Tag: writing prompts

Writing prompts for chilly months

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Here are today’s written prompts for my Cambridge writing group so that you can join us in spirit if anything here stirs you to write. (Usually the group is really keen on that creative electricity that happens whenever we get together in person but in these UK winter months, I’ve moved us online because travel can be tricky.) These prompts, to warm us on these chilly days, are from two magnificent American poets today: Mary Oliver and Sylvia Plath. Happy writing!

PROMPTS FOR CWs, 17 January 2026

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

This is the room I could have never been in.

This is the room I could never breathe in.

***

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses,

With soft rugs —

***

This is the time of hanging on for the bees — the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Flying like soldiers

To the syrup tin

***

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, volume two (2005)

You want to cry aloud for your

mistakes. But to tell the truth the world

doesn’t need any more of that sound. (The Poet with his Face in his Hands)

***

I have a little dog who likes to nap with me.

He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck.

He is sweeter than soap. (Percy, Two)

***

How the distances light up, how the clouds

are the most lovely shapes you have ever seen, how

*

the wild flowers at your feet begin distilling a fragrance

different, and sweeter than any you ever stood upon before —how

*

every leaf on the whole mountain is aflutter. (Bear)

Heptonstall, North Yorkshire

Treat yourself to some easy writing with prompts from Margate, June 2025

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As usual, these prompts are not a task or exercise, just something – a few lines or as a whole – to blend into your thinking, so that when you’re ready to write for ten or fifteen minutes, something will come. Trust that, however long it is since you last had a chance to write, your words are waiting to fall onto your page or screen:

The sun is puce the sky is green

The streets awash with brilliantine

This is my redcurrant dream

(Recurrent? No just the once)

I’m psychedelicate

From John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018

I know a little cupboard,

With a teeny tiny key,

And there’s a jar of Lollipops

          For me, me, me.

From The Cupboard by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

This poem is dangerous: it should not be left

Within the reach of children, or even of adults

Who might swallow it whole, with possibly

Undesirable side-effects.

This Poem… by Elma Mitchell

‘This was Mr Strugnell’s room,’ she’ll say,

And look down at the lumpy, single bed.

‘He stayed here up until he went away

And kept his bicycle out in that shed.’

Mr Strugnell by Wendy Cope

The atheist archbishop weeps

Life is just a trap

Gazing into the inky deeps

Of a Chateauneuf-du-Pape

The Ranks of the Heathen Saints from John Cooper Clarke’s The Luckiest Guy Alive, 2018

Who will bring me the secrets of night?

‘I,’ called the Bat. ‘By the moon’s silver light.’

The Treasures by Clare Bevan

Could food be the heart and soul of your story? Prompts from my group last weekend

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Food is essential to a healthy balanced life, we’re told. I’d say it can be a vital part of balanced writing too and I don’t just mean those favourite biscuits you keep handy while you type.

Can you think of scenes in something you’ve read or seen that stick with you more because of the food in them? I don’t just mean the Royale with cheese in Pulp Fiction (one of the film’s most memorable scenes though it plays no part in moving the story forward). For me, favourites run from The Wind in the Willows (Ratty’s wicker ‘luncheon basket’ opens up to all sorts of beautiful meals in that lovely book) to A Christmas Carol where Scrooge needs a lesson in how food and generosity can bring us all together, and Chocolat where the stranger in town opens a chocolate shop and upsets the community balance in all sorts of delicious ways. This treat (wonderfully named ‘The Passionate Epicure’, written exactly 100 years ago) came up in our writing group chat on Saturday – thank you, Kate!

Food in a story reveals depths in our characters as well as anchoring us with them in their reality.

Here are some prompts I’ve lifted at random from recipe books:

Cordon Bleu Cookery, 1976 (given to me by my mother): ‘Hot souffles are often considered to be the test of a good cook. They are not difficult to make if you follow the basic rules.’ Those lines always makes me laugh as I’ve never baked a good one and can’t be bothered now to try.

