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What are Creative Writing Prompts?
Creative Writing Prompts can be defined as,
“The clues and ideas that help you begin your journey of composing your own masterpiece. In other words, prompts are similar to the warm ups before exercise which help to loosen your imagination, hone your writing muscles and set the reigns of your pen free to take off”.
Have you ever been in a situation where you are sitting in your room or some other calm and serene place with a pen and a paper in your hand, your fingers itching to create something out of words but every time your pen is close to touching the paper, there you are—blank—not knowing what to write?
This is what they call ‘getting stuck in the "writer’s block".
Do not worry!
This is a ‘disease’ common with all the writers and can be cured by creative writing exercises and you could make use of another simple technique called ‘creative writing prompts’.
Getting Started with Your Own Creative Writing Prompts
Prompts exist in various forms such as a short phrases, a singular word from the dictionary, a vision, a picture, any object or people around you, a memory from the past, an abstract concept or any idea from an incident or story etc.
Below are some examples of few writing prompts which you would find helpful when cranking up essays, poems, short stories and articles:
- If you thought ghosts don’t exist…
- An old man was sitting in his garden when…
- When I am sixty years old, I want to be…
- Mosquito
- I love them. Their names are engraved on my birth certificate.
- Colors
- Birds are…
- How to make a pancake
- Write 150 words on the life of a coin
Some Good Writing Prompts Resources From the Web
Teacher’s Scholastic: The interface provides you the options to pre-select a level for your story. The next page offers a magic box which generates random titles and topic ideas for stories.
Random Word Generator: You are given a random name. You can type in a word type (noun, adjective, verb etc.) along with it’s complexity level (common, average, obscure etc.) and the word generator generates words for you on the basis of your selection.
Word Perhect: The site provides a randomly generates quiz which takes you to a mash up of options for getting some nice weird ideas.
Isnoop Net Fridge: A mash up of words which you can move around to form, get and build ideas for your stories and poems. The tools is very effective if you are short on inspiration and creative writing ideas.
Graphic Poetry: The page gives you random instances of sentences which you can browse around to get ideas and starters for poetry and fiction writing.
Different Types of Creative Writing Prompts
Story Starters
Creative writing story starters for short stories can be found around you. Look around and add up objects, people, instances and then began forming out ideas. Write down each idea as you work on it.
Poetry Prompts
For poetry writing you can find poetry starters from nature (seasons, colors, insects, birds) and snippets of words around you to form verses and stanzas.
Creative Writing Prompts for Kids
- You spent a day with your great aunt. Describe your day.
- Narrate how you spent the first day of your school.
- What would you do if you were the last person on earth?
- What would you do if you had two heads?
- What if you were a rabbit… How would you start your day?
- What would you do if you suddenly woke up in another country and no one could understand a word you said!
- Write a poem about your favorite person, animal, or place.
- Write a story from the perspective of a butterfly hatching up from the larva. What does it experience, see and feel?
- It was your birthday yesterday. Narrate how you spent the day.
- Imagine you wake up one morning and realize you have become batman. Describe what happens and how you come back to your normal self.
Fiction Writing Prompts
Good fiction writing can be done by working on your imagery, characterization and dialogues. For an effective fiction writing prompt, you need to watch the development of story in novels, drams, plays and movies.
