Fictional Fixation

Writing Prompt:
The year is 2147, and time travel is a well-established technology, though it is strictly regulated by the government. A rogue faction of time travelers, known as the Chrono Outlaws, has been illegally altering key historical events to reshape the future. They claim to be fighting for a better world, but their actions have far-reaching consequences, disrupting timelines and causing paradoxes that threaten to unravel reality itself.

You are a young, brilliant engineer working for the government’s Time Enforcement Agency. Your job is to ensure that time travel is used responsibly. However, after a routine mission goes awry, you are thrust into an unexpected confrontation with the Chrono Outlaws. One of them, a mysterious individual from your past, offers you a chance to glimpse the future—an opportunity to witness the future’s potential destruction firsthand.

You must decide whether to join them in their mission to reshape the future or to uphold your duties and stop them, risking the very fabric of time itself. The more you learn, the more you realize that the future may not be as clear-cut as you once believed.

Tips for Writing This Prompt:

1. Explore Paradoxes and Consequences: Time travel stories often rely on paradoxes, so consider the consequences of changing even the smallest event in the past. How does it affect the characters and their world? What unexpected outcomes arise from their interference with the timeline?
2. Create a Complex Protagonist: Your protagonist should be torn between two conflicting ideologies. Maybe they want to save the future but struggle with the ethics of altering time. Let their inner conflict drive the story.
3. World-Building: Time travel should feel grounded in the futuristic world you create. Describe the technology, the politics around time travel, and how it’s controlled. How has society adapted to the existence of time travel?
4. Focus on Tension: The tension in a time travel story often comes from uncertainty. What will happen if the protagonist makes the wrong choice? How can they trust their knowledge of the future when everything could change in an instant?
5. Foreshadowing: Use foreshadowing to drop clues about what’s coming, but keep the true consequences hidden until later in the story. You want the reader to be as unsure about the future as your protagonist.