From The Right Practice:
Road trips yield great stories. Why? Because a road trip forces you, your family, your friends, or your characters into uncomfortable and new situations. Add to that the potential for various complications and conflict, and you have all the ingredients for a terrific story.
Whether you want to write the story of a road trip you took, or one you’re planning, or a scene from your work in progress that involves a road trip, you can use the elements of plot to help you. (See our full guide here.)
Start with a character who has a goal, and then let the complications and conflict ensue. Bring their actions to a crescendo of crisis (will they make the best bad choice to get what they want?) and deliver the climax and denouement.
A road trip has a built in external goal: you want to get to your destination, usually in a specific way for a specific purpose. But all those details can get hijacked by internal conflict, car trouble, wild roadside stops, and any other complication you can dream up. Give it a try!
Twenty-one Road Trip Writing Prompts
- My original prompt was simple: Write about a road trip.
You can still do that one. But here are twenty more to take for a drive. (See what I did there?)
2. A parent and adult child have to take a road trip to sort out important family business. What happens?
3. Two co-workers have to drive to a work event one state away, but the trip goes terribly wrong.
4. A group of college seniors embark on a final road trip before graduation, but at the beginning of the second day, they pick up a hitchhiker who looks a lot like one of their professors who died the year before.
5. A newlywed couple borrows a travel trailer and sets off on a cross-country roadtrip, when…
6. A young twenty-something trying to get home makes the mistake of stopping at…
7. An older couple has to move closer to family and takes a route that has some unusual memories.
8. A multi-family caravan road trip is derailed when a sink hole drops them into another dimension.
9. A motorcycle road trip through the Rocky Mountains turns deadly when…
10. A photographer sets out to capture pictures of the last five family-owned motels along a historic route when they discover…
11. A child convinces their grandparent to drive a thousand miles to return to a family home, but when they arrive, they are shocked to find…
Link to the rest at The Write Practice