Making Your Own Writing Prompts

Writing prompts are excellent ways to practice different aspects of writing. But what if you can’t find one for the literary device or technique you want to practice? That’s when making your own writing prompts comes in handy.

How to Create a Writing Exercise

Writing a writing prompt is a writing exercise in and of itself. Teachers do it all the time, and you may have done it yourself without thinking about it in those terms. Every time we write, we’re following a guide of some kind in our head – we just don’t always formalize it. This process isn’t going to change that, but it might help you get more out of the exercises you create.

Here are the steps:

1. Pick the Skill You Want to Work on.

It can be a specific literary device or any aspect of writing you want to get better at. There’s always something to improve, and writing exercises are great for honing specific skills.

Example: For the sake of this article, let’s say you want to improve writing mood.

2. Define the Skill

If you want to improve something, you have to understand it. If it’s a literary device, what’s its definition? How is it achieved? Are specific words or specific types of words required? How do you know it was done successfully?

The more you can nail this down, the more you’ll be ready to use the skill and the easier it’ll be to tell if you succeeded.

Example: Mood is defined as the atmosphere or emotion of the scene. It’s developed primarily by word choice and descriptive language (like imagery).

3. Brainstorm Actions That Apply the Specifics of the Definition

Take the definition and the parts of the skill that you outlined and tackle each individually. Think of ways or things to write that would be a way to practice that particular piece.

As you consider each one, it may help to answer questions like these:

• When have I used that before? / How do I normally use that?
• Where does my normal writing succeed in this and where does it fail?
• If the skill involves a range, where does my normal writing fall in that range?
• What type of scene or character would be easier to use that with?
• What type of scene or character would be harder to use that with?
• How can I make a scenario harder or easier to write?
• Could it help to practice it in pieces? (Such as only writing a sentence or a phrase and evaluating it in relation to the skill)

Example: With mood, maybe you haven’t use it deliberately before, but your normal writing will have moods. Look at some scenes and evaluate what kind of mood(s) you create naturally. Identify your strengths and weaknesses.

As far as types of scenes / characters that mood will be easier or harder to write, that’s going to vary by writer, but a scene with a really drastic mood will often seem easier (for many, a scary scene like in a horror movie or a really happy scene would seem easiest). Moods that are the opposite of your normal writing style or that contradict will be harder (a scary sunny day, for example).

In this case, practicing in pieces can help. Identifying words or phrases that suit a particular mood is a good way to dip your toe in the water.

4. Order and Formalize the Results of the Brainstorm.

Some of the answers to the brainstorming are analysis, but others are actions, and those are all writing exercises. If you put them all together, you’ll have a very thorough writing prompt (or series of writing prompts) to help you practice the skill you chose.

To assemble them, consider your answers and identify the ones that are easiest. Or the ones that are building blocks – that will help you complete the others if you’ve already done them. Use that to put your answers in order.

Then, write them as a to-do list. 1, 2, 3, etc. Once you’ve put it into words in a specific order, you have a writing prompt (it’s that simple).

Example: Looking at our mood answers, the first answers are analysis. They help evaluate your current skill and will be useful for juding improvement. The action items are…

1. Write the scene/character that’s easier,
2. Write the scene/character that’s harder, and
3. Brainstorm words and phrases that suit a particular mood.

The third option is an excellent building block, so it should go before writing scenes. In fact, it could go before each writing section. Since writing the easier scene should be easier (or so we assume), it makes sense for it to come before the harder one. That makes the actual order…

1. Brainstorm words and phrases that suit the easier mood.
2. Write the scene/character that’s easier.
3. Brainstorm words and phrases that suit the harder mood.
4. Write the scene/character that’s harder.

Voila. A writing prompt for mood.

5. Make It Repeatable. (Optional)

You’re not going to master a new skill in one go. Improve, yes. Master, no. And while you can use the prompt as-is, once you’ve gone to all the effort of making a writing prompt, why not make the most of it? With a little editing, it can be ready to re-use again and again.

That said, the tactics are going to vary somewhat on the writing exercise you came up with. Here are some that are frequently helpful:

• Make it more generic. If you were very specific about the skill or the aspect of the skill, take a step back and see if you can make it broader. Then, add a step for identifying the specifics – that way you still get to practice on a detail level, but the prompt is wide enough to re-use.
• Reduce repetition. If you’re repeating a step with a variation, you could have already built in prompt-wide repetition. By both making it generic and removing repetition, you can repeat the whole prompt rather than having specific steps to handle that repetition.
• Add a step for analysis. Maybe just at the end. Maybe at the beginning and the end. The analysis we did in steps 2-3 can actually become part of the writing prompt itself. If you want to use the prompt over and over without doing exactly the same exercise, I’d recommend including the analysis as steps before and after so that you can vary the prompt and also take a moment to see how you did.

Example: The mood writing prompt above is very specific and mostly useful for people beginning to try to write mood (because of those specifics). If we look at it closely, however, we can see that steps 1-2 and 3-4 are repeating the same pattern. If we make that pattern generic, we can cut the repetition:

1. Brainstorm words and phrases that suit the mood.
2. Write the scene/character based on that mood.

That process works for both scenarios now. All you have to do is replace the mood you’re focusing on, which also makes it more useful as a continuing practice than the 2 very specific moods. The question then becomes “What mood?” If you want to help yourself with that step of the process, add the analysis before and after.

1. Pick a mood to write about.
2. Brainstorm words and phrases that suit that mood.
3. Write the scene/character based on that mood.
4. Analyze the results and look for strengths and weaknesses.

For step 1, you can be as specific or vague as you want. If you have trouble brainstorming moods, use something like “pick a mood you’ve seen recently in a movie.” Or “draw a mood from a hat” (granted, you then have to make a list of moods, cut them out, and put them in a hat, but you do you). Whatever you want to do each time.

The important thing is that now you have an exercise you can re-use but keep fresh, which is a major asset in improving writing skills.

Share Your Results

If you use this process to create a writing exercise, please, share your results and your experience in the comments! I’m always looking for ways to improve the process and making your own writing prompts is definitely an area where there’s likely to be different tactics and techniques. Or if anyone is trying to follow the steps and gets a bit stumped, let me know. Maybe I can help.

And if anyone wants to share their writing prompt, please do. It may help other writers, as well. 🙂