At A Grade Ahead, we understand that creative writing builds imaginative, critical, and focused thought. This is why our English program incorporates the skill into our curriculum as early as 1st grade using writing prompts and other creative activities!
No one likes staring at a blank page. Instead, many writers use writing prompts as quick activities to direct them and get their creative juices flowing. Sometimes these prompt-based stories can turn into whole manuscripts! Here are some ideas to help you put pencil to paper.
Are you looking for a prompt to improve your child’s education through enrichment? Here it is! Take a free assessment to get started with A Grade Ahead today!
Use Real Life
- Reimagine your setting so that everything around you is a different version of itself. For example, your front door becomes a portal, your bed becomes a vampire’s coffin, etc.
- Pick something in sight and write about its history. Who were the item’s past owners, and did they use it for the same purpose that it’s used for now?
- Ask your family or friends to each give you a word (e.g., “mouse,” “grandfather clock,” “laugh,” etc.) to make a story out of.
- Write a fantastical version of your day. For example, instead of going to normal school, perhaps you attended a school for knights. So instead of practicing algebra problems, you practiced sword fighting.
Retell a Familiar Story
Redesigning a story in a unique and fresh way challenges you to embrace your personal writing style. Pick a fairy tale, book, movie, real-life story, etc., and choose at least one element to modify. Here are some possible elements.
- End the story differently. Make this especially interesting by including one seemingly insignificant change at the beginning of your story that eventually leads to the huge twist at the end of the story.
- Apply a different setting. For example, if the story of Snow White took place in modern-day Ohio, how would that change the story? Is Snow White the mayor’s daughter instead of the king’s? Maybe she gets lost in a forest like in the fairytale, or maybe she gets lost in a city or a cornfield instead.
- Narrate from a different character’s perspective. Perhaps allow the villain to tell his or her side of the story. You can also consider rewriting the story from an animal’s or object’s point of view.
Looking for even more? See if an A Grade Ahead Academy near you is offering writing-based Time Traveler Tales, or one of our other fun enrichment camps, in your area!
More Prompts
- Your character has spent their whole life preparing for something awful to happen. When it finally happens, your character’s plan falls apart.
- Your character has the strangest day ever. What makes it so strange?
- An invitation arrives for your character. Was she expecting it? Where is she being invited to?
- Your character writes a letter. Who is he writing to, and why?
- A sound startles your character. What is the sound, and what does it mean?
- Summer has finally arrived! What does your character do on their first day of summer break?
- Get seasonal with these two past blog posts:
There’s no pressure to turn these prompts into full-fledged books. Just have a little fun with them and see where they take you. Remember to think creatively! And if you do come up with something you love and want to polish, don’t forget to check out our blog series Creative Writing Corner! This will help take your story to the next level.
What do you think? Do you enjoy creative writing and writing from prompts? What’s the longest story you’ve written from a prompt? What was the prompt? Let us know in the comments!
Author: Grace Heberling, Teacher at A Grade Ahead
