Creative Writing Prompts: How Prompts Can Improve Your Creative Writing

Creative writing prompts are a great way to improve your creative writing.

They can stimulate new ways of seeing and thinking and help you develop 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 tip is anything that gives you a starting point from which to write. It can be a phrase, an image, a song, a movie, a photo or a memory.

The most effective creative writing guidelines are fairly simple and short and give you just enough to get your creative teeth and imagination flowing.

They don’t give you half a new story on a plate, or a technicolor musical spectacle that sings and dances.

Think of creative writing messages as tasty hor d’oeuvres to make your creativity salivate, or a peek behind the stage curtain to catch a glimpse of singers, dancers, and scenery in the twilight.

Why do we resist using creative writing prompts?

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

We believe that unless we come up with all the ideas at every stage of every creative writing project, somehow we won’t be. “authentic” or are we “unfaithful” somehow.

Understandably, we want to be original and come up with our own unique ideas, and that’s a great quality and ambition as a creative writer.

But the fact is, there is nothing that is 100% new, original, never discovered before.

ALL creativity arises from an initial stimulus and impulse.

Even when we think that we have come up with a new idea out of nowhere (a scene, a story, an image, or a character taken out of the ether), if we could, we could trace our line of thought to a number of sources.

It’s like those dreams we have that at first seem random, strange, and disconnected, but then when we look more closely, we can see how the elements of our daily experiences have come together.

A snippet of the conversation we had that same day, an image from the TV show we saw last week, a line from a song that stuck in our heads …

Think of your creativity as an underground spring.

Somewhere deep there is an endless fountain flowing. It always flows and it will always flow.

But it needs a way out, a way to 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 bring the water to the surface. Then it would sprout freely on its own.

For your creativity, use creative writing prompts to have a similar effect. Tea

The hardest part is getting the water to the surface first, so anything you can use to make it as easy as possible is obviously a good idea.

Once your creativity has been “pumped up” to the surface, it will be much easier to keep it fluid and active.