Sonnet Prompts
Quick answer: Sonnet prompts with arguments built in: fourteen lines, a turn at line nine, and subjects that deserve the form, from eviction notices to first frost.
A sonnet is not fourteen lines of rhyme; it is an argument with a hinge. For eight lines you establish a situation, a claim, a weather; then at the volta, somewhere around line nine, the poem turns on itself: but, and yet, until, unless. Shakespeare spends three quatrains on the ravages of time and then wagers everything on a couplet. The machinery is small and ruthless, which is why it has survived seven centuries of poets trying to wear it out.
The practical consequence: choose subjects that contain a turn already. A sonnet about how nice spring is has nowhere to pivot. A sonnet about loving the house you are about to leave turns by itself.
The Prompts
Each of these carries a built-in volta. Your job is to find where the turn wants to happen, then build eight lines of pressure before it.
- Write a sonnet to a house on the last night before moving out: octave for the rooms and their history, turn at the sound of the removal van.
- An eviction notice rewritten as a sonnet: the landlord's formal language for eight lines, and the tenant's voice breaking through at line nine.
- Write a love sonnet to someone you have not met yet, with the volta admitting you may have already walked past them.
- A sonnet in which a doctor rehearses delivering bad news: eight lines of practised phrases, then the patient's face makes the turn.
- Argue with a dead poet for eight lines about how to live; let them win at the volta.
- Write a sonnet about first frost, where the octave celebrates the beauty and the turn remembers whose garden, and whose hands, taught you to notice it.
- A sonnet spoken by a bridge: eight lines of traffic, weather and rivets, then the turn reveals what it watched one night and cannot forget.
- Write fourteen lines about a photograph of your parents before you existed, turning on the moment you realise they were not waiting for you.
- Compose a sonnet where the octave is a job interview's confident answers and the sestet is the truth thought silently behind them.
- A sonnet about teaching a child to ride a bicycle, turning at the exact line where the running hand lets go of the saddle.
- Write a break-up sonnet in which the octave blames them entirely and the volta, honestly and expensively, does not.
- A sonnet to your own body at midlife: inventory for eight lines, gratitude after the turn, and no apology anywhere.
- Write a sonnet in plain contemporary speech, no thee, no doth, about a supermarket self-checkout failing to recognise an item, turning into a poem about being unrecognised.
- Take a proverb you distrust, early bird, rolling stone, and spend the octave agreeing with it, the sestet quietly dismantling it.
How to Use These
Draft the volta first. Seriously: write line nine before line one, because if the turn works, the poem works, and eight lines of pressure are easier to build when you know what they are pressing toward. Do not chase rhyme in the first draft; get the argument down in roughly ten-syllable lines and let the rhymes surface in revision, where slant rhymes, moon and mean, love and leave, will serve you better than forced exact ones.
Give yourself two sessions. Sonnets written in one sitting tend to end with a couplet that merely summarises; a night's sleep usually reveals the real last line hiding around line twelve. If the finished poem still turns when you read it aloud to someone who has never heard the word volta, it is done. Fourteen tight lines also happen to sit beautifully inside contest length limits, and structure is one of the five things Writory judges score.
What poets can take from this
- Write the volta before anything else; it is the poem's engine.
- Choose subjects that already contain a turn, a loss, a but, an unless.
- Draft the argument first, rhyme in revision, and prefer slant rhymes.
- Keep the couplet for discovery, never for summary.
- Plain contemporary speech beats costume-drama diction every time.
Try it yourself
Write a sonnet in which someone reads an old shopping list found in a coat pocket, octave for the ordinary items, volta at the one item that proves whose handwriting it is.
Questions
Does a sonnet have to rhyme?
Traditionally yes, in a set scheme, but many modern sonnets keep only the fourteen lines and the volta. Start with the argument and the turn; add rhyme if it sharpens rather than strangles the poem.
What is a volta?
The turn: the point, usually at line nine or before the final couplet, where the sonnet's thinking changes direction. It might be a rebuttal, a confession or a widening of view. Without one, fourteen lines is a paragraph.
Shakespearean or Petrarchan, which should I learn first?
Shakespearean is easier in English: three quatrains and a couplet, seven rhyme sounds instead of four or five. Petrarchan's tighter rhyme demands more, so most poets earn it second.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the October contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.