creative writing prompts

creative writing prompts

The Power of Creative Writing Prompts

1. Introduction

While aimed at individuals who support creative expression, this essay stems out of an assignment to inject new life into “Teaching the Multi-Genre Research Paper.” Over the years teaching this assignment, often by the time students chose their subject, developed their content, and got to the actual writing, they had depleted their creativity reserves. Switching tracks, I requested a creative research paper. Given the go-ahead that essentially anything goes, one student wrote a children’s book on the U.S. Constitution. Another wrote and illustrated a cookbook; her French recipes symbolized an eclectic mix of states. Doing a quilt seemed to best visualize one girl’s Filipino-American heritage. While the products were interesting and varied, my happiest realization was the quality and creativity of their process. They were accessing the genuine learning involved in research and writing, and in a creative manner. Creative writing is a much-needed and sought-after avenue to get students passionate about learning. Yet how much of it is actually done in classroom settings? Too often it is an extracurricular, add-on feature of an English curriculum, a luxury for already gifted or enthusiastic writers. This essay encourages teachers to realize creative writing is universal; everyone possesses an active mind and language is our identities’ most fluid and versatile material. So perhaps you are a middle-school English teacher visiting National Gallery of Writing. You click on “creative writing prompts” aiming at something to engage unreliable boy writers or draw out a painful quiet girl. You are a high school social studies or science teacher needing an alternative to the age old “report” that will better reflect who your students are and the directions they wish to go. You may be a college instructor trying to rekindle your own passion for teaching, searching for something to jolt you and your students out of conveyor belt assignments. This essay is written with all of you in mind. Creative research is an ideal setting for creative writing, and creative writing is an ideal method for addressing any subject. Therefore, these prompts are applicable and adaptable to the learning of anything. They are designed to help students find a starting point for something, anything they want to learn about. They encourage research that is primarily information-gathering, research as a search with faith that what is sought will be found. Step one in an elementary prompt might be to make a newspaper clipping. Someone might actually have a newspaper or magazine, others can type text onto a pre-designed format. They might not get beyond the first step, but the child who really wants to make a sports page about dogs will have to find information about dogs in a context that is pertinent to its breeds and history. Coming back to the same girl? quilting her heritage, a prompt on world geography could have her design a world map quilt square. At a higher level, anyone studying anything can take a documentary approach and create something representative, be it a poem, essay, story, painting, photograph, slide show or video.

2. Benefits of Using Creative Writing Prompts

The most important reason to write is to capture reality while it is still relatively incoherent. Whether we like it or not, life as we know it does not last long. Life slips away day by day, but it remains captured in the net of language and poetry. Writing offers a way to create stories that resonate with the significance you have found in your own life. Life is often mundane, but it holds moments of great significance. These moments can often be expressed through an unusual event or an encounter with a stranger that sparks a powerful memory. Great stories often find their roots in these small nuggets of truth. An example of this is Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” This collection of stories written by Tim O’Brien weaves a tale of war that tiptoes on the borderline of reality and fiction. Many find it hard to believe that the stories are fictitious due to their poignancy and remarkable attention to detail. O’Brien based the stories off of his own experiences in the Vietnam War. He did this to prove that sometimes fiction can tell a story with more truth than the truth itself. This is a very powerful testament to the strength of creative writing and the stories it can produce.

3. How to Use Creative Writing Prompts Effectively

Creativity is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it becomes. The purpose of a creative writing exercise is to spark a thought, idea, or story in your mind, so you can quickly and easily start writing and practice your writing skills. Writing is a form of mental exercise that hones the mind and the ability to think. A brainstorming writing exercise is best done with a pen and paper, so the writer is free of any technical worries and can let their mind wander. With the element of freewriting to aid a creative writing exercise there are a number of benefits to be gained. The writer is put into a non-restrictive creative setting that unleashes ideas and inspiration. A brainstorming writing exercise can be done in many forms, and sometimes unexpected and often surprisingly creative results. However, if you are aiming to practice a specific form of writing it is best to stick with an exercise that is relevant to your work. For example, if you are a fiction writer you may wish to write a short descriptive piece that is set on an alien world, using this as a springboard into a larger potential story. If you are a poet you may take a line from a favorite poem and use that as the inspiration for a piece in a similar style. A simple brainstorming exercise can also turn into a long-term project, and some of the best creative writing exercises are things that weren’t meant to be more than a few words on a piece of paper.

4. Inspiring Creative Writing Prompts

The Microsoft Word version of the prompts is available within the menu options when you highlight the section of the prompt. These prompts have been cleverly put into Word’s notorious formatting system and created a ‘wizard’ which allows the prompt to be more easily accessed for a lesson’s activity. This is most efficient for a teacher who has access to a data projector in a classroom.

In order to differentiate between diverse abilities in writing style and comprehension of similar ideas, prompts are formulated in three categories: lower secondary, upper secondary, and post 16. It is not essential that the person attempting the prompt fit into that age bracket, but the language and the topic of the prompt will be aimed at people in that range of academic writing. This is not to say that these are not interesting ideas for older or more advanced writers to attempt. GPR believes that comprehension of complexities in ideas can better be understood through a writing style, and an age group can have a more effective conversation regarding the topic. Age specifications are a rough estimate and depend on the level of the teaching.

Limits cannot be set for a creative writer who is inspired to express a class of thought in a new tag which has yet all the strength of the old one. In this section of our website, we set at the disposal of creative writers a list of interesting, engaging prompts which should serve to stimulate conversation, good and original writing. This page is like the manual to a video game which, through targeting particular skills, sets the game up to play in a certain way or achieve a particular goal. As a result, it will become a choice resource for many.

5. Conclusion

Creative writing prompts have a powerful impact on those who use them. By encouraging students to focus on a specific topic, writing creatively is made much simpler. Teachers can use the prompt to inspire their students to write creatively, noting the information we are often given isn’t enough to go on. With creative writing, the limit is often the sky. It helps students to ‘think outside the box’ and improve their overall confidence in writing. The freedom of the writing style and word choice is a pleasing change to academic writing, and it allows students to get genuinely excited about a piece of work. Creative writing makes students more open-minded, and therefore more accepting of different ideas. It helps to develop critical thinking skills, and is something they will carry with them throughout life.