Creative Writing Prompts

If you’re ever stuck for ideas - or maybe even have writer's block, creative writing prompts are your friends!

These are for you to play with. Don’t take them too seriously. You cannot get them wrong. Use them along with freewriting to loosen up your writing muscle so to speak. (And don’t forget the magic of EFT for helping your fiction writing flow.)

These creative writing prompts are not designed to launch you into a short story or novel (although, if one does, that’d be great too! Do let me know if that happens!).

But their aim is that they be training exercises.

I use the word ‘training’ quite literally. Your subconscious is an infinitely creative and wonderful tool - but it needs to know what to do. It needs to be told by your conscious mind what’s expected of it. And the more you train it, the more it will get into the groove of producing original and interesting creative writing for you.

• Write The Three Little Pigs from the wolf’s point of view. (This exercise, like the one above, are good practice in playing around with Point of View. As a writer you have to be able to see things from lots of different people’s points of view. What other stories could you tell from an unusual point of view?)
  
  
• Graham somehow (you decide how) is offered the chance to have any superpower of his choice. Which one does he pick and what are the consequences? (Don’t sit there chewing your pen and wondering, keep writing the conversation between Graham and whoever/whatever is offering him this choice, until the choice presents itself.)
  
  
• Get a photograph from a magazine, and write that person’s back story.
  
  
• Rachel’s elderly mother announces that there was something she never told her, but she’s going to tell her now.
  
  
• Open up the dictionary and choose two nouns and an adjective at random. Write a piece incorporating these. Let your mind run free. If you ended up with an ‘orange desert’, don’t automatically put it on another planet. Play around with why a desert here on earth might be orange. Don't worry about how mad and zany it is - this is playing, remember?
  
  

Here are some more fiction writing prompts to boost your creativity (Opens in New Window).

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