastly different than the world we know. This alternative present was started when a high level A.I. android traveled from the future to the year 1200 and presented himself as a God. Being an immortal android he successfully controls the world, leading to a vastly different world than the one we know. But some know of this legend, and the time travel he used to travel to the past has now been discovered in present time.

Outlawed Time Travel

The year is 2005 and time travel has been outlawed. This 2005 is much different than the one we’re familiar with. After the year 2090 life on earth changed in every year dating to the dawn of man and extending to the end of times. Time travel created an infinite and ever changing wave of new time dimensions, each with their own unique creations, issues, and outcomes. The future became the past, and old influences of the past changed futures. Now the man who made that time travel possible thinks he’s created a way to travel not only through time, but also through the infinite dimensions his initial creation has already created.

Time Travel Diplomat

In the year 2121 and Tom Waterfeld is a time travel diplomat. Using a specific set of time travel rules Tom travels through time and attempt to prevent disasters created by bad politics. And he must do so without further damaging the future he’s trying to improve.

Virtual Time Travel

The year is 2200 and while time travel is not yet possible, Carter Snapperson has discovered that it is possible to at least see the past and he’s created a virtual reality device to do just that. However after “traveling” back in time virtually to several key historical events, Carter realizes that much of the past is far different that what we have recorded in the history books.

The Time Travel Experience Executive

In the year 2145 Jonathan Cowell has a dream job. For a large fee Jonathan creates “experiences” in which the worlds wealthiest time travel tourists can hire him to opportunities for them to meet their idols of the past. It’s harder than it sounds. Some of these idols are hard people to get in front of. And one new tourist has given him a particularly challenging assignment.

Let us know what you think about our ideas! Comment below to give us your opinion, add onto an existing idea, or submit one of your own!

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Can I use Forbidden Technology? I’m really drawn into that one!

Sorry, I’m just replying. But you definitely can use it!

Virtual time travel is a good idea since it deals with the idea of a parallel or a different universe that ours or one that has been somewhat altered by journeys and changes through time. Time travel plagiarism is an interesting concept since I enjoy writing and have an affinity to famous works and short stories and what some of these may works will be in the future. My idea: A group of aliens has been on earth several weeks and they are trying to learn about the earth in the present year while it is the year 2170 on …  Read more »

I have a story line of an android detective following the trail of a crazed scientist bent on destroying the world. The scientist has created a time machine with which he sends an anti matter bomb thousands of years into the past. The detective is able to jump into the time stream and follow to where the bomb ends up. The detective is able to neutralize the bomb, but is now stuck in the past. Luckily the detectives android battery has enough power to essentially live to the time this all started. Now he faces the dilemma of should he …  Read more »

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