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?
