Writing Prompts

Writing Prompts are the anomaly of the writing world. When first faced with the idea of a writing prompt, many writers turn their noses up at them. The writer feels they can make it without the gimmick or doesn’t need help. Raymond Carver once wrote, “Writing is hard, and writers need help.” Prompts are kind of like that. Once the writer runs into their first snag, they look for a solution. Sometimes you need a little help, and writing prompts can help if you open yourself up to possibilities. There is also the situation where people don’t want to write or feel they can’t write, like high school students, and these writing prompts are also for them.

It’s hard to tell, though, which writing prompts will help and which prompts will fizzle. I give prompts to my writers every day. I have given and received writing prompts for 25 years in workshops, courses, and writer’s groups. I’ve found a few characteristics that a good writing prompt needs to reach down into the writer and get them writing. Here are ten things to look for when you are looking for a good prompt.

1. The prompt has the right tone and voice. You can’t have a horror prompt that sounds like a joke. You can’t have a romance prompt that lectures. The technique of the prompt is essential. You are probably on the right track if the prompt matches the tone.

2. The prompt is high interest. Boring prompts are the worst. You can tell when the instructor, prof. Or the workshop leader just didn’t put any time into the prompt—Frost’s “No tears in the writer…” quote. If a prompt doesn’t move you or get you excited to write, it will not inspire anyone else to write.

3. Cliché prompts, much like needing to be high interest, a prompt needs to be original. If you make a prompt the exact old same, I think it makes it harder to create. For instance, write a prompt about being a rebel. I was given this prompt in a workshop one time. I can’t take watching a tv show I don’t like; there is no way I will be able to hold my interest through writing a boring story cliché story. It’s just not going to happen.

4. Story starters can be inspiring. I’ve found that prompts that write the first paragraph or a couple of sections of a story seem to inspire me to write if they are done well. Suppose the first paragraph of writing is excellent if it has a good tone. If writing is exciting and pulls me in, I want to write like that. I think it’s like a writer. Generally, we want to be writers because of something we read. When I read something extraordinary, it makes me want to write.

5. Oddly, the more moving parts, the better. Prompts are the opposite of excellent writing in many cases. The more complicated they are, the more they get me thinking and writing. They need good descriptions to get me pointed in the right direction. It’s a little hard to explain, but examples might help:

Example 1: Write about two characters who meet and fall in love.

Example 2: Write about two characters in a hurricane who meet and fall in love as the eye of the storm passes above them.

The first one, I’ve got nothing. I’m moving on. The second example gives me enough to want to try it. It presents me with an exciting idea.

6. An element of writing involves the best prompts I have ever written. I have written several goods (later published) short stories based on prompts. Both of those prompts had story elements involved—the best way to write a story where there is a juxtaposition between 2 characters and their situations. I wrote a story about an agoraphobia falling in love with an exhibitionist at a meteor show. I love that story. A writing prompt with a literary element explicitly stated generally inspires the writer in me. It seems like a challenge.

We may add more pointers in the future. For now, these six will get you started. We also have a wide range of writing prompts here on the site. The writing prompts below are for many different kinds of writers in different situations. Writing prompts could be fun if you left them. We will post a new one every week! We want you to have fun with these! So enjoy and keep writing!

Writing Prompt: You Meet a Dragon

May 28, 2019 by admin 3 Comments

You are on vacation, driving across country. You are a couple days into the journey when you stop in the small desert town of Ever Springs. The town was named after a magic spring that no longer flows through downtown.

Ever Springs is a quiet town of about 5000 people. It has a downtown area built in the 1850s with a general store, a post office, hotel, mom and pop restaurant, a couple bars and a court house. It’s a typical idyllic American town. The little town is at least 100 miles from any other city. It really wasn’t well marked on the map, but it was the only place for another 100 miles to sleep, and you just wanted to stop and rest.

You have stopped here on your way to your real vacation on the West Coast. You want the beach, and you know your friends are waiting for you. Your excitement keeps you up. It’s 3 a.m. and you can’t sleep. (You can have a family, be with friends or be on your own, whatever is best for you in your writing. You can also be male or female, pick one). You decide to go walking. You are pretty sure there is little to no crime in this little quiet town out in the middle of the desert.

You walk downtown. When you leave your hotel there are 3 little stoplights all flashing, but the buildings are so stuck in time, you are enjoying yourself just look. You walk for 5 mins to the edge of town, where the high school is, and the road travels out into the darkness of the desert. Little communities of houses can be seen behind the buildings of the town. No one is out. The small stream of occasional traffic passing through the town has even stopped.

