Out-of-the-Box Creative Writing Prompts

Hi! I'm Livia Blackburne, author of the NY Times bestselling young adult novel Midnight Thief. Before becoming an author, I conducted research on the neuroscience of reading in children at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. These lessons plans are materials that I use in my own writing workshops.

When coming up with creative writing prompts, it's easy to start doing the same thing over and over again, whether it's pictures, quotes, or something else. But creativity research tells us that we make our best ideas when we mix things up -- when we throw several unrelated pictures together, or when we use prompts from different modalities.

This set of 11 writing prompts is my attempt to encourage students to think outside of the box. I've introduced a grab bag of stimuli, from picture and quote combinations to emotions and music. See if it gets the creative juices flowing!

Note: This set of writing prompts can also be purchased as a part of a larger lecture on generating story ideas. Don't buy this if you already own Creative Writing Workshop Lesson 2: Freewriting and Idea Generation