Creative Writing Prompts- How Prompts Can Juice Up Your Creative Writing

Creative writing prompts are a great way of enhancing your creative writing.

They can stimulate new ways of seeing and thinking and help you grow your creative writing skills in directions you might not have thought possible.

So what are creative writing prompts?

At the most basic level, a creative writing prompt is anything that gives you a starting point from which to write. It could be a sentence, a picture, a song, a film, a photo, or a memory.

Most effective creative writing prompts are quite simple and short and give you just enough to get your creative teeth into and your imagination flowing.

They don't give you half of a new story on a plate, or a technicolour all-singing all-dancing stage show musical.

Think of creative writing prompts as tasty hor d'oeuvres to get your creativity salivating, or a peek behind the stage curtain to get a glimpse of the singers, dancers and set design in the half darkness.

Why do we resist using creative writing prompts?

Many of us as creative writers feel we should be able to do it all.

We think that unless we come up with every single idea at every single stage of each creative writing project, then somehow we're not "authentic" or we're "cheating" in some way.

It's understandable that we wish to be original and come up with our own unique ideas, and that's a great quality and ambition to have as a creative writer.

But the fact is, there's nothing that's 100% new, original, never-been-discovered ever before.

ALL creativity stems from some initial stimulation and prompt.

Even when we think we've come up with a new idea from nowhere - a scene, a story, an image or a character plucked from out of the ether - if we were able to, we could trace our line of thinking back to a number of sources.

It's like those dreams we have that at first appear random, bizarre and disjointed, but then when we look a closer we can see how the elements have been gathered from our daily experiences.

A snatch of conversation we had earlier that day, an image from TV show we watched last week, a line from a song that stuck in our heads...

Think of your creativity as an underground spring.

Somewhere deep down there's as endless source flowing. It's always flowed and always will flow.

But it needs an outlet, a way to get to the surface and show its purity and shimmering beauty to the world.

For the underground spring, you could build a well and use a pump to get the water to the surface. Then it would gush freely on its own.

For your creativity, use creative writing prompts to have a similar effect. The
hardest part is getting the water to the surface in the first place, so anything you can use to make that as easy as possible is obviously a good idea.