Erotica prompts for slow, literary stories
These premises keep the heat in the subtext. Take one as written or bend it, and the follow-up questions will shape it into your own.
Letters and words
- Two strangers are matched as pen pals by a lonely-hearts column in a small newspaper and write for a year before meeting.
- A calligrapher is hired to copy out a stranger's love letters for an anthology, and starts answering them in the margins.
- A widow finds unsent letters in a secondhand desk and tracks down the man who wrote them.
- A radio host reads anonymous letters on air every night, and one listener's letters are clearly written to her.
- Two rival poets trade insults in print for years, then are booked to read on the same stage.
- An interpreter at a peace summit realizes the delegate she translates for is speaking only to her.
Strangers
- Two strangers share a sleeper compartment through the mountains and agree to tell each other only lies.
- A woman rents a seaside cottage for a month and finds the owner has not quite moved out.
- Two guests at a silent retreat communicate only through the notes they leave in the shared kitchen.
- A night ferry is delayed until dawn, and two passengers spend the hours on deck.
- A stranger asks to share her umbrella in a downpour, and they walk until the rain stops, which takes hours.
- A pianist practices in an empty hotel ballroom every night, and the same guest keeps listening from the doorway.
Old flames
- Two former lovers are seated side by side at a friend's wedding, and both have to give speeches.
- A chef returns to the city she left and finds her old love has been cooking her recipes, unchanged, for a decade.
- They meet every five years at the same café, by agreement, and never once talk about the agreement.
- An actor and his former co-star are cast as lovers again, twenty years after the first time ended badly.
- A woman inherits half a vineyard, and the other half belongs to the man she left on a station platform years ago.
- Two exes take the trip they planned and never cancelled, as friends, supposedly.
Forbidden lines
- A royal portraitist and the queen's sister, who sits for her every afternoon while the court gossips.
- A gardener at a grand estate and the visiting composer who works with the windows open all summer.
- A ferryman's widow and the surveyor sent to close the crossing for good.
- A judge and the defense attorney she once loved face each other across a courtroom for the first time in years.
- Two ambassadors from countries on the brink of war negotiate through the night in a borrowed villa.
- An heiress engaged to the wrong man spends the week before the wedding with the architect redesigning her house.
Artists and muses
- A sculptor hires a dancer to pose and spends the first week studying only the way he stands.
- A photographer documents an old jazz club's final month and keeps framing the same bartender.
- A painter and the model she has drawn for ten years finally talk about why the portraits stopped.
- A cellist and a composer write a piece together by mail, one movement at a time, without ever meeting.
- A ghostwriter falls for the voice she invented for a client, and then meets the client.
- A tailor fits a reserved man for his wedding suit, one appointment at a time, and the wedding keeps being postponed.
Slow seductions
- A sommelier teaches a reserved diplomat to taste wine slowly, one evening a week, and both pretend it is about the wine.
- Two chess players meet for one game a month in a park, and the games get longer every time.
- A dance instructor gives private lessons to a widower who insists he only wants to learn one waltz for his sister's wedding.
- A bookbinder restores a rare book for a collector who visits every week to check on progress he does not need to check.
- Two neighbors trade dinners across the hall, each meal a little more elaborate, and neither admits it is courtship.
- A garden designer and the reclusive owner of the estate argue for a whole summer about where the roses go.