How to Use Writing Prompts

When you use writing prompts, you’ll never be blocked again.

Often you sit down to write, and try to download what’s in your head. And then, frustration hits, because it doesn’t come out on the page the way it sounds in your head. It’s flat and dull and lifeless.

Why? Because it’s rehearsed, not fresh. Writing prompts give you a new starting point, so you can regain the freshness of the experience or idea you’re putting on the page. You come into a memory or a scene through a side door, and things look different from here.

Or, maybe, you’re just playing, exercising your imagination. You need toys to play with. That’s what writing prompts are: toys for the imagination.

What Is a Good Writing Prompt?

A good writing prompt intrigues your imagination, and propels you into thoughts, perceptions, and imagery you’ve never thought of before.

A good image prompt holds ambiguity, mystery, secrets, or some unexpected juxtaposition.

A good verbal prompt encourages you to approach something you know from a new, unexpected angle.

A good object prompt invites you to look more closely, to hone your attention and awareness, to discover the secrets lying beneath the surface and back in time.

Anything can be a writing prompt. As you start working with the Imaginative Storm method, you’ll start to see writing prompts everywhere.

Are You Looking for Writing Prompts?

Visit our YouTube channel for a huge archive of writing prompts. Each Saturday, after our Writing Circle, we create a video of the prompt we used, including the community word list. And we do the timing for you.

The reel opposite includes some of the hundreds of prompts we’ve used.

How to Write Using a Prompt

The best way to write to a random prompt is not to have any particular agenda in mind. Let the prompt do the work, and then let your imagination take the lead. There's no right or wrong thing to write. The goal is to surprise yourself, to write something that you wouldn't have written if you'd started from your rational mind.

Sett a 10-minute timer any time you're putting words onto a blank page.

Ten minutes is long enough to get up momentum, but not long enough that you can sit around agonizing about what you should write. Basically, you just have to get on with it. Your rational mind doesn't believe you can write anything good in 10 minutes (because anything good takes WORK and STRUGGLE, right?) so it throws its hands up and isn't so fixated on writing well. This is good, because trying to write well is one of the biggest obstacles to actually writing well.

If you want to keep writing after the timer goes off, you're free to do that! But there is a magic in setting that time limit. It's throwaway. If you don't get anything interesting, big deal--you only wasted 10 minutes. But the chances of getting something interesting are way higher than if you get all tangled up in trying to write well.

And those 10-minute pieces add up. Allegra generated most of the material for two full-length books--her memoir Love Child and her novel A Stolen Summer--in 10-minute bursts.

Come Write with Us!

Everything we do in the Imaginative Storm is suitable for writers across the spectrum: from those who consider themselves beginners to published writers with many titles to their name.

  • Join our Prompt of the Week Zoom to write to a random prompt for 10 minutes! We usually have some newcomers, and we will welcome you. It’s on Thursday at 3 pm PT / 6 pm ET, for an hour.

  • Explore our Circle site, where we publish the raw material we write in 10 minutes. You’ll get an idea of what’s possible, and how we support one another with appreciation rather than competition or criticism.

  • Get our Daily Prompt delivered straight to your inbox every morning.

  • Check out our vast archive of image prompts on YouTube. We guide you step by step in working with the prompt, share what we did in our Saturday session, and time you for 10 minutes while you write.

  • Let us guide you step by step through the 10 sessions of the Imaginative Storm method, in our self-paced online course Write What You Don’t Know: Imaginative Storm Writer Training. The course includes a monthly live Zoom with Imaginative Storm co-founders Allegra Huston and James Navé. Ask us anything!

  • Sign up for one of our live workshops, on Zoom or in person, and explore the memoir, or fictional story, you might write.

  • Order our book Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow.

  • Subscribe to Imaginative Storm on Substack for our newsletter with thoughts on writing.

We hope to see you.

What People Are Saying About imaginative Storm

Testimonials from 12 members of the Imaginative Storm writing community

  • “You helped me overcome my critic. I went from being a fearful writer to a joyful one.”

    — Corinne Crone, intimacy coach

  • "After Imaginative Storm, writer's block is a myth."

    Abdullah H. Erakat, journalist and screenwriter

  • “This wave of words came in 10 minutes in a beautifully playful space. I find the Imaginative Storm method intriguing, freeing, well-seasoned and lovingly crafted. I am delighted, surprised and nourished every time I jump into it!”

    — Esme Olivia, singer/songwriter

  • "The Imaginative Storm helped me go places I would not normally consider going and kept me from overthinking when I got there. The number of poems from the Imaginative Storm that have been published speaks to the success of the method and its benefit to me as a poet.

    — Louis Faber, poet

  • Wendy Shaw

    "It's like discovering a part of yourself you didn't know existed. What a gift!"

    Wendy Shaw, visual artist

  • “It’s life-changing. Even if I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing.”

    Deborah Williams, writer and educator

  • “I am brought ever closer to something Carl Jung said many years ago: ‘Until we make the unconscious conscious, we will live our life and we will call it fate.’ I feel the Imaginative Storm process is ever getting me closer and closer to a more conscious understanding of my life.”

    Dan Stenabaugh, writer

  • “The Imaginative Storm process has given me the freedom to tap so many aspects of myself. It’s so easy to get stuck trying to write about events until you shake up the brain cells and spill them out in a fresher way."

    Darlene VanderHoop, writer and yoga instructor

  • Alice W. Meadows

    “Writing what I don't know has given me more confidence and freedom and flow to write what I do know. It's like having a base camp to set out on writing adventures."

    Alice W. Meadows, writer

  • "What this process teaches us to do is to be with the percolating of all the chaos inside us. It's raw, but the pen keeps going and amazing things arise."

    Arlene Shapiro, performer and writer

  • "Imaginative Storm opens up this creative cave, gives me a shovel and shows me where to dig. It says, ‘Look at this gem! Look at that gem!’ Before I know it, I’m mining words that tumble out on to the page."

    Sandi Dittmer, writer