Writing Prompts - Understanding and Defining Writing Prompts

This is the meaning of writing prompts, the different types, and how to use them.

WRITING PROMPTS – Here are some writing prompts for writers to focus, practice, and expand their creativity.

Writing is quite a hard task, especially in times when one cannot think of any fresh ideas to write about. And this is where the idea of writing prompts should come in. The prompts introduce new topics where the writer can start writing somewhere and these topics are to encourage the writer to write in a creative way.

There are various types of prompts and some prompts include some of the following below:

creative writing
non-fiction
poetry
descriptive writing
expository writing
journal writing
mystery writing
narrative writing
short story
essay

A passage of text or a single photo can provide a potential topic idea or a starting point to create something original. Garth Sundem and Kristi Pikiewicz in Writing in the Content Areas, 2006, said that it usually has “two basic components: the prompt itself and directions explaining what the students should do with it”.

There are a lot of it depending on what genre a person is writing about. And these genres are:

Mystery / Thriller
Romance
Science Fiction
Fantasy / Paranormal
General Fiction
Religion / Spirituality
Travel / Adventure
Horror
Children’s
Young Adult

You just have to get yourself engaged with the prompt and from that point, you get to decide. After making a decision, make an outline of it and then, start writing.

Make sure that your content answers and tackles the issue or topic raised. It should have a logical analysis of the specific issue and the quotations used must have support details for further understanding and to also support your stand.

You can find a prompt from the mundane of things like:

a person dancing in the rain
a unique job
starting a story with the loud whistle of a kettle
about money
magical powers
a story where a lawyer has special abilities
a story about a forensic scientist who can talk to a ghost
a group of students solving a mystery
the life of a famous personality behind the camera
the entangled stories of two best friends falling in love with the same person
about the ancient society
a narrative about a miracle that happened in real life
the past of a killer that explains why he does what he did to the victims
a successful mother who abandoned her child when she was young
an adventure of finding a cure to a disease
the rise of zombies
a person with ADHD but excels in surgery or in being a lawyer
the back stories of celestial beings
you can write a poem about a person looking out the window
a poem about food and how it can’t seemingly fill a stomach because the physical body is looking for something else