Weekend Writing Prompt

Writing prompts can be canned starts to writing, but they can also be invaluable if you have writer's block. You can take a writing prompt and get hundreds of different story ideas - depending on your mood, your personal experiences, and how you connect with the idea at the moment that you read it. You can recycle the same writing prompt over and over again, writing from different points of view, different settings, and different situations, and then you could give the writing prompt to a classroom full of 9th graders and get another 40 stories that you didn't even dream of when you were writing from the same prompt.

If you have a goal to write something every day, then writing prompts are a good way to fill in on the days when you just can't think of anything good to say.

These writing prompts comes from "The Writer's Book of Matches: 1,001 Prompts to Ignite Your Fiction" Written by the staff of Fresh Boiled Peanuts at www.freshboiledpeanuts.com. In the book's introduction, it says, "Light a match and start a fire. You work with a prompt, you start a story."

A few writing prompts to chose from:

• "Well, if you could accuse anyone of being downright evil, it would be him."
• "I just had the weirdest dream about you."
• A man aspiring to be a pro bowler loses to his young daughter
• While digging in a cereal box for the toy surprise, a child makes a grisly discovery.

Another great way to make a writing prompt keep on giving, is to take it and change some of the details. For example change "A man aspiring to be a pro bowler loses to his young daughter" to "A man aspiring to be a chess master loses to his young daughter." let your imagination run wild!