The first is from writingfix.com, a site that began with 50 prompts several years ago, and now boasts 504. The page is interactive. You click on a button to generate a random prompt. Click here for their daily prompt generator page. You can also order a print version to have mailed to you for a penny per prompt. You can’t get more economical than that. 504 Writing Prompts

Writing.com has its members submit writing prompts. To access them, go to their prompts page here.

In the fiction writing section of about.com, you’ll find a series of 6 photos to use as writing prompts. Examine each photograph with a detailed eye. Don’t go just with first impressions. Pick up on the minutia as you scan each one for that telling little detail that could spark your writer’s imagination. To visit the photo prompts, go here.

At the inimitable Writer’s Digest, you can access a year’s worth of writing prompts. In addition, you can post a 500-word-or-less response to the prompt, making this the only interactive story prompt site I know about. For WD’s writing prompts, go here.

The Seventh Sanctum has a number of story idea generators. Some are whimsical, others are provocative. Try out their story idea generators here.

For a list of several writing sites, visit http://www.geocities.com/melydia/prompts.html

Finally, from dumblittleman.com (you’ve got to love the blog name…) go to 50 Tools That Can Improve Your Writing.

First he says you need to be open to receiving ideas. If you are convinced that you can’t have ideas, guess what? You won’t have any. Ever.

In order to receive broadcasts on your TV, you have to have cable service hooked up, plus your TV and cable receiver box plugged in and powered on in order to receive broadcasts. It’s the same with being able to receive ideas. You must be receptive to them. Tune in to your environment and you’ll begin “receiving” story ideas in abundance.

Next, he suggests that you start keeping an ideas journal, if you aren’t already doing so. You never know when an idea will come to you, so always have something handy to write on. I like 3×5 cards, as they easily fit into a purse or a shirt pocket. Then transfer what’s on the cards to a notebook you keep at home.

If you want to be a writer, you must read extensively, not only in the genre you want to write in. Read poetry, non-fiction, bestsellers — anything you can get your hands on. And, of course, read your favorite genre voraciously. You MUST know what is selling and analyze the market to determine how you can bring something unique to the marketplace.

His next point I’m not quite sure about, but I believe it has merit. He says to ask yourself what it would look like if you could have all the ideas you would ever need. The premise is that we may think we need an inexhaustible supply of ideas, but that’s nowhere near the case. How fast can your write? How many stories and novels are you capable of writing in the time you have left on earth, assuming you live to a ripe, old age? It’s not as many ideas as you might think.

Ask yourself what inspires you. Do some soul searching. Perhaps it’s seeing Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent wowing the judges and the crowd when they expected nothing much out of a rather frumpy, middle-aged woman. Maybe it’s watching a movie about people overcoming incredible odds.

Finally he says to take existing ideas and divide and multiply them. Take one idea and separate it into parts, examining each one. Or take two or more ideas and combine them.

This doesn’t do justice to his article, so be sure to go here to read the entire article. (opens in new window)

It was our second such walk. Two weeks earlier everything had seemed pretty much dead or dormant. Snow was just beginning to recede and it had been as though everything were in a state of waiting.

I confess that I had an agenda for this second walk. I wanted to show her all the wonders of spring — all the changes since our first venturing out. There were now crocuses poking their colorful heads up through dried leaves and remnants of snow. Trees were budding or sprouting leaves. Not such a bad agenda, right?

You would have thought so. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We began by revisiting particular places we had explored several days before. “Look, Bekah, how this tree has changed! And here — flowers are blooming in the middle of the snow!”

I was all ready to take her to the next marvel of nature, when my daughter’s sense of wonder kicked in on its own. She dragged me to and fro exclaiming over what I thought were the most mundane things: a clump of sticky brown leaves with a broken birds egg in it; an unremarkable yellow-brown rock; a stick with green mottling on it, protruding from a stubborn pile of iced-over snow.

In many ways, she is her mother’s daughter, but in this, she was way ahead of me. What she taught ME was that new eyes see everything from a fresh perspective. I kept trying to show her things that amazed me, but in retrospect, I see that she showed me that even the most mundane things amazed her. And that is just as it should be.

We live in an amazing world, and yet it takes a small child’s delight in things we take for granted to re-awaken us to those marvels and everyday miracles.

If you have no small children or toddlers in your life, try to tap into your inner child. Get down on a child’s eye level and examine your home, your yard — in short, anyplace in your environment. And above all, take nothing for granted. Use all your senses and see where they take you. Perception is everything.

Impression
Sir Edmund William Gosse (1849–1928)

IN these restrained and careful times
Our knowledge petrifies our rhymes;
Ah! for that reckless fire men had
When it was witty to be mad,

When wild conceits were piled in scores,
And lit by flaring metaphors,
When all was crazed and out of tune,—
Yet throbbed with music of the moon.

