good writing promps

good writing promps

Exploring the Art of Creative Writing: Engaging Prompts and Techniques

1. Introduction to Creative Writing Prompts

At the beginning of a creative journey, it’s often helpful to have a specific desire in mind, and a result that we actively seek. One part of this desire is a voice, or some particular way in which we want to be heard and understood. This is essentially a point of view which also enlightens the reader, enriches the reader’s experience, and may stimulate personal growth in either the reader or the writer. Mindful authors infuse purpose into their work; these authors write on purpose. We can explore one voice that is generally useful to all: the voice of a confident, curious explorer of life itself.

If you have ever been put on the spot and asked to create something from nothing, then you probably understand the difficulties of beginning a new piece of writing. With creative writing, this is particularly challenging. Crafty writers can use the blanks of a prompt as ideas for their pieces and use them as fun and meaningful prompts. As one crafty writer shared, “Part coward, part pacifist, I offered the random gods fast decisions and all my love.” Delia Miller teaches students the elements of creating a hunger for story as she shares, “I refuse to write for the entertainment of others. It’s talking dirty, playing dirty with your head. The whole object of craft in art is to make beautiful things.” What a great treasure we have when we can choose to use the art of creative writing.

2. The Power of Prompts in Stimulating Creativity

What is less often addressed are the many very specific and various challenges a writer will face when they sit down to write, ready and eager to trade, very specifically, on their very specific and unique life stuff. These challenges should be what is focused upon in every exercise and piece of writing shared between teacher and student alike. One of the reasons that many students, and non-students with an interest in writing, often pause so long before they present their work in a creative writing workshop, or to an individual tutor, or any other audience, is that sometimes they get the feeling, as if from others, that their 100th draft was one 100th of the trouble of perfecting another’s 1st.

Creative writing is hard to teach. Not hard to teach well, but hard to teach in the first place. Its very material is the raw stuff of experience, of life itself, and this is held by many to be incommunicable, sacrosanct, ethereal. In contradiction of this, there have been many excellent books written about the processes and practice of creative writing, in the broadest sense, as they apply not only to the human goal of creating but also to the accompanying desire to communicate, to share experience with others.

3. Types of Writing Prompts and How to Use Them Effectively

When stereotypical-character prompts are used, students can generate a range of inspired fictional results.

When time-framed prompts are used in the creative writing class, students must set and follow deadlines. Such realism paves a way to practical and artistic success. For example, students might focus on recording a carefully framed response to a crisis situation. Or students might attempt to capture the particular details of a high school graduation or an annual Thanksgiving celebration or some other communal experience or ritual. Assignments can be written or oral as long as the deadlines that are imposed in class are taken seriously.

Concrete or specific writing prompts describe actions and portray people in specific ways. They can come from writing exercises that a teacher invents, from a published source such as a book of suggested tasks to stimulate creative writing, or from a chance event or a memory about something evocative.

While creative writing prompts can come from hundreds of sources for an array of purposes, the following types tend to be especially successful in inspiring quality fiction: concrete or specific prompts; time-framed prompts; stereotypical-character prompts; quick-write prompts; five-senses prompts; area-specific-event prompts; metaphorical prompts; song-prompts-quote-prompts; strategic prompts; mind expander prompts; prompt-free writing exercises.

4. Crafting Compelling Stories Through Prompts

Fill the rest of the scene around the technique.

Prompts: – A character wants to enroll in a costly program, but it conflicts with a deeply ingrained value they have about money. – A character lies about not getting into a program they wanted to hedge against feeling dumb or jealous if they later find out that someone they know has received the same news. – Technique: Make obstacles risky, urgent, or unchallengeable. – Technique: Make solutions long defeated. – Technique: Make fear come to life. – Technique: Make the plan not work.

The following prompts will push you to experiment with conflict, escalation, and dramatic circumstances as methods to keep readers engaged. Changes to characters’ plans and passions are the heartbeat of narratives. These are how plots move and the ups and downs happen. The prompts include conforming desires, disaster, do it or else, announcement of failure, why do you want success, the offer, Sob Story City, taking off the mask, the sword and the stone, and peer pressure. They were designed for fiction but could be useful for nonfiction too, like personal statements.

5. Conclusion: Harnessing the Potential of Writing Prompts

Another important classroom prompt technique is the use of personal-essay triggers to encourage “prewriting.” The teacher or the students should use a combination of visualization, oral brainstorming, reading, and freewriting to unlock the memories. For example, the memoirist might brainstorm with a list of “firsts” as a way to begin the piece. This can help unlock memories and start the writing process. In addition to emotional triggers, one can use opposition to begin four paragraphs. It can provoke instant opinion and reaction.

Cris Freese, interviewer for The Writer, suggests a number of techniques for making use of a prompt. In particular, she urges students to utilize the prompt to inspire different genres of writing. The English teacher, for example, who assigns a prompt about the causes of World War I, can follow it up with a variety of writing exercises. After their nonfiction essays, the students may write poems from the viewpoints of soldiers fighting in the trenches. Plays, short stories, and nonfiction expose the students to various styles and viewpoints of the same historical theme.