Here are some writing prompts related to school, education, learning, or the lack thereof.
As always, I provide the caveat that these prompts are deliberately terrible and are not meant to be used. If you use one and create something decent from it, consider it an accident gone gloriously and strangely right.
In an effort to make the paperless office a reality, all faculty are given tablets. The tablets are made of stone and each comes with a chisel. Describe the reaction of the faculty.
A student has a grand, sweeping vision on how her university can be better-managed in this highly competitive, technologically-challenging time we live in. It involves logrolling and lawn darts. Write the speech the student gives to the board assembled to hear this vision.
The Department of Psychology runs an experiment in conjunction with the IT Department to determine how many superfluous confirmation prompts someone has to click through when trying to print a document before totally losing it. Write about the exciting results of the experiment.
Rather than trying to fight students constantly checking Facebook in class, teachers instead embrace this by having a hologram of Mark Zuckerberg appear in classrooms. Write about Mark teaching students what’s really important. Share and like if you agree.
It turns out that modeling a school on Lord of the Flies is actually a bad idea. Explain why in 500 words.
Hey, I thought, I already posted an amusing cat video yesterday and I can’t do it two days in a row. It would be like giving up on writing altogether, however adorable the resultant video might be. And it’s too early in the new year to give up on writing. That got me thinking…new year…writing…hey, why not a bunch of dumb writing prompts using a holiday theme? And here they are, in chronological order:
New Year’s: Baby New Year and Father Time meet up as they often do in the funny papers. In 1,000 words or less, write about their debate over the mistakes of the past and the futility of the future. Since Baby New Year is a baby he just poops his diaper and cries a lot.
Valentine’s Day: Write a story from the perspective of Cupid, except this year Cupid decides to shoot people with arrows that don’t make them fall in love with each other, instead the arrows just injure and kill. Why has Cupid become so hurtful? Has he become jaded and cynical over the commercialization of Valentine’s Day? Is he trying to re-enact the St. Valentine’s Day massacre? Is he cranky after attempting to have a conversation with Baby New Year? Follow your heart, in 500 words or less.
Easter: It’s the fight of the century! In one corner, the Easter Bunny, in the other corner, Jesus Christ. Write a light-hearted romp that pits these two lovable characters against each other. Who will be King of Easter? Only your muse knows!
Arbor Day: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Bonus: include a drawing of the tree.
Mother’s Day: On The Police’s 1983 album, Synchronicity, there is a song called “Mother.” It is the worst song ever in the history of everything. Rewrite this song so your mother would not immediately disown you if you presented it to her.
Father’s Day: Write a dirty limerick for your father. If you hate your father (perhaps he really likes that Police song) write a clean limerick instead. If your father is dead or missing, you may roll the dice again.
Halloween: Write a short story based on one of the following entertainment-themed scary ideas:
Seinfeld never gets canceled
Pink Floyd reunites to record “The Wall II” with special guests One Direction and Meatloaf
Aliens arrive and use advanced DRM to make all of your media inaccessible, then leave the planet, laughing as they go
Thanksgiving: Write a touching drama from the perspective of the turkey about to be eaten. Use the following words in your story: gobble, thwack, cry and delicious.
Christmas: Jolly Old St. Nick turns out to be an alcoholic and he’s on another bender with the holiday just around the corner. Write a story about how Christmas is saved by people realizing it’s not about the accumulation of material gifts, it’s about the birth of Christ. Just kidding. Write about the desperate attempts by the elves to sober up Santa and get him onto the sleigh without killing anyone. If kids don’t get their presents there’s going to be heck to pay! Bonus: Include Frosty the Snowman as a supporting character/comic relief.
After my abject failure with National Novel Writing Month 2015 perhaps what I need to get back into the swing of things is to tackle a writing prompt or two.
Or I could just come up with a few more “interesting” ones of my own. And here they are!
You and your nerdy friends suddenly find yourselves thrust into a real life Dungeons & Dragons adventure. Write about your daring exploits as you gouge evil from its shell. Actually, don’t write this. Don’t ever write this. Forget I even mentioned it. Did you start writing this? Well, stop. Right now. OK.
