Author tips

The Many Benefits of Writing Prompts

9 ways that they can help you as a writer

Over recent weeks, I have been sharing a list of writing prompts every Monday. Most of the prompts are in themed lists, and you can find them all in the following list:

In fact, I have shared over 100 prompts so far!

While I will publish more in the coming weeks, this felt like a good moment to take a breath, and to reflect on what writing prompts are for. To think about how and why to use them, and how we can find our own sources of inspiration.

In doing so, I’ve come up with the following 9 ways that writing prompts can help you as a writer.

1. Prompts don’t tell you what to write — they spark your own creativity

One of the most valuable things to realize about writing prompts is that they don’t tell you what to write.

Not really.

Consider this — two writers can tackle the same prompt and come up with very different stories.

That’s because so much of creativity comes from your own brain. The prompt gets the ball rolling, sure, but the path that it takes from that point on is based on your own knowledge, preferences, and creativity.

2. Prompts are almost infinitely varied.

Following on from the previous point, there are an infinite number of ways that an idea can be sparked in our head.

Something may grab our attention mid-conversation, or we may just notice an interesting and weird event as we go about our daily life. There are many ways that thoughts can begin bouncing around in the mind!

Writing prompts, too, can come in many forms. While the most obvious one is a mini synopsis of a story that the writer then fleshes out, there are many others, for example:

• a phrase (like the first line of dialogue in idea 7 here).
• an inciting event, accident or sudden situation (such as idea 5 here or idea 3 here).
• a location (such as ideas 7 and 8 here).
• a mysterious character (such as idea 5 here).

Your favorite books and poems can also provide prompts and sparks — take a note of ideas or thought-provoking quotes as you read.

3. Providing a limitation is a good thing!

Ira Robinson recently commented on one of my stories that he likes to hone his fiction writing skills by writing a very short story based on three random words.

Writing a story that must include certain words is limiting, of course. It’s clearly harder in some respects than writing a story without such constraints.

But this is the strange paradox of writing prompts. By narrowing down the options, it can actually make the creative process flow more easily.

4. Prompts can be combined

A single prompt can be the start of your inspiration… but it needn’t be the end. Hopefully, if things go well, then a good prompt will get your ideas flowing. But if not, all you need to do is flick through a few more.

In fact, combining prompts is one of the best approaches. Creativity is often about mixing ideas together and finding unusual combinations, rather than making something totally new and unseen.

Each prompt in turn, helps to boost the natural creative processes inside your mind. From a simple beginning, you can soon have a full idea for a story!

5. Prompts can be accessed in different ways

Perhaps the most obvious way to engage with prompts here on Medium is to read and bookmark lists of prompts.

But there are, of course, other ways — books, searching the web, etc. And as I explain below, a really great option is to write prompts onto a set of blank cards. Doing so allows you to flick through them quickly until you get inspired, choose several to combine them (as per the previous point), or spread them out over a desk to look for unexpected combinations.

6. Prompts can be visual.

Characters and places can be used as prompts (as mentioned in point 2, above). As this might imply, your prompt doesn’t need to be a scenario, word or phrase. And you can further expand your thinking and find new sources of ideas and inspiration by looking at pictures.

Some ways might include:

• scrolling through your own photos
• entering a word into Unsplash and seeing what comes up
• typing a phrase into Google images
• typing a phrase into an AI image generator

As an example to get you started, check out this list of visual writing prompts by Jann Christoph von der Pütten:

7. A prompt could also be a conceptual idea.

Another way to expand your use of prompts is to look for ideas or themes that could form the heart of a story, rather than the on-the-surface events.

Consider this story by Sam W. where we are invited to describe a ‘happy place’, perhaps one where we feel secure, or that invokes childhood memories:

And again, the prompt will just be the spark. The idea and emotions that are bound up this kind of prompt can be enough for you to begin some very creative thinking. To explore things that are tucked away at the back of your unconscious mind.

8. You can find your own unique way of using prompts

I have tended to use prompts, sometimes in combination, to come up with poems, short stories, and flash fiction. I often find that they push my out of my comfort zone, and help me to look at things from new angles.

But other people use them differently. I’ve seen great non-fiction writing prompts, such as these ones from Chelsea Marie:

Some people may also use prompts as a form of problem solving, rather than coming up with a brand new story idea. I wrote about this here, as a way of tackling writer’s block.

9. Incubate your way to success

As ideas can come to us in a flash, it’s easy to overlook the fact that creativity is often a slow process overall. In line with this, there are considerable benefits of taking breaks. Perhaps you should sleep on an idea, or put the current work out of your mind entirely, and doing something else for a spell.

Psychologists call the process incubation. Like a hen sitting on an egg, a bit of time is needed before the idea is ready to ‘hatch’ and meet the world.

So when it comes to using prompts, don’t rush things! Let the prompt play around your mind on your coffee break, or as you fall asleep at night.

Who knows where your creative mind will take it?

Thanks for reading! Remember — there is no one right way to do creativity, and there is no single best kind of writing prompt, either.

Good luck with your writing — and here is the link to my list of writing prompt articles again: