Story Prompts to Inspire Your Inner Muse
Five Creative Writing Exercises to Help Get You Writing
Aug 3, 2009
Here's your chance to create some new story ideas, explore your writing and stimulate your creativity.
Get Started With These Six Tips:
- Try not to be judgmental. If you’re anxious about your writing, that defeats the purpose.
- Remember you are learning. There is nothing at stake here. You may choose to use submit this piece somewhere later, but forget about that for now. Right now, you're just writing. So just write.
- Make writing a habit. Try to write in the same place, at the same time, every day.
- Don’t worry about punctuation or grammar. That can come later.
- Write as quickly as you can. Don’t think. Don’t analyze. Don’t stop.
- Be kind to yourself. Writing takes practice. Not everything you write will be brilliant, and that's okay.
Begin With Something Fun:
Writing Prompt #1: English is a living language. New words are born, and old words die. Here are three words that you don't hear much anymore: poop-noddy, bawdreaming and trantles. A poop-noddy is a fool. Bawdreaming is bawdy behaviour, and trantles are objects of little value. Here's your first prompt. Write a story using all three words: poop-noddy, bawdreaming and trantles.
Writing Prompt #2: Quotations and excerpts can help trigger your writing. This is a short quote from Di Brandt's poem "Dog days in Maribor": "Twenty-five billion Barbies, plastic harems for everyone." Use this as the first line of your own poem or piece of prose.
Writing Prompt #3: Memories can be powerfully evocative. Write for as long as you like using the following prompt. Recreate your memories using taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. This prompt can take you anywhere, and you can reuse it as often as you want. Here it is: I remember ...
Writing Prompt #4: Most people have fond memories of their first pet. Write about your first cat, dog, guppy or whatever. You can make your story humourous, sad or nostalgic. It's up to you. Pick a specific incident that stands out in your mind, and write about it. You may decide to use dialogue or you could tell the story from the perspective of your pet. It doesn't matter if it happened a long time ago, do your best to bring the story to life.
Final Prompt
Writing Prompt #5: Write a story beginning with the following line. Her heels clacking on the pavement, Catherine walked quickly past the dumpster ...
You can either choose the prompt you like best and work with that, or you can use one prompt per day. It's up to you.
Just keep up the writing.
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