After winning millions of dollars in the lottery you discover that money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy lots of really cool shit. Write about all that really cool shit.
Explore the previously unknown connection between the horrifying visions of HP Lovecraft and the horrifying taste of HP Sauce.
Write a story featuring the following items: a ball of yarn, the Hadron supercollider, a manic pixie-like woman and a giant wheel of cheese.
A plate is knocked off a table and smashes into a thousand tiny pieces. Write from the perspective of each of the thousands of tiny pieces.
And the carbon-based life form version of the poem:
I like the way you interface
I like they way you run
I like the way you move in space
I like that you are fun
Your processors so sleek
Your voice when you speak
Machine language poetry
That melts all my circuitry
Let’s merge into one unit
Articulated hand in articulated hand
We’ll make all of the parts fit
With rockets engaged, who cares where we land?
To everyone who writes poetry, I offer my apologies. My sense of rhyme, meter and language is similar to that of a robot that has been bashed about with a rock until it shoots sparks and leaks oil. Except worse.
Here is the full list of 50 writing prompts I’ve come up with. If someone comes across this list by entering “writing prompts” into a Google search, I offer my humble apologies. This list is not meant to be used for any sort of constructive writing exercise. If anyone manages to get genuine use out of these prompts, I commend you. Printing them out and using the paper to train puppies, however, does not count.
As promised in this post I will pick one of these fabulous prompts and actually use it in the way nature intended. It won’t be pretty. It also won’t be tonight. But soon.
You are a contributor to The Worst Writing Prompt website and have been asked to come up with the worst writing prompt ever. What is it? Does it make people scream in horror? It should make people scream in horror.
You have a nice ripe banana. The monkey very badly wants the banana. The monkey is cute and hungry. You refuse to give the banana to the monkey. In 500 words explain what the hell is wrong with you.
You wake up to discover you’ve switched bodies with Karl Marx. Since Marx is dead you find yourself buried alive in his grave, slowly smothering to death under the crushing weight of the earth. Describe your day.
You’ve always wanted to go to a Beach Boys concert and finally score tickets for the front row. Excited, you take your seat, only to find that instead of The Beach Boys, the band on stage is a bunch of skeletons wearing Hawaiian shirts and singing “Kokomo.” They sound a lot like The Beach Boys, though. Do you ask for a refund? Explain why or why not.
Write a story about three blue jays, a raccoon and a grey whale that make a magical journey across Canada.
You are a robot and can only speak in binary code. Write a love poem to another robot in binary code.
In the year 2722 acid wash jeans finally come back in style. How does this affect future society?
An old gypsy places a curse on you. You scold the gypsy for perpetuating unhealthy ethnic stereotypes. What happens next?
Persuade a friend to become a drug addict so you can use him to research a story on drug addiction. Just write about this, don’t actually do it because if you do he will try to kill you with an axe while on a meth high.
You find an ancient mystic lamp and rubbing it causes a genie to appear. The genie grants you 3,000 wishes. What do you wish for?
You just had the Windows 10 music app import all of your music and it’s sorted your songs into genres such as Other, Misc, General Unclassifiable and Default. It believes Bruce Hornsby is Punk Rock. You decide to use Cortana to punish the music app, believing Windows 10’s advanced technology will allow this. What are the instructions you give to Cortana?
One day you wake up and discover you’re a carrot, crisp, fresh and tasty. Your roommate eats you, ending your life. Write out your regrets that your roommate enjoyed healthy food.
A giant meteor is going to destroy all life on the planet in 1,000 years. How do you plan out the rest of your life knowing this?
Use these words in a story: agastopia, gabelle, jentacular, encephalalgia, jargogle, meringue
A phone is ringing inside a locked room. If you can’t answer the phone something terrible will happen. Describe the breakfast you had.
You are hired to do a 3D version of Citizen Kane set in outer space with aliens and laser beams and shit. Summarize your Oscar speech for Best Director.
A mysterious man wants you to permanently remove ten words from the English language. All of the words will be replaced with the word “poop” because poop is funny. What’s the deal with this mysterious man and why does he find poop so funny?
