Writing prompts can be a fun way to practice writing, but when I tried to find collections of writing prompts on the internet I couldn't find any that suited my own tastes and interests. If you're in the same boat, maybe you should try writing your own prompts. To make my own up, I just sit down every now and then and free-associate thoughts and topics onto a Word document. Often the idea comes from something I recently read or something that happened to me that day. I also like to include songs and pictures that strike me as meaningful into my prompts list, though I did not include any of these into my public prompt list. The key to making your own prompts is that you want them to be unexpected, new, and relatively random. You aren't likely to get much enjoyment out of drawing up a list of prompts one day and then sitting down to write on them the next day. There needs to be enough time in between the time you draw up your list and the time you pick one out to write that you have forgotten writing any of them and the prompt you write on strikes you as new. In my case, I waited until I had a list of 100 or so, adding to it whenever I felt like doing so over a period of months. Then I began picking individual prompts out of my list by the use of a random number generator. By this time, I had completely forgotten writing the prompt, and it was just as new to me as if someone else had written it.

Click here to go back to my prompts page.