The rain starts before you are properly awake. By nine it has settled into that steady, patient drum on the window that only ever seems to arrive on a Sunday, and the day has quietly cancelled itself. No walk, no market, no tidying the shed. Just the kettle, the grey light, and a long stretch of hours with nothing in them.

That is not a wasted day. It is some of the best writing weather you will get all year. Below are five prompts built for exactly this kind of afternoon, each one short enough to finish before your tea goes cold.

A Five-Minute Setup

You do not need a leather-bound journal or a candle. You need something to write with that does not have notifications on it, and somewhere to sit near a window.

• Put the phone in another room. Rain is the one sound you actually want to hear.
• Set a timer for fifteen minutes. When it goes, stop mid-sentence if you like.
• Write the date at the top of the page. Future you will be glad of it.
• Do not read back until the end of the month. First drafts are for getting things out, not for judging.

If a prompt does not fit your mood, skip it and take the next one. This is not homework.

1. The View From the Window

Pick one window — the one you can see from where you usually sit. Write for ten minutes about what is happening outside it, and nothing else. No thoughts about work, no plans for the week. Just what is there.

Describe everything visible and audible from this window, using no weather words at all. No rain, no grey, no drizzle. Find the other words.

This constraint does more than it looks like it will. Without the usual vocabulary, you notice the wheelie bin lid standing open, the pavement going dark in patches, the gull on the chimney pot that has given up entirely. You notice how leaves move differently in a shower than in a downpour. You start writing specifics instead of moods, which is what makes a page worth rereading.

If you get stuck

Make a sensory list first: five sounds, three smells, two textures, one colour. The smell of wet slate, the squeak of damp shoes on a doorstep, the hiss of tyres on a road with standing water. Then build a paragraph from the list.

2. A Wet Day You Remember

Childhood rain is a different substance. It means wet playtime, the smell of coats drying on radiators, wellies that leaked before you reached the gate.

Write about a rainy day from your childhood in the present tense, as if it is happening now. Start with a sound or an object, not a summary.

Two ways in, if the memory is slippery. Start with a thing: the box of felt tips kept for indoor break, the caravan holiday where it rained for four days straight, one umbrella shared three ways on the walk home from church. Or start with a sound: rain on a tent, the crackle of a plastic mac, the theme tune of whatever was on television when the football was called off.

Write for fifteen minutes without stopping and see which details turn up. The point is not nostalgia. It is to notice how you learned to spend a day indoors, and whether you still know how.

3. The Plan That Was Rained Off

Most of us have something we quietly hoped would be cancelled. A barbecue, a long walk with people we like but find tiring, a trip that sounded better in February.

Write about a plan that fell through because of the weather. Then answer honestly: was it relief or disappointment? What does your answer tell you?

Set it as a scene rather than a summary. The message on the group chat. The sky you checked three times. The moment you put the coat back on the hook and felt something lift, or something drop. Then finish with two short lines: "What I did instead" and "What I would choose next time."

There is a useful difference between wanting to do a thing and wanting to have done it. Wet weekends are very good at exposing it.

4. An Inventory of the House

This one works when you feel too flat to write about feelings. Stay factual.

List twenty sounds, sights and small details from inside your home today. Then choose one and write about it for ten minutes.

1. The gutter overflowing at the back.
2. The fridge switching itself off.
3. A tap dripping in the bathroom.
4. The smell of a radiator drying something woollen.

Get past twenty, because the first ten will be obvious and the interesting ones usually arrive around number fourteen. Then take the oddest item on your list — the chip in the mug, the postcard on the fridge from someone you have not replied to — and follow it wherever it goes. Domestic detail is not boring. It is what a diary of a life is actually made of.

5. A Note to Your Drier Self

Rainy Sundays are easy to romanticise in July, when you would give anything for an excuse to stay in. Write forward instead.

Write a short letter to yourself on a hot afternoon in six months' time. Tell them three things about today, one thing you are looking forward to, and one thing you have decided to stop worrying about.

Keep it to a page. Then either seal it in an envelope with a date on the front, or set a reminder on your phone and paste the words in. The pleasure of this prompt is not the writing. It is opening it later and finding out which worries were true and which had quietly dissolved while you were busy doing something else.

Making It a Habit After the Rain Stops

One wet Sunday will not build a journalling habit, but it can start one. A few things that help:

• Keep the notebook where you make tea, not in a desk drawer. Distance is the enemy.
• Claim a slot rather than a mood: twenty minutes on Sunday evening, whenever you can.
• Aim for one page. Stop while you still have something to say.
• Reread once a month. Skip the entries that bore you; they were scaffolding.

If a prompt about a wet afternoon leads somewhere heavier — a loss you have not talked about, a worry that keeps returning — that is worth taking to a friend, or to your GP. Writing is a good place to think. It is not the only place, and there is no prize for doing it alone.

For now, the kettle is probably ready, and there is at least another hour of rain coming. Start with the window.

Photo: olga Volkovitskaia / Pexels