You go to work and everyone is in their underwear, just like in some crazy dream–but you aren’t wearing any. How do you address this situation without alerting the Underwear Police?
You are having an online chat with a friend who responds to everything you say with an amusing reaction gif. Invent a device that allows you to slap him right through the screen.
What are things you can do in 85 weeks? List them.
Write a light-hearted piece about orphans dying in a fiery bus crash
Make a list: 7 Signs It’s Time to Change Your Pants
Why would a speaker be afraid of catsup?
Start your story with this: “She touched the litterbox in her pocket and smiled.”
In 250 words write from the point of view of a dangling participle
One day you keep eating Bits & Bites until you weigh 10,000 pounds. You sue the company for making them too delicious but you’re too big to get to the phone and call your lawyer so instead you eat more Bits & Bites. Describe the color and shape of your phone or lawyer.
You are ordered to press the Big Red Button. When you do the whole world blows up. Or does it? No, it doesn’t. Don’t be stupid. Write something that isn’t stupid.
A man and a woman–let’s call them Adam and Eve–suddenly find themselves kicked out of a magical garden with only the clothes on their backs but they actually don’t have any clothes, they’re completely naked. Explain in 500 words why you are a pervert who writes about naked people.
A woman applies for a job in tech support because she has suddenly gone mad. She is told she can only use the words “Hi”, “Did you check the cable?” and “Try rebooting” when speaking to customers. Describe how she becomes Employee of the Year.
You can be any mineral in the world. What mineral will you be?
Write a story featuring leprechaun witch vampires that battle zombie werewolf truckers. Then self-publish the story on Amazon and trick your friends into posting five-star reviews.
List 500 things you’ll never do
Write a story based on the song “Heartbreak Hotel” where staying at the hotel will cause your heart to rupture, resulting in a swift, painful death. Make it a romantic comedy.
You and your friends have gathered around the campfire to tell spooky stories. You begin to tell yours, “The Haunted Ketchup Packet.”
Electricity is a recent discovery. Think of 12 things to do while being electrocuted.
In 400 words, create your ideal pudding
Begin a story with, “His unibrow had gained sentience, just as I feared it would.”
In 200 words, write about your first sexually transmitted disease
Throw a rock at a little kid in the park, then write about your adventures in jail
Godzilla and King Kong are finally getting married and you’ve been asked to write their wedding vows, then you kill them because they are big freaky monsters.
Write from the perspective of a smart car with a brain tumor. Make it a romantic comedy.
Using a time travel machine, the scientific genius fixes everything that was wrong with history. What sort of pants does he wear? How did they help him fix history?
At long last Lucy lets Charlie Brown kick the football instead of yanking it away. Since you don’t own the rights to Peanuts you can’t write about this. Write about something else.
List 9 good reasons to touch Stephen Harper’s hair
Aliens come to Earth and threaten to vaporize the planet if we don’t reform our ways regarding war, poverty and the environment. Write about how the brave hero dazzles them with his flamenco dancing instead.
Write from a new perspective, such as while clinging to the side of a runaway bus
Describe a fateful meeting between Hitler and Einstein in three words
Write from the point of view of dysentery
Start your story with this line: Call me oatmeal
One day you find the commentary on every social media site to be witty, insightful and well-reasoned. Write about this or some other absurd fantasy scenario.
NOTE: Some prompts have been slightly altered from the originals. The unaltered versions can be found in the earlier posts.
At long last Lucy lets Charlie Brown kick the football instead of yanking it away. Since you don’t own the rights to Peanuts you can’t write about this. Write about something else.
List 9 good reasons to touch Stephen Harper’s hair.
Aliens come to Earth and threaten to vaporize the planet if we don’t reform our ways regarding war, poverty and the environment. Write about how the brave hero dazzles them with his flamenco dancing instead.
Write from a new perspective, such as while clinging to the side of a runaway bus.
Describe a fateful meeting between Hitler and Einstein in three words.
Write from the point of view of dysentery.
Start your story with this line: Call me oatmeal.
One day you find the commentary on every social media site to be witty, insightful and well-reasoned. Write about this or some other absurd fantasy scenario.
