Writing can be difficult, and it’s not only full-time writers who suffer from "writer’s block". Students have papers to write. Programmers have documentation to write. Teachers have curriculums to write. Marketing agents have advertisements to write. Small business owners have copy to write. No matter who you are, you’ve likely sat in front of a blank page without an idea of how to start. That’s where writing prompts can come to your rescue.
Writing prompts demand a written response - one that can be as serious an answer as you’d like, or it can be full of nonsense. But either way, it gets you writing. A simple phrase can ignite an inferno of prose from within. The hard part is starting, and creative writing prompts do that for you. Here are some great places where you can find writing prompts to help jump start your writing muscles.
Writer’s Digest
Writer’s Digest is one of the most famous publications for writers. With a history that begins as far back as 1920, it’s hard to discredit the immense amount of help that the Digest has given to amateur and professional writers alike.
For a while, they’ve been running a section with regularly updated writing prompts. Once every week, Brian A. Klems posts a new writing prompt for you to respond to. If you need an ongoing source of prompts, be sure to check it out.
Creative Writing Prompts
On the Creative Writing Prompts site, you’ll see a big block of numbers ranging from 1 to 346. Each number is a unique writing prompt. All you have to do is hover over a number and a popup box will show with the prompt displayed.
If you just need a quick creative writing prompt, this site is great. The downside is that the site isn’t updated regularly, so once you’ve gone through all of them, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Writing Excuses
To be sure, Writing Excuses is a weekly writing podcast. However, one great thing that those podcasters do is to end each episode with a writing prompt. Most of the time, the prompt is related to the topic of the podcast, which is even better.
In an episode about character viewpoints, for example, the prompt will be designed to exercise your skills at writing in different viewpoints. A setting-related episode would prompt you to write about a certain kind of setting. Stuff like that.
Writing Excuses is led by prolific author, Brandon Sanderson, and two of his good friends, Dan Wells and Howard Tayler.
One Minute Writer [No Longer Available]
You have 1,440 minutes a day. Use one of them to write.
That’s the tagline for the One Minute Writer blog. They live up to that tagline by providing you with near-daily writing prompts. Prompts that will spur your fingers to type. Prompts that will force you to confront and analyze interesting ideas that can be translated into stories.
For ongoing prompts delivered consistently, you can’t beat the One Minute Writer. Subscribe to the posts today and you’ll never run out of ideas again.
Creative Writing Solutions
Creative Writing Solutions has an individual page dedicated to listing a bunch of writing prompts that they’ve come up with.
The awesome thing about these creative writing prompts is that the creators have divided them into different categories. Some of the prompts are meant to help you formulate new story ideas. Others are designed to help you flesh out characters and settings.
The drawback? High quality but low quantity. Once you’ve gone through them all, you’ll have to find another source.
Head over to Twitter and run a search for the #writingprompt hashtag. It’s one of the Twitter hashtags that every writer should know.
You’ll find a whole bunch of Twitter posts dedicated to writing prompts. People from all over the world post up their prompts and you, the lucky one, get to consume them all for free and at your own leisure. User-generated content is awesome, and this hashtag is just another example of that.
Where do you go to get your dose of writing prompts? Let us know in the comments.
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