What’s a good writing prompt?

A writing prompt can be anything: a question, word or phrase, an image, music or other sound, a video, a taste or smell. A good prompt holds something unexpected, something for your imagination to chew on.

Our book Write What You Don't Know and self-paced online course Write What You Don’t Know: Imaginative Storm Writer Training contain over 50 writing prompts for adults, specifically designed to help you explore the most important elements of writing. We also use random prompts in our Prompt of the Week gathering and YouTube videos, which feature images, and our short-phrase Daily Prompts.

How to write using a prompt

The best way to write to a random prompt is not to have any particular agenda in mind. Let the prompt do the work, and then let your imagination take the lead. There's no right or wrong thing to write. The goal is to surprise yourself, to write something that you wouldn't have written if you'd started from your rational mind.

We are also great believers in setting a 10-minute timer any time you're putting words onto a blank page. Ten minutes is long enough to get up momentum, but not long enough that you can sit around agonizing about what you should write. Basically, you just have to get on with it. Your rational mind doesn't believe you can write anything good in 10 minutes (because anything good takes WORK and STRUGGLE, right?) so it throws its hands up and isn't so fixated on writing well. This is good, because trying to write well is one of the biggest obstacles to actually writing well.

If you want to keep writing after the timer goes off, you're free to do that! But there is a magic in setting that time limit. It's throwaway. If you don't get anything interesting, big deal--you only wasted 10 minutes. But the chances of getting something interesting are way higher than if you get all tangled up in trying to write well.

And those 10-minute pieces add up. Allegra generated most of the material for two full-length books--her memoir Love Child and her novel A Stolen Summer--in 10-minute bursts.