Continuing the trek toward fifty inane writing prompts…
Write a story based on the song “Heartbreak Hotel” where staying at the hotel will cause your heart to rupture, resulting in a swift, painful death. Make it a romantic comedy.
You and your friends have gathered around the campfire to tell spooky stories. You begin to tell yours, “The Haunted Ketchup Packet.”
Electricity is a recent discovery. Think of 12 things to do while being electrocuted.
In 400 words, create your ideal pudding.
Begin a story with, “His unibrow had gained sentience, just as I feared it would.”
In 200 words, write about your first sexually transmitted disease.
Throw a rock at a little kid in the park, then write about your adventures in jail.
Godzilla and King Kong are finally getting married and you’ve been asked to write their wedding vows, then you kill them because they are big freaky monsters.
Write from the perspective of a smart car with a brain tumor. Make it a romantic comedy.
Using a time travel machine, the scientific genius fixes everything that was wrong with history. What sort of pants does he wear? How did they help him fix history?
I’ve created a contest for myself. As I have done before, I am going to make up a bunch of inane writing prompts, with my ultimate goal being to write fifty of these prompts. When I achieve this goal I will have won the contest. The prize is to take one of the prompts and actually use it. I am not entirely sure how well this contest will go. Winning may turn out to be losing. All I know for sure is if I move to Quebec I will be ineligible to participate.
Writing Prompts, Part 3: Follow at Your Peril (prompts 23-32)
Why would a speaker be afraid of catsup?
Start your story with this: “She touched the litterbox in her pocket and smiled.”
In 250 words write from the point of view of a dangling participle.
One day you keep eating Bits & Bites until you weigh 1,000 pounds. You sue the company for making them too delicious but you’re too big to get to the phone and call your lawyer so instead you eat more Bits & Bites. Describe the color and shape of your phone or lawyer.
You are ordered to press the Big Red Button. When you do the whole world blows up. Or does it? No, it doesn’t. Don’t be stupid. Write something that isn’t stupid.
A man and a woman–let’s call them Adam and Eve–suddenly find themselves kicked out of a magical garden with only the clothes on their backs but they actually don’t have any clothes, they’re completely naked. Explain in 500 words why you are a pervert who writes about naked people.
A woman applies for a job in tech support because she has suddenly gone mad. She is told she can only use the words “Hi”, “Did you check the cable?” and “Try rebooting” when speaking to customers. Describe how she becomes Employee of the Year.
You can be any mineral in the world. What mineral will you be?
Write a story that uses the following words: witches, vampires, fairies. Then self-publish the story on Amazon and trick your friends into posting five-star reviews.
When lacking inspiration for writing I often find it helpful to make a list because I like lists and what better way to inspire than to write a list of writing prompts? There is no better way, I say. None! The utility of the prompts is best left as an exercise for the reader.
You just had the Windows 10 music app import all of your music and it’s sorted your songs into genres such as Other, Misc, General Unclassifiable and Default. It believes Bruce Hornsby is Punk Rock. You decide to use Cortana to punish the music app, believing Windows 10’s advanced technology will allow this. What are the instructions you give to Cortana?
One day you wake up and discover you’re a carrot, crisp, fresh and tasty. Your roommate eats you, ending your life. Write out your regrets that your roommate enjoyed healthy food.
A giant meteor is going to destroy all life on the planet in 1,000 years. How do you plan out the rest of your life knowing this?
Use these words in a story: agastopia, gabelle, jentacular, encephalalgia, jargogle, meringue
A phone is ringing inside a locked room. If you can’t answer the phone something terrible will happen. Describe the breakfast you had.
You are hired to do a 3D version of Citizen Kane set in outer space with aliens and laser beams and shit. Summarize your Oscar speech for Best Director.
A mysterious man wants you to permanently remove ten words from the English language. All of the words will be replaced with the word “poop” because poop is funny. What’s the deal with this mysterious man and why does he find poop so funny?
You go to work and everyone is in their underwear, just like in some crazy dream but you aren’t wearing any. How do you address this situation without alerting the Underwear Police?
You are having an online chat with a friend who responds to everything you say with an amusing reaction gif. Invent a device that allows you to slap him right through the screen.
What are things you can do in 85 weeks? List them.
