[Nick's Writing Blog] Review: 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts

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Nick

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Aug 27, 2010, 7:37:51 AM8/27/10

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I was fortunate to be sent a copy of this new downloadable (PDF) guide by Chicago-based freelance writer Bryan Cohen, who runs the website Build Creative Ideas.

Its full title is 1000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More.

My first impressions were highly favourable. This is an extremely well written and professionally produced e-book, running to a respectable 100 pages.

As the name indicates, the great bulk is devoted to writing prompts. These are basically scenarios or ideas you can use to stimulate writing projects (I'll provide a couple of examples in a moment).

Bryan says the prompts have been compiled from various ideas that have floated in and out of his head over the last two years. He says he has made them as open-ended as possible, so the same prompt could be used multiple times over.

There is a concise but useful introduction, which suggests ways the prompts could be used, including examples. The prompts themselves are then set out under the following headings: Holidays, Seasons, Memories, Life, Health, For the Kids, Literature & Genre, Art, Sports, The Outdoors, The Modern World, The Weird, and General.

To give you a flavor of the prompts themselves, here is one from the Life - Home section:

260. Do you have a restaurant, bar, or other hangout that you feel is your home away from home? It's the kind of place where everybody knows your name, like the show "Cheers." The kind of place where they'd ask about you if you didn't show up for a couple of days. Talk about how this became such a location for you.

And here, by way of contrast, is one from the Weird section:

901. As you are walking down the street, you hear loud sirens. Before you can figure out the reason, you see a giant flash of light and you pass out. You wake up in a giant pile of rubble. What has happened and where do you go from here?

Understandably, the book has a certain US bias - for example, there are sections for prompts devoted to Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, neither of which is celebrated in Britain (where I live).

Nevertheless, for anyone who ever finds themselves struggling for inspiration for a writing project, 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts could be a valuable - and reasonably priced - investment.