If you’re one of the many people who’s told a writer ‘I have an idea for a story’ then congratulations! You’ve just offered them a writing prompt.

Unlike those annoying in-laws who try to get you to write their story for them however, writing prompts are often found in a multitude places and often for free or nearly free. The reason being that writing prompts aren’t meant to tell the whole story, they’re meant to inspire writing. Frequently prompts can be tailored to your specific genre, including fiction and non-fiction.

What Writing Prompts Are

A writing prompt is exactly what it sounds like: a prompt meant to inspire a writer. Occasionally writers come across the incorrect idea that writing prompts are somehow cheating or stealing ideas. This is entirely false for a number of reasons, the primary reason being that the purpose of a writing prompt is to give you ideas for writing. In fact, writing prompts can be one of the best ways to help shape a familiar idea into something new.

Types of Prompts

A writing prompt is usually no more than a few sentences. It may introduce a constraint, a character, or even a line from a story to help inspire writing. There are also visual prompts, which may provide an image of a place, item or character/characters to help inspire a scene or story.

Bonus Exercise: If you’re struggling to figure out a part of a story, try creating a mood board. Collect images that evoke the feel you want your character, setting or general tone to evoke. Then try using your collected photos as writing prompts: describe them and how you imagine they fit into your story.

1. Visual Prompts

Visual prompts are pictures. They may be of a place, a person or even an event. These are usually presented with the instructions to write a story about the picture. Quite literally, they’re a take on that old saying: A picture is worth a thousand words.

2. Lines of Dialogue

Some writing prompts show up as things characters might say to one another. These are usually one to two lines of a conversation. It’s up to the writer to determine the rest of the conversation and who the characters speaking are.

3. First Lines

Writing prompts may also be a single sentence with no other context around it. These are usually presented as the start of a scene or story.

4. Directional Prompts

Certain prompts may provide a constraint or a requirement for the story. These might mean you have to use a particular element, word or trope. They may also add limits such as a specific point of view, word count limits or even require you to write a story without a specific letter or word.

What They Aren’t

There’s a surprising amount of incorrect assumptions about writing prompts. As short as most prompts are, many writers have heard an incorrect assumption about writing prompts. Here’s what writing prompts aren’t:

Ghostwriters

A single writing prompt isn’t the whole story, and it certainly won’t write the entire story for you. That’s a ghost writer, who often works with someone to bridge a gap between their skills and their idea. Even if you were to add multiple prompts together you must still do the work to figure out story structure, characters and their motivation, setting detail, grammar and even authorial voice. No matter how many prompts you string together they won’t provide enough substance to create an entire story.

Cheating

Writing prompts don’t give you an advantage in writing. They’re only there to provide ideas, and by the time you’ve written and edited a story, the original prompt might be completely incompatible or unrecognizable in your story, even if you start off using it word-for-word. Your story is completely yours; in most cases you can choose to use or not use a prompt. Whether you start with a writing prompt or not won’t make your writing ‘better’ or ‘worse’. That comes down to a matter of skill.

Stealing an Idea

Plain and simple: there’s no way to steal an idea. In fact, per the US Copyright Office you can’t copyright an idea. And at its base, that’s all a writing prompt is: an idea. Depending on the writer, you might also get multiple ideas from one writing prompt. Additionally, if you give ten writers the same prompt you’ll get ten different stories because each of them will have their own interpretation of the prompt. No theft involved.

How to Use Writing Prompts

Now that you know what writing prompts are and what they aren’t you might be wondering how to use them to create a story. The short, simple response: Start your writing process.

Once you’ve found a prompt you like the best thing you can do is to follow your normal writing process. For some writers that means planning out the story, for others that means literally writing the story in response to the writing prompt.

If you like the prompt but don’t know what to do with it, here’s some tips to help coax out the story.

Make a List

A list is a good way to gather similar ideas or thoughts. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy, you can just write ideas as they come to you while you consider how you could respond to the prompt. Try to list some characters, some settings and some themes you’d like to see in a story based on the prompt.

Look Up Definitions

Some prompts occur as singular words or word lists. Look up words you don’t know, or even look for example sentences of words you do know. Use these as kernels to help collect more ideas until you get something that starts building into a story.

String Together Several

Collect a couple of similar prompts and see how they could correlate. This is especially helpful with different styles of prompts. The dialogue lines alone may not work for you, but if you add them to a directional prompt or an opening line the connections may provide enough ideas to get going.

Ask Questions

Asking questions is a powerful way to open up new avenues from a singular writing prompt. Remember to use 5W’s and your H: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How. Sometimes just looking for questions to ask about your prompt will generate more ideas. Other times you may need to both ask and answer the question in order to get your creativity flowing.

Guidelines, Not Rulebooks

The most important thing about using a writing prompt is to remember that they’re supposed to be guidelines. Unless you’re writing for a publication that specifies they require you to use one of their prompts, you have absolute freedom to change, modify and alter the writing prompt. Found a great line of dialogue but want to add a character’s name in it? Go for it. Think that one sentence prompt needs expanded into a full paragraph? Get to writing! Found a prompt and think ‘It would be great if…”? Make whatever change you need and put words down.

Writing prompts can be a great tool for any writer, regardless of genre. Using them to spark new ideas or to help progress on a current story helps build writing skills by employing different areas of the creative process.

Exercise: You can grab the Storms & Weather prompt packet here (no email required!) Read through the list and try writing a 1500 word flash fiction based on any of the prompts there. Remember to use the above strategies if you need more inspiration!