You stand and look out at the desert thinking of the rest of your trip. Soon you will be with your friends, suddenly you hear something whoosh by overhead. You look out into the desert night and see a large bird flying away from the town. It is very large. After a minute it turns, flies up, and back toward the town. You feel odd about it, so you turn and decide to go back to your hotel, walking a little faster than before.

The large bird passing 20 feet your head, and it casts a large shadow. About 100 yards away, right in the middle of the quiet little down, it lands and turns toward you, and for the first time you realize, it is not a bird, but a very large dragon, something you have only seen on tv and in story books. You freeze.

The dragon, leans low, moving toward you. You are frozen with fear. You think maybe you are dreaming. At he comes close, he stops and begins to speak…

You can write your story below in the comments, or just write it for yourself….please leave me a comment and tell me what you think of the prompt. I wrote this one late and quickly, so if you see mistakes, leave THEM in the comments. I’ll correct them, thanks!

Creative Writing Prompt: Writing Prompts that end the world: Name that Virus

April 16, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Here are writing prompts that end the world: Name that virus. I know it’s specific. It grew from one prompts, and I wanted to stay on topic. We will be working to turn all our single writing prompts into a nice long list of prompts, so some will be pretty specific. I honestly have so much need for writing prompts in my writing (1 give one everyday) that it’s hard not to just list all of them, but I want these lists to be specific and useful (maybe not always this specific) Anyway, here are my The End of the World: Name that virus writing prompts. Spoiler: They are all about viruses that end the world.

1. A virus that makes people zombies is sweeping through the 3rd world. Describe the characteristics of the virus.

2. You wake up, early. Pulling the curtain back, you can see the sun is just rising. You hear sirens. You go down stairs and look out the window. The house across the street is on fire, but there are no firetrucks. An ambulance is turned on its side at the end of the street. The paramedics bodies are scattered on the ground. A group of people are on their knees eating the body.

You can’t believe what you are seeing. A women in a jogging suit runs by being chased by a bloody man.

You realize they have not seen you. You go back up stairs and close the bedroom door and lock it. You sit on the bed and look at you wife. You prepare yourself to tell her about what you saw. You shake her. She moans. She shaker again and say, “Wake up honey, something horrible is happening….”

She sits up. She is pale. Her eyes are blood shot. She opens her mouth and blood pours out on the bed…

3. Write a story that talks about a werewolf virus surging through your town,

4. A vampire virus is being reported in the news and on social media. No one believes it can be real. At the bar, you have lucked out and the date you are talking to is way out of your league. She wants to take you home, but as you look into her gorgeous face, sitting in her car, she tells you she has been infected.

5. You go rock climbing in the desert. In the process you fall into a cave. You are luckily unharmed. You look at the steep walls of the cave and decide you will take your chances and try to find a way out underground. As you are walking you stumble into a large room of monsters. They have large fangs, and slimy skin. Their eyes are large, and they are pale. You scream at first and are quickly surround.

One of them demands that you should point the light at the ground, or they will kill you. “What do you want?” you ask. This starts deliberations.

After a little while the leader comes back to you. “We want the world to be like us. So we are going to help you get home. We once were just like you, and I can smell you’ve been infected.”

6. You are working in the hospital in the town where the virus seems to have started. The halls are filled with dead bodies. You are giving the patient a cup of ice chips when you notice your chemical protection suit has a hole in it.

7. The man at the airport is screaming, “No you have to stop him. He has the virus. He will kill us all.” He is being wrestled to the ground by airport security.

8. The news reporter on television keeps coughing. Everyone seems to be sick. Blood starts coming out of the reporters mouth.

9. It’s been 300 days since the virus hit. Your supply of canned foods has run out. You know you have to venture out.

10. The man on television just said the words “super ebola.”

Free Writing, and How it Helps You Write Better

April 10, 2019 by admin Leave a Comment

Stories only happen to people who can tell them.

– Lou Willett Stanek

Being a writer (a blogger, a copywriter, an academic writer, a poet – choose the right variant), you’ve heard about the phenomenon of free writing probably, even if you never used it yourself. Chances are, however, that you practice free writing quite often to deal with your writer’s block for example, but you just do not know its definition.

Free writing can be very useful; it helps you awake your creativity and learn yourself better. Write down your thoughts, and you might be surprised. But do you know how to use free writing in a right way? Mark Levy perfectly describes the phenomenon of free writing and its usage in his book Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content; the secrets of free writing have been revealed finally.

The point of free writing is condensation and fixation of your own scattered thoughts on paper: you take a notebook or a laptop and write two or three pages of a text, denoting a certain point of concentration which is not always expressed with exact concerns or questions. Sometimes it is just a word you start your writing with.

It is important to start writing, trying not to dwell; and you will see how sentences pull different ideas out of your subconsciousness. Such a method helps you synchronize the voice of your intuition with paper, find solutions which are hard to plumb, revive your curiosity and desire to work when you are attacked by blues.

