✍️ Letter prompt generator

How to use a prompt

A prompt is a starting point, not an assignment. You do not need to answer it fully, or at all — its job is to get the first sentence down, and the first sentence is always the hardest. Many of the best letters start with a prompt and wander somewhere else entirely by the second paragraph.

Try answering it in the most specific way you can. "What did you have for dinner?" is not really asking for a menu; it is asking for the kitchen, the person who cooked, the argument about whose turn it was to wash up. Details are what your pen pal will remember and reply to.

Then turn it round. Once you have answered, ask your pen pal the same question. Comparing answers from two different countries is often more interesting than either answer on its own, and it guarantees your next letter has something to respond to.

Why send a photo too?

A photo of something ordinary — your street in the rain, your breakfast, a sign in your language — shows your pen pal your world in a way a description cannot. The photo prompts here are the same ones our community uses for its monthly postcard board: observational, low-effort, and chosen so they never ask for a face, an address or anything that identifies where you live. Before you send any photo, check the background for house numbers, school badges and street names.

The kinds of prompt

• Everyday life — the small, ordinary details of your days, which are exactly what someone in another country finds fascinating.
• Where you live — your town, your food, your weather and your customs, seen through the eyes of a visitor.
• Memories — childhood, family and the stories that made you, for when a correspondence is ready to go a little deeper.
• Opinions and ideas — questions with no right answer, which make for the liveliest letters.
• Things to do together — small shared projects that give every future letter a subject.

For more on what to write, and how to keep a correspondence going once it has started, have a look at our letter-writing guides.