Nessa Writes Nonsense

Prompt Theme: Monetize Everything or Bad Ideas Some People Think Are Good Ideas

1. Pay-Per-Breath Air is privately owned, and only those who can afford premium oxygen get to breathe the good stuff. The poor are left to choke on recycled, polluted air. But the big lie? Fresh air isn’t scarce. It’s just hidden behind corporate greed. Your protagonist stumbles on the truth and must decide: expose it or cash in.

2. Sleepless Society

Sleep is for the weak.... or the wealthy. In this world, valuable billable hours are lost to sleep, so it’s been chemically suppressed for all but the elite. The rich buy “luxury sleep” packages in exclusive clinics, while the rest of society spirals into exhaustion-induced madness. Your character, desperate for rest, risks everything for a forbidden nap.

3. Memories Wanted. Lived Once. Pay Little. Memories are the final frontier of monetization. Sell your happiest moments for a quick buck, but here’s the catch: once sold, the government can alter or erase memories of anyone deemed dangerous. When your protagonist realizes their memories have been tampered with, they must uncover the truth about what they’ve forgotten.

4. New Identity, New You Embarrassed yourself online? Went viral for all the wrong reasons? No problem. For the right price, you can buy a new identity, face, name, history, anything. But when your protagonist discovers their new identity comes with a dark, dangerous secret, they realize starting over isn’t as simple as it seems.

5. Love on Loan In this society, emotions are rented like timeshares. Want to feel love for a weekend? Happiness for a day? There’s a subscription plan for that. But when your protagonist’s “trial period” of love ends, they’re left hollow, and they’ll do anything to feel it again, even if it means going into emotional debt.

6. Rent-a-Family Feeling lonely? Need a picture-perfect family for your social media feed? Rent one. But when your protagonist rents a family for a weekend getaway, they discover their “temporary” relatives have no intention of leaving. Maybe they’re not as fake as they seem?

7. The Silence Tax Talking in public spaces is taxed per word. Want to speak freely? That’ll cost you. The rich dominate public discourse, while the poor are silenced. When your protagonist finds a way to bypass the system, they spark a rebellion built on the one thing the government fears most: unregulated voices.

8. The Subscription to Live

Everything in life requires a subscription—water, shelter, even your heartbeat. Miss a payment, and the consequences are fatal. Your protagonist is behind on their “Life Subscription” and has 24 hours to find a way to survive without paying the price.

No. This won’t be the thing that makes you a writer. Look at your empty notebooks and unused writing tools (Scrivener, I’m looking at you...I still love you). Pick one of those up and use it for at least a month. If you’re still not making progress, it’s not your tools. And if you are making progress? Well, you definitely don’t need that new gadget.

I am so sick of reading writing advice. It’s always just write, write, write. But what if I don’t want to? What if I want to daydream about my stories until I’m spiraling into Fae folklore, casually coming up with a title, opening line, and outline for a monster smut novel I never intend to write? (Pixie Dust and Fairy Fucks)

That’s what writing chaos is—it’s starting a story with an idea that spirals into five unrelated outlines, naming characters after inside jokes, and abandoning plot structure entirely just to spite the "rules" of how things are supposed to be done. “Ooh, you have to learn the rules before you break them.” No, you see, I already understand exactly why the fictional protagonist of my fake Fae smut gets trapped with her domineering Fae lover. I did the research. I know the Fae lore to back it up.

But I’m not that type of writer. I don’t write about that. Or am I?