52 Writing Prompts

In 2023, I decided to offer up one little nugget of inspiration for writers per week (at LEAST) in the form of a writing prompt. Here they are. Numbers 1 to 52 for each week of the year. I hope you find some inspiration and write on!

1. Write about a New Year’s Eve party, or a resolution gone wrong
2. Look out the closest window and write what you see
3. Open the book closest to you and use the first sentence that catches your eye as your prompt
4. Google ‘Random Word Generator’, select the ‘five words’ option, then include those five words in your piece of writing
5. What is peeking out of a hole looking at you? Write that story
6. Focusing on the senses, describe what you see/hear/smell, etc. right now
7. Tell your greatest love story or the story of the lover who broke your heart
8. What is ‘family?’
9. What do the snowflakes say to one another as they’re falling from the sky?
10. When the women start a revolution, it will be because…
11. You’ve found a pot of “gold.” What is that gold and what does it mean to you
12. The birds sing because…
13. Only fools rush in
14. Surprisingly, the chocolate egg hatched…
15. Write something you’ve never told anyone
16. Imagine your home on Mars
17. Write a list poem, beginning each sentence with, “I will try…”
18. Write your earliest memory
19. Who or what are you the mother of?
20. Create a scene by writing about a moment in time as though you are watching a movie
21. Write about the object closest to you. Tell its story
22. Write from the perspective of one of your emotions
23. The situation is that you are hanging from a cliff. But what’s the story here?
24. Write using your father’s voice or an imagined father’s voice
25. Tell the story of the one who lifts you up
26. Write the story of the sky, the river, the stones
27. Find a poem or short text in a language you don’t know and “translate” it as best you can through guess work to create something new
28. Use a colour as the central point of meaning in your story
29. Create a piece of playful writing with the sole purpose of delighting a child (after Dr. Seuss or Eric Carle)
30. Go outside on a sensory field trip. Take notes, then find a place to sit and write about your observations
31. Freewrite. Don’t stop and think, simply let the words fall down and out onto the page
32. Play the last song you listened to, and either use it as inspiration or pull a lyric to use and start writing
33. Google ‘Random Picture Generator’ and write a piece to accompany the first image that pops up
34. If you were a phase of the moon, what phase would you be?
35. All good things must end
36. Write a back-to-school memory
37. Write a letter to a specific person, who has upset you or brought you joy, to unburden those emotions
38. Write about a moment of change in your life
39. In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Who has behaved badly?
40. You peer down into the lake, and see…
41. What are you grateful for?
42. “A life doesn’t happen in grand narratives,” says Peter Babiak. Write into the small
43. Tell a story using only dialogue
44. Write a spooky story
45. What brings you peace?
46. What keeps the flame burning?
47. Write two opposing ideas coming together, a juxtaposition
48. Write about your character’s desire
49. The five things your therapist told you
50. Never write a story with talking animals. Most publisher explicitly write on their websites: NO books with anthropomorphised animals—except maybe this once? 😉
51. On the coldest night of the year…
52. Write about receiving a gift that surprised you