Do you find yourself struggling with writing? Is finding inspiration difficult, or do you perhaps feel out of practice? Maybe you want to get some words on a page, but have no idea where to start? 

Well, whether or not you find yourself struggling with writing, writing prompts are a beautiful concept that can benefit all writers. It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced writer or are just beginning—writing prompts are a great exercise for those who want to “warm up” their writing, get their creative flow going, or simply just practice. 

At the bottom of this blog post, you will find 90 writing prompts to use over the next 90 days! 

Want a free Writer’s Weekly Planner to help you plan and track your writing over these 90 days? You can get a copy right here.

What Are Writing Prompts?

Writing prompts are suggestions for writers, and can all be very different depending on the prompt itself. Not only do creative writing prompts, story...

When I first started writing, I wrote stories filled with exposition or summary without even knowing it. I

was writing by instinct based on my years of experience as a reader and I didn’t know the technical aspects of writing, the craft of developing stories that work.

That’s a great phase to be in, because all things are possible and we’re learning so much about ourselves as writers and – if we seek it out – we’re also learning lots about craft. The quality of our writing can grow exponentially as we learn new techniques.

Scene-building is one of those essential skills for a writer because the scene is a basic building block of narrative. At its most basic level, a novel, or memoir, is fundamentally a stacked set of scenes linked together by exposition.

How to Write a Scene: Definition

What makes a scene anyway?

A scene is a unit or section of a story that contains the following elements:

• Characters
• One location
• A specific time

e.g. Susan and...

I travel a lot.

In part because my day job requires it of me, but in part simply because it’s something I love to do—meeting new people, trying new foods, getting to see parts of the world I have only read about or seen on TV. 

But every time I get on a plane and whisk myself off on some new adventure, there are still some things that I fret about when I’m leaving my house for a long period. 

Did I lock the back door? 

Did I turn my oven off? 

Did that stranger behind me in the security line slip cocaine into my carry-on when I wasn’t looking? 

No matter how many times you do a thing, all of your anxieties—even if irrational (who the heck gives away free cocaine as a prank?)—don’t just go away.

And submitting work for publishing is no different. Now that we’ve reached the end of our lit-mag publishing series, let’s talk about the hardest part: the wait.

You’ve polished up your piece of writing to...

You sit down to write, eager to translate the words and images in your head onto the page. Perhaps it takes a few minutes to settle in, but you’re soon deep into your work-in-progress.

Two hours later you look up, astonished that the world outside your book exists and wondering where the time went.

Have you ever had this happen to you? Perhaps you’ve experienced a taste of it, but in shorter bursts. Or you can only achieve this elusive state intermittently and desperately want more of it.

This is the elusive state of FLOW. It’s a critical component of a creative life and also one of its most rewarding experiences.

When we’re in a state of flow, time ceases to exist – as does anything outside of the immediate artistic challenge in front of us, whether that’s crafting a love scene or finding more active verbs on a final editing pass.

Flow is where we feel that sense of satisfaction in our creative process, and when we’re in flow, we’re...

Join me for a wee thought exercise…

Let’s imagine a perfect writing day.

You and I both know there’s no such thing as truly “perfect” in real life, but for the moment this is just a thought exercise so we can make our day whatever we want it to be.

Here’s mine…

I wake up early, feeling truly rested and refreshed. Everything is quiet around me except for the sounds of birds starting their day. I walk my cocker spaniel, Mr. Darcy, because he is definitely perfect and hates to wait for his morning walk. 

As I walk, I clear my head of last night’s dreams and observe… the woman who lives in the house on the corner is walking her fat Pekingese pup while wearing pyjama pants and slippers…a black squirrel has found a piece of bread and is trying to cram as much of it into his cheeks as he can…the couple who own two Weimaraners are also out for a walk and don’t seem to be speaking to each other. Are they...

It’s not just me, right? The past year has been HARD, and I’m not sure the next 8 weeks are on track to be much better. I had to take a few social media breaks this year, just to preserve my sanity and remember a sweet little thing called Hope. How about you?

Many of us wish the world was a kinder and more compassionate place. We’re clear that political dialogue should be constructive rather than destructive, and people attacking one another will not help us solve our problems or heal the world’s seemingly intractable divisions.

We’re good humans, or we try to be. Right?

We know that being kind to one another is essential to combat the isolation and loneliness generated by an increasingly online lifestyle where we don’t speak with people face-to-face anymore as much as we used to. We make conscious efforts to reach out with grace, kindness and compassion when we see people suffer.

Except maybe when it comes to ourselves and our own writing. Then,...

Experts abound in every field and every expert offers advice from their own world-view. The writing advice most often offered to new writers is:

“You should write every day.” 

I hate this kind of writing advice.

To be clear, I’m not saying you shouldn’t write every day -- it’s not the specifics of the writing advice that bothers me in this case, it’s the should.

Any time someone hits me with a should, I want to hit back. That’s their truth, not mine. I’m turned off right away and just not interested. It’s like I have an inner 12-year old who sticks her fingers in her ears and yells NANANANANAH. (She’s a cutie-pie, that girl: red pigtails.)

This kind of writing advice seems to imply that “real” writers write every day, making the rest of us feel like imposters if we can’t get to our desks 365 days of the year. As though the rest of us just have "cute little hobbies."

Assuming best intentions though,...

Writing practice always varies from writer to writer. It's not what it looks like that necessarily matters -- the details can vary but the need for a considered writing practice never goes away, even for published writers.

There was a time, about a decade ago now, when I could not bring myself to write. I had been seriously working on my writing for a number of years, and had published poems and stories in literary journals, and won some prizes. I was at the point where I needed to be pulling together my first book of poetry.

It’s not that I was blocked exactly, I just couldn’t sit down to write. I'd lost all of the delight I used to have in my writing practice.

I kept telling myself I was just too busy, with family and with work, and that I would get to it “soon.”  But the longer I went without writing, the harder it was to write. Weeks and months went by without my being able to really put pen to paper.

But the problem wasn’t my busy life, it was...

Sometimes I forget that writing takes time.

In the second week of November, I had ALL of the meetings. You’d think the world would have run out of meetings by now, but no: apparently, there will be more next week. And I still had that cold that will not leave and has me hacking morning and night. My daughter texted to say that I’d forgot to send her money for university this month, which reminded me OH RIGHT, PAY THE BILLS. I had multiple events in the evenings and on top of that, I discovered Transparent on Amazon. (No judgement, ok?)

It seemed I would never get any writing done ever again. Which felt fine, because I wasn’t convinced that my current work was all that great anyway

In other words: just another normal writing week.

And this is me now that I’m not parenting on a daily basis. For a long time, I was also single parenting while working and going to school at the same time – and yet, in those years it seemed like I got even more writing done....

Nothing has made more difference to my writing life than working with mentors -- writers with more experience than I had at the time who could encourage me to push myself and my writing further than I know I'd have been able to do working on my own. I can't say enough about how that has transformed my poetry, fiction and non-fiction work. If you think your work could benefit from an experienced set of eyes, here are 5 good reasons to find a writing mentor, along with what and what not to expect once you find them

Deadlines

Working with a writing mentor will mean external deadlines. Based on mutual agreement, you’ll identify a regular time period for you to submit your work and receive feedback. If you are the kind of self-disciplined angel who takes deadlines seriously no matter who sets them, then may life continue to shower blessings in your general direction. For the rest of us, having a set time by which we must deliver a poem or story or manuscript to someone else can...