(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Writing Prompts

Here are links to all the prompts I’ve put up in the past here at Writ­ing About Writ­ing.  Most are prompts I’ve done myself in some writ­ing class or anoth­er or have had to design as part of oth­er projects.

Some are whim­si­cal and most­ly free writ­ing. Some are extreme­ly struc­tured and will require you to write exact­ly the amount or time that they call for. While each “rule” in a prompt often has a rea­son (most peo­ple write bet­ter under a time pres­sure than they do with none, for exam­ple) the only real rule with any prompt is to get you writ­ing, so if you feel inspired by parts of the prompt but not the rest, feel free to cheer­ful­ly ignore what­ev­er isn’t quite work­ing for you.

It’s All About the Food
Sun­day Prompts–Disney Style
Get Into The Head of Your Char­ac­ters
Con­crete Detail
Writ­ing as a Child
Make Your­self Aware of Fil­ter­ing
First Sen­tences
Son­der: Deep­en­ing Minor Char­ac­ters
From a Slight­ly Dif­fer­ent Angle
A New Year’s Inven­to­ry
Look Down Your Own Moun­tain
Pin­ter­est Sto­ry
What Have You Done for me Late­ly?
Sub­vert Expec­ta­tions (Ban­go)
Recom­bine, Recon­fig­ure, Recon­struct
Fast and Ran­dom
Metaprompts: The Prompts About Prompts
Den­tal Writ­ing Prompts?  Oh yeah.
Truth and Compassion…And Pol­i­tics
Sig­nif­i­cant Details Eulo­gy
Prac­tice Dai­ly Goal Set­ting
The Para­dox of the Human Condition‑A Civ­il War Prompt
NaNoW­riMo Warm Up (best done before NaNo)
What Does Suc­cess Look Like?
The Genre Shell Game
“Scene 2“
Short and Timed

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

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