201 Writing Prompts

All writers have those days when inspiration just seems to fly out the window—when the blank screen becomes a sadly accurate reflection of the sorry state of your imagination and you start your fourth game of FreeCell in ten minutes. Or you have a day when the current writing project just sits there like an ugly pile of February slush—all memories of the lovely white snow it started out as are gone, and all it’s good for is creeping in that one small hole in your boots and making your life miserable, wet and cold.
Some people call this writer’s block. I call it a temporary pause in the creative process—actually,I call it a lot of other things, too, but I’d have to change the rating on this book if I printed them.
The writing prompts in this book are for those days.
But they’re also for the days when you just want to play with words. They’re for those times when you need to clear your brain of the messiness of your day and warm up before tackling the project that means so much to you. They can serve as prompts for your daily writing journal, too. Trust me, if you break them down into their individual components, you’ll have enough to last a year! Maybe you could share one with your writers’ group one night and enjoy the completely different stories that emerge from the same prompt.
How you use the prompts is up to you, but I encourage you to use them for whatever purpose works for where your writing is right now.
The book is broken into chapters of ten random writing prompts each. The prompts come in a variety of formats from lists of titles and opening lines, to reflective questions, to random snatches of dialogue and brainstorming topics. Work through them in order, or dip into the book anywhere you please.
I hope you enjoy exploring these writing prompts, and I wish you many, many hours of imagination and creativity.