Six secrets of free writing have been revealed by Mark Levy in his book; trying to follow these tips, you’ll be among those lucky ones who think clearly, understand themselves and their thoughts better, overcome writer’s blocks easily, and create writing masterpieces, gaining new knowledge and improving their writing skills.

1. Do not try too hard

It expresses the absence of any particular purpose of writing. You just know that free writing activity is useful, so you sit and write, limiting yourself with time or scope only. What is more important here is the process of writing itself, so just relax and do not think of results and significance of this exercising.

2. Write quickly and continuously

It’s a really interesting feature of free writing: you should try not to stop while writing. When you do not know how to continue a previous sentence, just start writing about what you see or feel at the moment: “It snows again, and it seems colder…”, “Why am I writing all this right now?”, “It seems I’ve forgotten to turn off the light in my bathroom”, etc.

3. Set time frames for your writing

Tell yourself to write 1000 words for 20 minutes for example. You can arrange a super-hard free writing for yourself, using such applications as Write or Die to make the process easier. It may seem that this recommendation contradicts the first one in the list, but it is not true: time limit allows you to start the process of “clinging” one sentence after another; and if you do not hurry and do not make big pauses for thinking – you lose momentum which push your subconscious ideas out of your head.

4. Write the way you think

Free writing is not a process of writing as it is, but a method to monitor your cogitation.

It’s very easy to follow this tip: just do not think someone will read your writings except you.

5. Develop your thought

Once again: just grab one thought after another. All famous essay writers use this trick to come up with arguments needed to express their points of view and prove them.

6. Redirect your attention

Attention switches are simple questions you ask yourself (in a written form) to refocus your mind to some unexplored elements of the situation.

Use this method to analyze some event or day in general. For example, after reading the book of Mark Levy you might make the list of some issues from it:

How to make it exciting?
How to increase its value?
What do I miss here?
Where was I wrong?
How should I use the information I already have?
What are the important data I do not have?

Effective methods of free writing to optimize this process

1. Use a sheet of paper to consider unusual points of view and bring all seemingly incompatible ideas together.

2. Start your free writing session with a particular phrase (it is called an aiming) to determine a direction of your writing.

3. Write possible ideas and solutions without criticizing or evaluating their realization.

Use assumptions to get out of a dead end. Give written answers to the following four questions: What is the problem I’m trying to solve?; Who had a chance to solve a similar problem?; How did they solve it?; How can their decision be used with regard to my situation?

A short session of free writing can help you find answers. In order to get really fresh thoughts, try to perform a series of sessions with the total duration of a few hours. Make sure that each session of your free writing starts with a new direction, even if it seems unnatural and difficult.

By Lesley Vos, a novice writer and a passionate blogger who is honored to be a guest contributor to such wonderful blogs as Novel Publicity, Helping Writers Become Authors, Janice Hardy Blog, and others. Lesley is always ready to share her knowledge with everyone who needs it.

Writing Prompt: Vampire’s Someone to Love

September 11, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Vampires Someone to love

You are vampire, female or male, and while you need food, you have found that you need love more. At this point in your 500 years you have only been in love once. You realize that through that loss you have been damaged so badly that you have never been able to look at the humans as any more than food.

Now, you want a lover. You want to whisk someone away. You have money and power, but you are really alone, even though you do have human servants who you eat only on occasion. None of these humans seem like the right fit.

You know some groups of vampires, but you are finding that vampires are not your type. You have started going to talk therapy and the psychologist thrills you.

In 500 words write your awkward, asking out of your therapist, and how he or she responds. You can also write this as you are on your first date with that person. Remember, you are a vampire, you are vulnerable and deadly. You have a longing to be loved…..
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Horror Prompt: Hammer it home to this end

September 11, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

Write this prompt in the first person limited.

You come home from a night with friends. You are alone, and you go into your apartment. You are do not have a family. You hear something in the other room, and you go to investigate. When you walk into your bedroom someone hits you on the head with a ball peen hammer. You fall to the ground, he hits you several more time.

In this prompt you need to write what the person is thinking and feeling. They need to be confused because they didn’t know the stalker was in the house. You also may not even be able to realize what is hitting you.

Make sure that you describe good scenes, and what happens after the few hits with the hammer. Does the burglar/slasher just leave you there for dead? Give details. This prompt is our fear when we yell at the person not to go in the room. In this prompt, you have been beaten and you must realize, if your life were a movie, people would be screaming at you not to go in the room.

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Please write your story as the prompt indicates, post below, get published on EWR. It’s that simple.

Works published below are owned by and copyrighted by their authors. No one has permissions to reprint or use any story posted here without the express written consent from the author.