If we could dare to write as ill
As some whose voices haunt us still,
Even we, perchance, might call our own
Their deep enchanting undertone.

We are too diffident and nice,
Too learnéd and too over-wise,
Too much afraid of faults to be
The flutes of bold sincerity.

For, as this sweet life passes by,
We blink and nod with critic eye;
We ’ve no words rude enough to give
Its charm so frank and fugitive.

The green and scarlet of the Park,
The undulating streets at dark,
The brown smoke blown across the blue,
This colored city we walk through;—

The pallid faces full of pain,
The field-smell of the passing wain,
The laughter, longing, perfume, strife,
The daily spectacle of life;—

Ah! how shall this be given to rhyme,
By rhymesters of a knowing time?
Ah! for the age when verse was glad,
Being godlike, to be bad and mad.
EDMUND GOSSE. 1894.

The fact that writers struggled with this same malady a century and a half ago is actually good news. It’s not just you. You aren’t the first writer to be so afflicted, and you won’t be the last. You are not a hopeless writer. You are not a bad writer.

BUT…

you MAY be your own worst enemy by listening to the perfection critic sitting on your shoulder and whispering in your ear.

No writer wants to present sub-standard material. The problem occurs when we have a skewed view of what is “publishable quality.” I’m not suggesting you adopt the philosophy of so many internet writers who put anything out there saying, “Good enough.” That brings to mind the old phrase, “Close enough for government work.”

The process of creating a story is a highly individual endeavor. Nevertheless, it is a function of the right side of the brain.

By contrast, the process of editing, formatting and restructuring a story is (largely) a left brain function. Some creativity is necessary for this process to be successful, but it’s a different brain mode than writing.

Think of your right brain as a slightly (or very) untidy, free-spirited zone where anything goes, and your left brain as an efficient, no-nonsense housekeeper with the soul of a drill sergeant.

Okay, so that’s an over-simplification, but it does point out the stark contrast these two brain zones exhibit.

Create a rough draft in your right brain and do whatever is necessary to muzzle your inner critic. One of the easiest ways to do this is to set a timer for 10 minutes and just write like the wind. Don’t allow yourself to fix anything, not even a stray punctuation mark. Leave that to the drill sergeant editor for later.

If you find this hard to do, I wrote a review of a great website (opens in new window) that nags you if you stop typing for a given time period (it’s customizable). Pretty cool.

Here’s the main thing I want to leave you with:  Think of your first attempt at any writing as your “sloppy copy.” This automatically gives you permission to be imperfect on this initial draft.

Nothing is set in stone. No one else needs to see this. That’s what word processing programs are for, in fact, to make editing more efficient and simpler. SpellCheck will catch a lot of errors. If you have the grammar checker turned on, it will nag you worse than your inner critic if you haven’t customized those settings. (I recommend you do that. My customization is to turn the blamed thing off!)

You have my permission to create any old sloppy way you wish. This should free you from that paralysis of fear. Then put your sloppy copy away for at least a day before reading it.

(For novel-length works, I recommend writing a whole chapter and putting that away, then beginning the next chapter, leaving off at a place where you will know where to begin the next time you sit down to write. Don’t forget the timer.)

After this cooling off time, you can let your left brain take over to make a second draft. You won’t achieve perfection here, either. Writing is a process. Take it one step at a time and before you know it, you’ll have something ready for an editor.

My friend, author Donna Sundblad, has the best type of writing prompts, in my opinion. You can get regular inspiration on her blog Pumping Your Muse. (opens in new window) You won’t run out of ideas if you subscribe to her blog feed and read it faithfully.

In addition, Donna has written a book by the same title as her blog. The print version is in its second edition and is available at Pumping Your Muse (the print book) 2nd Edition.

Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ lists 329 prompts that vary between writing exercises and inspiration — just shy of a year’s worth of story inspiration. 1) Use them to get yourself writing — kind of “priming the pump.” (Does anyone actually know what that means anymore, since people don’t use the old metal hand pumps that needed a cup of water poured in to get it going?) 2) Use them to inspire a new project, or 3) incorporate the writing you produce using one or more of these prompts into a work-in-progress.

What I like best about her site is that all I have to do is hover my mouse over one of the numbers (1-329) and the prompt appears beside the cursor. Very cool. No clicking away and then having to come back to the main page if I want to try a different prompt.

Creative Writing Prompts.com was listed in the coveted Writer’s Digest’s “101 BEST Web Sites for Writers” in both 2006 and 2007.  (opens in new window)

Shery also has a software program that will generate more than 1,000,000 story ideas or writing prompts for you. It’s reasonably priced and will offer you a creative shot in the arm with the click of your mouse. Access it here: Write Sparks! (opens in new window)