Fanfic ideas: 50 premises you can drop any characters into

How to use these ideas

Read the list with your characters in mind and notice which ones make you wince or grin. That reaction is the signal. Then make the idea specific: who is in it, when in canon it happens, and whose head we're in. A premise only becomes a fic when it runs into particular people.

For more, the prompts page sorts another set by trope, and nothing below repeats those. If you want new settings rather than new situations, there is a separate list of fanfic AU ideas.

Rivals and old grudges

For pairs who started on opposite sides and keep finding reasons to stay there.

• Two rivals are named co-heirs of a mentor's estate, and the will says they must agree on every decision.
• A rival writes a scathing anonymous review of the other's work, then has to admit it face to face.
• Rivals discover they have been trading anonymous letters for a year and confiding everything.
• The one person who saw the proud rival cry keeps the secret, which somehow makes everything worse.
• A rival injures the other by accident in a sparring match and insists on handling the recovery personally.
• Old enemies are sent to recruit the same reluctant expert, who refuses to work with either of them.
• Two rivals have to train a pair of new recruits together, and the recruits start a betting pool on them.
• A rival is the only one who believes the other's wild theory, and hates that it's right.

Friends who might be more

Friends to lovers lives on the moment one of them notices first. These give that moment somewhere to happen.

• One friend asks the other to help rehearse a confession meant for someone else.
• Best friends agree to stay single for a year, and one breaks the pact in their head first.
• A friend moves to the other side of the world, and the letters back get longer every month.
• Old friends meet at a reunion and each assumes the other is married.
• One teaches the other to dance before a formal gala, and the lessons keep running long.
• Two friends share an umbrella every rainy day for a year and never once discuss it.
• One of them keeps a list of every small kindness the other has done, and the other finds it.
• The friend who hands out relationship advice to everyone is finally asked what they want.
• After a breakup, one friend moves into the other's spare room for a week and stays a whole season.

Hurt/comfort and found family

Hurt/comfort means one character suffers and another looks after them. Found family is a group of people who choose each other. Both work as gen fic or with a ship.

• The team's strongest fighter loses their power for a month and has to let people help.
• A character who never cooks feeds the whole group for a week after a disaster, badly and with great pride.
• Someone quietly learns sign language after a teammate loses their hearing in a battle.
• The loner falls ill, and the team realizes none of them knows where they live.
• The group throws a birthday party for someone who has never once mentioned their birthday.
• Two old allies take a long, slow trip to scatter a fallen friend's ashes.
• A veteran trains a newcomer and slowly realizes the newcomer is the one looking after them.
• After a defeat, everyone ends up camped on the floor of one cramped room because nobody wants to be alone.
• A character with nightmares discovers someone has been sitting outside their door every night.

Missing scenes and canon gaps

Canon leaves holes everywhere. Fandom fills them.

• The first meeting canon only mentions in a single line of backstory.
• The funeral the story skipped straight past, and who stood next to whom.
• The trip home that canon summed up in one sentence.
• The week after the big reveal, when everyone still has to show up and do their jobs.
• The last conversation before a character left the group for good.
• The recovery from an injury that healed suspiciously fast between chapters.
• The letters a character wrote and never sent, found at last by the person they were for.
• The morning after a character's very public mistake, and who still sits with them at breakfast.

Strange rules and crack premises

Crack fic is the deliberately ridiculous kind, and it is often where writers loosen up. A few of these can also be played completely straight.

• A spell makes one character's thoughts audible to everyone for a day, except the person they're thinking about.
• The two people least able to fake being each other swap bodies in the middle of a mission.
• A curse turns the leader into a small, very angry bird for a week, and only their rival can understand them.
• A character's shadow starts acting on its own, doing everything they never dared to.
• Every lie told inside one house makes it snow indoors, and the house is getting very cold.
• A wish to be forgotten works on everyone except the one person it was meant for.
• A magical illness means one of them can only speak in rhyme during the most serious week of the year.
• Memories start leaking between two people after a spell goes wrong, the embarrassing ones first.

Side characters and OCs

The edges of canon are full of people with opinions. An OC (original character) fits right in here.

• The quartermaster who has supplied the heroes for ten years finally sends them an itemized bill.
• The villain's accountant quietly sabotages the evil plan through paperwork.
• A messenger carrying letters between two leaders starts editing them to keep the peace.
• The official chronicler hired to write the heroes' history finds the truth far messier.
• A tavern keeper who has watched the main pair argue in the same corner for five years finally steps in.
• Your OC runs the lost and found at the heroes' base and has a drawer of things that explain everything.
• The guard who was knocked out in the first big escape scene, and what happened to his career afterwards.
• A retired hero now runs a bait shop by a lake, and the current team keeps visiting for advice they ignore.

Turning an idea into a first chapter

1. Write the idea as one sentence with your characters' names in it.
2. Choose your branch point: when in canon this happens, and what has or has not happened yet.
3. Pick whose point of view carries the first scene. Usually it is the one with more to lose.
4. Open in the middle of the situation, not before it. The setup can arrive in a line of dialogue.

If an idea is close but not quite there, the fanfiction prompt generator asks the questions that sharpen it. The craft side, from voice to tags, is in how to write fanfiction.

Questions