Dragon Writing Prompts

"But what in the world do they want a trumpet for?" It's the last line of a movie. But use it as your first line (of a story...

Hippocrates believed moods and behaviors were caused by the balance of four bodily fluids (called humors): blood, yellow bile, black bile, p...

Anu Garg of Wordsmith.org sent out a week of words that have multiple and varied meanings. Growler had 5 definitions: One that growls. A ...

What are these guys thinking? Write a caption or a bit of dialogue.

A friend passed on some spam with words that caught my eye. phasma symphonizing vertebration riddled I like the sounds of phasma and ver...

What does your character ... ... fear? ... dread? ... want? ... want to avoid losing? ... want to avoid gaining? ... love? ... desir...

Come up with a new deck of cards for current times, a fantasy world, a future world, for your own or someone else's world. J.K. Rowling ...

Turn Little Red Riding Hood into a zombie story. Is she the zombie? Is she a zombie fighter? Who represents the wolf? And who the grandma? A...

Did you stumble across this? Or were you directed here? Was the picture taken before entering, or just after, facing back where you came?...

I overheard, "Analen's getting married." And my whole life changed. Take it from there. Or, alternately, take it many places f...

On slips of paper, write down a dozen occupations that fit with your preferred writing genre. If you're expanding beyond contemporary, y...

Tell the story of a house from the house's point of view. What do houses care about? Not the same things as the parasites -- er, symbiot...

Ben Shott writes about words for the NY Times with an occasional weekend competition. This weekend's competition is to come up with n...

Use the following homophones in sentences. toe/tow pidgin/pigeon complement/compliment manner/manor mane/main medal/meddle/metal/mett...

Write 5-10 different scenes of a character waking up. It's natural to default to amusing grumpiness or just getting up and moving on. Bu...

Click the picture to enlarge Someone is not who they're pretending to be. One is a breeder of cockapoos . One of them hates someone in t...

"Some men of a secluded and studious life have sent forth from their closet or their cloister, rays of intellectual light that have agi...

I love collections :-) One of Kenneth Koch's ideas in Wishes, Lies, and Dreams  was to sprinkle a poem with Spanish colors (which grew i...

When I stumbled across this week's quote, it reminded me of a prompt that provides a structure for a poem (or for a brief story or chara...

If you like to rhyme, skeltonic verse can be fun. The structure is playful and suggests lively movement so is also known as tumbling verse. ...

Use the following first and last words from lines of poetry for inspiration. When you're done, the originals are in the comments. (They...

A metaphor turns one thing into another. Start with the statement: A road is a road for cars. and see how many roads (and paths and byways) ...

Don't be scared! The pantoum form looks way more complex than it is! The beauty is a poem that's twice as long as the number of line...

Grab a permanent marker and newspaper or magazine from recycling. Flip to a random page, preferably with columns. First scan through the tex...

Write a poem where each word begins with the next letter in the alphabet. (You can also write a paragraph or really long sentence if you wi...

A ritual is a series of actions meant to bring about or prevent an event. A ritual gives a sense of control over the unseen forces shaping o...

For this poetry warm up, put a color in each line. Try starting with just one color. This will free you to see the color in not only objects...

Similes compare two unlike things to call your attention to similar aspects you wouldn't have seen. They help you see things in new wa...

This is an idea from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching children to write poetry by Kenneth Koch. A bit pressed for time, here's my exp...

Free write today. Cut these up, pick one and start writing. Black Cascade The Lonely Ones Everyday Demons Burn Halo Before The Flood ...

Write a day from the view point of a wizarding apprentice's wand.

The sign in the dusty store window reads 12,023 Gifts. As you're standing there, it changes to 12,024. Intrigued you enter. What do you ...