Our Weekly Creativity prompts challenge you to make a piece of writing (a poem, a journal entry, a story outline, a review) or art, or music, or a spoken word recording, or other piece of creative work. All the prompts we have written are brought together on this page – see below. The first prompt of the month is also a Flash Contest!
You can find more writing and art activities on our Activities pages.
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Creativity Prompts
Who is your reader? And how do you want that reader to feel? Pick a news topic that you feel passionate about. Choose your reader (an adult, a younger child, someone just like you), and the emotion you want them to feel (e.g. joy, anger, excitement). Write a paragraph about ...
Think about what the world might be like in ten, fifty, or one hundred years. Write about what it would be like to grow up during that time. Who would you live with? Where would you go to school? What would your friendships be like? Describe this scenario with as ...
Write a mystery story. Think about the arc of your story, and plan out the actions and motives of the characters. Does the reader know something the characters don’t, or is the reader in the dark until the end? Think about how the mystery might unfold for the different characters ...
Sometimes a plot turns on a mistake or a miscommunication. What if the crucial email, letter, text or phone message never arrived? It could be a disaster, or it might mean a lucky escape. Write a story where an important message never got through, and that changes the outcome for ...
Write a story about a change in someone's life. This could be small (a new class or teacher) or large (moving house). Ask yourself these questions: what is the change like for my character? how do they feel? who else does it affect? ...
Take your favorite character from a book you’ve read and place them in this coronavirus situation. What would they do? How would they act? How might they feel? Consider submitting your story to our COVID-19 blog submissions category! If you do, make sure you tell us in your covering letter ...
Take a look at these photographs of houses from the Library of Congress. Choose one house that speaks to you and write a short story or play that takes place there. Think about what kind of mood the house in your photograph conveys and how you can express that in ...
Write about what super-heroes and super-villains do in their spare time or on their days off. Feel free to make it funny: maybe Voldemort enjoys yoga, or Wonder Woman writes a blog ...
Endings are hard. Try thinking about endings as punctuation: Period: it’s all neatly tied up and finished. Question mark: a few things are left open - whatever will happen next? Exclamation point - no one expected that, SURPRISE!!!!! Take a look at one of the stories you have written recently–or, ...
Study this painting for at least five minutes (set a timer!), zooming in to get a better look and taking notes on what you notice. Then write a 16-line poem about it. The artwork we are referring you to for this exercise is called The Procession to Calvary, painted by ...
