365 Creative Writing Prompts
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your support! Sharing is caring! If you want to become a better writer, the best thing you can do is practice writing every single day. Writing prompts are useful because we know sometimes it can be hard to think of what to write about! To help you brainstorm, we put together this list of 365 creative writing prompts to give you something to write about daily.
How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word
Find a Subject You Care About Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.
How to Write a Ghost Story - Picture the Dead — Ghost Posts
Having trouble coming up with a perfectly terrifying scenario? We’re here to help. Download a pdf of this writing exercise that we created for Don’t Forget To Write: 50 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons for the Secondary Grades. This awesome book offers writing lesson plans from the imaginative and highly acclaimed 826 National writing labs. Created as a resource to reach all students (even those most resistant to creative writing), these writing lessons are written by experts—and favorite novelists, actors, and other entertainers pitched in, too.
Preventing Teen Pregnancy: Three Words Most Likely to Make My Blood Boil
I hate, hate, hate that phrase. Nearly everywhere I go or look as a young adult sexuality educator anymore, I run into it incessantly. Let me be clear: I don't hate doing all that we can, to help people of every age to avoid pregnancies or parenting they do not want or do not feel ready for. I'm so glad to do that, and it's a big part of my job at Scarleteen and elsewhere when I work as a sexuality and contraception educator and activist. I don't hate doing what we can to help women who want help to determine when the best possible time is for them to become pregnant and parent (for those women who want to do so at all), and to do what we can to be realistic about pregnancy and parenting when counseling those who are considering either or both. I'm on board with parents of teens or twentysomethings who don't want to pay the costs for their teen's pregnancy or the child of their teen, or don't want a new infant in the house.
Ten Free Video Writing Prompts to Spark the Love of Writing in Your Students - John Spencer
I believe that writing should be fun. It’s not merely a functional activity we have to get through in life. I believe that persuasive, informational, and functional writing should be as fun as writing a story. I believe that all writing is inherently creative and that you can easily embed design challenges into writing (which I included in my latest illustrated writing idea). This is why I love creating video writing ideas. I used to hand students paragraph-long writing prompts and it felt overwhelming.
Data Mining Novels Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling
Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.” The video is available on YouTube. Vonnegut was representing in graphical form an idea that writers have explored for centuries—that stories follow emotional arcs, that these arcs can have different shapes, and that some shapes are better suited to storytelling than others.
Writepop - Science fiction stories, humor, and writing about writing
A thousand lifetimes in space – Living on a generation ship 1,000 human beings are selected to board a spaceship headed for the stars. The trip is so long that they will die in space, but their descendants will reach a new planet. To save room on the generation ship, the original population of the ship is all women, with children to be produced by artificial insemination.
Interviewing Characters: Follow the Energy - Conversations with Dale
On November 13, 2007 I ran out of plot for the NaNoWriMo novel I was writing. I had no idea what to write next. That’s not uncommon for NaNo novelists, but I hadda do something to jiggle myself loose. In NaNoWriMo, word count is everything, and I couldn’t afford to fall behind. So I tried something I hadn’t tried before: I interviewed my characters.