Write a light-hearted piece about orphans dying in a fiery bus crash
Make a list: 7 Signs It’s Time to Change Your Pants
Exciting news: I’ve added a new category on the blog for writing prompts.
It’s kind of exciting to me, anyway. A little.
Breaking writing prompts out into their own category will make it easier to find them, which will be handy for me and any bots scraping the site for inane exercises based on random writing prompts.
And now, a prompt.
Prompt #6: A mystical but seemingly omnipotent being appears before you and commands that you provide the solution to world peace or all the world will be destroyed. The omnipotent being has given you sixty seconds to respond. What do you do?
Searching for writing prompts is, on the one hand, easy. I enter “writing prompts” into a Google search and get 12.7 million results. It would take approximately one billion years to comb through 12.7 million results. Luckily, Google ranks the results, putting the allegedly best ones at the top. Let’s take a quick peek at the top three results from Google and check out the embarrassment of riches that shall be found, writing prompt-wise:
Result 1: Creative Writing Prompts, courtesy of Writer’s Digest and written by Brian A. Klems, their online editor. These are actually not bad at all, though they tend to favor specific scenarios rather than general ones (which is a preference, really) and more twists than your small intestine. Example:
Ah the freedom of flight, the weightlessness of free-fall. Doesn’t it feel wonderful? Well it would if you weren’t launching at maximum velocity towards a gaping hole that leads to the center of the earth. Why are you going there? What’s going on?
Result 2: Writing Prompts as featured on a Reddit subreddit. Reddit’s layout bothers me in a way I can’t articulate. The user-submitted prompts here tend to be brief and wacky/kind of dumb. Example:
Your girlfriend is the only protection earth has against an invasion by giant monsters. You want to break up with her. The government won’t let you.
Result 3: 180 Journal Writing Prompts on the Daily Teaching Tools site. The site design is like stepping back in time to 1999. Stare at its layout and you can almost sense the budding Y2K fear. As you might expect, these prompts are aimed at kids and are not built around writing fiction. Example:
Describe a real made-up dream or nightmare.
I’m not sure how a dream can be both real and made-up. Maybe that’s part of the writing challenge, to make the impossible possible. Reach for the stars, kids!
I originally intended this post to be a complaint about how easy it is to find prompts but how difficult it is to find good prompts. I don’t know if Google re-jiggered the results since my last check, but these are generally better than the ones I’d found previously.
That said, I’m still going to ignore all of them in favor of writing some prompts myself. I’m not going to do anything with the prompts, I’m just writing them down because I can. Because I must. But mostly because I’m too lazy and uninspired to do more than that tonight.
You are a contributor to The Worst Writing Prompt website and have been asked to come up with the worst writing prompt ever. What is it? Does it make people scream in horror? It should make people scream in horror.
You have a nice ripe banana. The monkey very badly wants the banana. The monkey is cute and hungry. You refuse to give the banana to the monkey. In 500 words explain what the hell is wrong with you.
You wake up to discover you’ve switched bodies with Karl Marx. Since Marx is dead you find yourself buried alive in his grave, slowly smothering to death under the crushing weight of the earth. Describe your day.
You’ve always wanted to go to a Beach Boys concert and finally score tickets for the front row. Excited, you take your seat, only to find that instead of The Beach Boys, the band on stage is a bunch of skeletons wearing Hawaiian shirts and singing “Kokomo.” They sound a lot like The Beach Boys, though. Do you ask for a refund? Explain why or why not.
Write a story about three blue jays, a raccoon and a grey whale that make a magical journey across Canada.
You are a robot and can only speak in binary code. Write a love poem to a nice female or male robot in binary code.
In the year 2722 acid wash jeans finally come back in style. How does this affect future society?
An old gypsy places a curse on you. You scold the gypsy for perpetuating unhealthy ethnic stereotypes. What happens next?
Persuade a friend to become a drug addict so you can use him to research a story on drug addiction. Just write about it, don’t actually do it because your friend will get high on meth and try to kill you with an axe.
You find an ancient mystic lamp and rubbing it causes a genie to appear. The genie grants you 3,000 wishes. What do you wish for?
