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Science Story Starters: 20 STEM-Themed Writing Prompts to Inspire Lab Lit Stories

Category: Resources

One of our earliest posts introduced the genre of lab lit. (See “What Is Lab Lit, and Why Should You Read It?”) In this post, we invite you to be the author and pen some lab lit of your own. Below are 20 sets of opening lines. You get to write the rest.  

As a middle school classroom teacher, I often gave my students creative writing prompts like these for fun during a warm-up period or a journaling exercise. This post is in the “Resources” category because I hope they might be of use to teachers searching for writing prompts with a scientific twist, or to any kind of writers looking for a playful little warm-up activity.

The situations alluded to in these story starters have to do with the people and problems of science – realistic science as we’re familiar with it in the present day. You might remember from the lab lit intro blog that the hallmarks of the genre are realistic situations with realistic science. . . So not sci-fi, nothing speculative or futuristic. We are planning, however, to post another blog piece along the same lines as this one, but with sci-fi themes and situations. Look for that in the near future.

Also, if you enjoy writing challenges like this, check out Wired’s 6-word story contest. It’s incredible the concepts that can fit into this tiny 6-word format. There’s a new prompt posted every month. We hope you’ll give it a try. After you try one of our prompts, of course. 

Thanks for reading, and have fun spinning your science-y stories!

1.The usually punctual UC-LP Professor Mindy Washington was running late for her weekly pub trivia night with friends when her work phone started blowing up. She couldn’t believe the news had gotten out that fast.

2. As Dr. Gabriel Jimenez drove deeper into the highland wilderness, the ostensible object of his pilgrimage receded farther from his mind, replaced by a burning clarity about the investigation that had held up his work at Dennor Corp. for the past two years. 

3. Before last Wednesday, there hadn’t been a significant lab accident since the fluorine group moved out of the building. Last week’s toxic exposure could have been a lot worse. Asli couldn’t help wondering, who had bypassed safety procedures. . . and why?

4. It’s discoveries just like this that Amaryllis Levy loved about materials science, but as she stared at the microbes that had made it possible, she wondered, had there been discoveries like this?

5. Amihan loved the grad students’ regular Friday happy hour because it meant that he had the lab all to himself – until the new postdoc showed up. But that was only the beginning of the chaos that ensued that January.

6. Engineers, MaryClaire had first noted as an undergrad, tended strongly towards the “work hard – play hard” mentality. Her new colleague at the Institute, however (and what kind of name was Mars, for a woman no less, she couldn’t help thinking), took that dichotomous tendency to the extreme. 

7. If only Professor Ghabriz had gotten to the lab earlier, it never would have happened. At least, not to her team. Not now.

8. Dr. Ky Lopez-Lee was desperate. They had been the lead investigator for the past six years on a highly promising gene therapy for a rare form of blindness, and now, because of a looming government shutdown over the federal budget, all of their work would be lost, whether the financial crisis lasted a day or a year. 

9. The lead singer, a biochemist from Ado’s group, suddenly dropped out, leaving the two physicists to scramble for a replacement for their upcoming gig. The process went much more quickly than anticipated when the postdoc in quantum computing, Mihi Hyun, showed up mysteriously at their next practice.

10. The day before his PhD defense, Darius McClure fished under the desk for the litmus paper he’d just dropped. His hand fell on a much larger paper pile than he’d expected.

“Well, what do you know?” he mumbled under his breath as he extracted the missing draft of Jas Robi’s paper. He had a decision to make.

11. What a time for funding to run out. Dr. K.J. Epps laughed incredulously. All the meticulously laid groundwork to establish the mere possibility of the new pathway, and the efforts of half a generation of grad students to establish a collection of samples. K.J. had taken the first half of her professional career to shift the narrative ever so slightly, and now at the critical moment of discovery – and she knew in her bones it would be discovery – the grants went dry. Her next thoughts surprised even her.

12. What good was the weekend if she never got to leave the lab, Inez wondered to herself. Well, it was a good thing she still loved her work in cell biology as much as she ever had. Still, the conference right around the corner would be a nice get-away. 

If only she could figure out why the rest of her lab wasn’t going this year. Everyone ducked the question uncomfortably, and Inez was afraid of what that meant.

13. “What are you saying, Miles? That it’s not viable? Rishi’s got pretty substantial evidence to the contrary,” the voice said. 

“Our patent won’t be in jeopardy much longer and we can. . . well, you know.”

Ash trembled, willing the voice to stop. And it did, resuming at a whisper. The rest was unintelligible, and then the whole floor shook with the explosion. 

14. “Well, of course at first I thought I’d made another error inputting the variables, you see. . .” PhD student Jeremy Vardanyan droned on to Professor Lal’s frustration. Would she ever be sent graduate students who were adequately prepared in math and able to be relied upon for simple statistical calculations? It was a constant source of irritation for the IIT-trained radiochemist. 

“But of course, so did their team, that is, before the signal. . . well, not exactly before, but you know what I mean,” Jeremy continued as Professor Lal largely tuned out. “And then of course, at Oklo in ‘72 they initially thought” – at that, the professor’s ears perked to immediate attention.

15. Naya chose Barfield University for her master’s not only because of its renowned and well-funded genomics labs, but also because of its support for first-generation college students and minorities in STEM. Her cousin’s best friend had taken just that route and raved about the opportunities that the program provided. So to be in this situation just days into her first semester at Barfield was unthinkable. 

16. What was Manuel doing in that section of the library? If his suspicions had been aroused earlier by the missing lab notebook, Professor Olume’s misgivings now flowered into full-blown mistrust. What was his grad student trying to prove?

17. Zuri and Beck did everything together, from maintaining the control population and performing necropsies at the lab to hitting the gym and going to the same game nights together outside of work. That’s why all the techs in the lab turned to Zuri for explanation of Beck’s strange behavior that week. 

18. “Uh, yes?” Somehow Aniya stumbled into an answer to Dr. Park’s question as soon as she walked into the office on Tuesday, although the latter’s combative tone and intense expression may have just startled Aniya into the answer she thought her mentor wanted to hear. 

What was going on? Dr. Park had never raised her voice in the two and a half years that Aniya had been a postdoc with her. 

Then she saw it, the file of results from the new mass spec. The peaks on the graph were in all the wrong places.

19. Dr. Olinda Lanzo Collon was excited to begin her role as mentor to young female scientists at Briadas International. Now head of the polymer group, she had loved her R&D career from her first week on the job as a newly minted PhD in analytical chemistry. That’s why she couldn’t believe what she heard during the first meeting with her mentee, Elena.

20. Never one to share the spotlight, Gerald Miro never let another researcher scoop him. He read the industry news hot off the presses and made sure to drop information he’d read at just the right time. It wasn’t easy. Robotics moved at light speed these days. He knew Karina resented him, or perhaps thought him foolish. But, he thought bitterly, she had certainly gotten the better of him this Monday morning. Gerald wondered why that was. Surely he could do some inquiring from the right sources to find out more.

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