More than abilities or talent, writing and creativity are habits. Therefore, you have to train them as much as you can to make you better at it.
With all the resources at the tap of a screen that we have right now, there are plenty of exercises and prompts for you to practice and have fun creating new stories.
Writing prompts will help you improve your creativity, help you get out of writer’s block, and apply new writing tools and theories you learn.
Why do I bring theory into this? Learning theory is also helpful for inspiration and motivation to create and write wonderful stories.
Despite it feeling restricting to some, as Robert McKee once said: The constraint that setting imposes on story design doesn’t inhibit creativity; it inspires it.”
These writing prompts are fantastic because they don’t have to be only writing prompts. They can also inspire a painting, a choreography, a new song, and anything else you could think of. Break off all the limits you thought these exercises could have.
Here, we share with you 40 prompts to have fun while putting your creativity to work.
- Use one of your chats to turn it into a story.
- Remember a time when you had to make an important decision in your life, write about what could have happened if you had chosen a different option.
- Choose someone you know or a character you like and put them in a situation you were in recently.
- One of your characters will say, “I knew it all along.”
- A story in which the narrator is constantly interacting with the main character
- A story with someone in a comma.
- A space trip or mission, but from the perspective of the spaceship.
- Take one of your dreams, whether it is the craziest one, your favorite one, or the last one you had, and turn it into a complete and structured story.
- Your main character is someone’s pet.
- An adult who gets in touch with their inner child after a really long time.
- Time stopped for absolutely everybody except a bunch of people around the world, and nobody knows why.
- Take a painting, any you like, and create a story.
- A marriage cheats on each other with the same person. You choose whether the lover already knows this or not.
- You get a package in your door, and when you open it, you see a baby… but from a creature you’ve never seen before.
- Your main character is someone in the pre-life world who chooses how challenging the life of a soul will be based on how they acted in their last time on earth. You make the rules of how this is decided.
- Your main character got to marry their famous crush, write how they did it.
- You have to help someone escape a maximum security facility. This is the only person capable of saving the world. But thanks to a misunderstanding, everybody thinks quite the opposite.
- Someone just kidnapped the person your main character loves the most. The kidnapper calls them to tell them what they want, but the call freezes, and they can’t hear the kidnapper’s requirements. The call finishes with “You have 24 hours,” and they hang up.
- In an experiment of telepathy, your main character ends up trapped in somebody else's mind. Getting access to all their memories and secrets.
- The sun wants to retire. Find a way to fix it: Convince the sun not to leave, find a replacement, or work to make the earth independent of the sun. It’s up to you.
- In their dreams, your main character keeps dreaming of the same person/the same place. They are starting to believe it is not just a dream.
- Your main character just received a letter, but it is from a couple of years forward in the future and has their own signature at the end.
- Your main character is a creature hated by humans, but they don’t mean any harm.
- Your main character is a witch who works undoing love-binding spells, but this one is particularly powerful. They could kill their client if they keep trying to undo it the traditional way.
- Your main character is a kid who accidentally got in the middle of their mother's mission, who is a special agent, but always kept it a secret from them.
- Your main character escapes their family house to follow their dream: to become the #1 in the most wanted worldwide.
- Your main character is about to leave the country. But someone knocks on the door. Is the past love your main character never got over, asking them to give them one last day to convince them to stay and give them another chance.
- Write how the pandemic was just the first step of a master plan for something worse.
- The algorithm falls in love with a user and tries to communicate with them.
- A random number texts your character: “You’re the only one I will truly miss. Thank you for everything, goodbye.”
- Your main character goes to a speed dating event, and someone tells them, “We meet at last.”
- Your main character is a stunt actor but gets a major injury at work. Write about their healing process and what they decide to do with their life afterward. Do they keep working as a stunt actor? Do they choose another career path?
- Your main character wakes up in a mansion, and apparently, they are the owner, but they have no idea how it happened.
- Your main character dies, and when they get to meet with death, she realizes she killed the wrong person.
- Your main character had a really bad breakup some years ago. Today, someone was hired as the new boss: their ex.
- Your main character meets again with their childhood best friend.
- Your main character works as a thanatopractor (The person who prepares the corpses for their funeral). But suddenly, the “dead old man” wakes up and asks your character to help him escape and get a new life.
- Write to someone you should have apologized to but never did.
- Some random things start appearing in your main character’s house. They don’t know where they come from, but two weeks after this began, they see something weird in the news: People have gone missing, and their description is somehow related to the new items in their house.
- Nobody knows what is outside the city. It has always been isolated and protected by a gigantic wall. There has been a random selection among some volunteers to get one to explore the outside. Your main character has been chosen to do so.
These are all little seeds to help you create something bigger and closer to what you really want to make. You can combine them, change them to your will, and maybe even make an activity with your friends to see what each of you comes up with using the same prompt.
Take the most out of these prompts, and let your imagination go to new places. There are no limits when it comes to creativity.
If you’d to take these prompts to other disciplines, like digital art, or music, but don’t know the first thing about digital art platforms or music theory, you could find the perfect course for what you want to try right here in Skillademia. Explore new horizons and become a multidisciplinary artist today!