Pasta by Carla Bardi, 2010: ‘Warm the yoghurt in a small saucepan over low heat. Add the garlic, chopped kiwi fruit, and lemon zest. Season with salt and pepper.’ Proving you really can put anything with pasta.

Michel Roux, The French Revolution, 2018: ‘Roll out the pastry to a circle about 3cms wider than the pan. Place this on top of the figs, tucking the excess pastry around them.’ Yum.

The prompts below come from Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, 1989:

The news seemed to move the Captain. In a barely audible voice, he replied, ‘That is a pity, a very great pity.’

The steam rising from the pan mingled with the heat given off by Tita’s body. The anger she felt within her acted like yeast on bread dough.

‘Look, it would be better if we didn’t dig up the past; I don’t care what Pedro’s motives were in marrying me. the fact is he did.’

More thoughts are below for a foodie brainstorm with your main characters. Food can arrive by bike via an app, in a packet or from a hob delivered by a kind neighbour in a crisis, whatever comes to mind. Ask your character to tell you in the usual character chat way, explained here –

About their favourite meals: what do they like to eat/ when/ where/ with whom/ in any particular contexts?

Who makes or provides this favourite food? Why? You, the character, or another character in the story? Why or why not?

Ask about food shopping: what/ where/ how/ when etc. Do they enjoy it? Loathe it? Why?

And so on. This kind of discovery can go on as long as you like. It limbers up your writing muscle, invites your characters back into your imagination after a break, and might even lead to you writing something that can go straight into your book. Even if it doesn’t quite do that last one, it might next time. Happy writing!

Writing prompts for poetry, fiction or short story

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In Margate, my writing group reckoned that our senses are their favourite writing prompts and that visual prompts are particularly wonderful. The spirit of JMW Turner haunts the air and skies around here and the Turner Contemporary Gallery is just around the corner, so we’re not short of visual stimulus. In case you’re looking for images today, here are some photographs – happy writing.

In Cambridge yesterday though, the writers called for written prompts as well. These below are culled from the wonderful poetry anthology, The Rattle Bag edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes:

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood

Throws down in front of us is not to bar

Our passage to our journey’s end for good

But just to ask us who we think we are.

‘On a Tree Fallen Across the Road’, 1921, by Robert Frost

Before the sixth day of the next new year,

Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear.

From ‘On the Cards and Dice’ by Sir Walter Raleigh, c 1553-1618

My mother said to me not to be talking with you today,

or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;

it was a bad time she took for telling me that;

it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

Translation from Irish anon by Lady Augusta Gregory, 1852-1932

One of the pumps has been shot away – it is generally thought we are sinking

From ‘Song of Myself’ by Walt Whitman, 1819-1892

It was the evening all afternoon

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar limbs.

From ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ (any one of them could serve as a prompt) by Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said, ‘Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth,

Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.’

From ‘The Angel that presided o’er my birth’ by William Blake, 1757-1827

Whatever works for you is your best prompt. Happy writing!

Writing Prompts

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Last Sunday at Marine Studios in Margate, my Where to Start Writing group were chatting about what sort of prompts work best. Many writers don’t need prompts of course. Their words churn in the brain like planes stacking above an airport and all they need is a quiet place and time. But sometimes we sit down to write and can’t get going.

If you have the confidence to start just anywhere, you won’t go far wrong. Fill a few pages with free scribbling, and keep writing – eyes down, let anything come – even when you think the words have dried. In time and with luck, your priorities about what you’re writing and then your story will find their way through to you.

Another way is use prompts. What did the Margate writers like best? Visual imagery was high on the list and I’ve added to my page of photo prompts here for you to have fun with. (I used to be able to add new photos to the top of the page but some update or other means we have to scroll down now, I’m afraid.)

Sensual prompts work too. As Marcel Proust knew, our sense of smell is marvellous for leading us by the nose down memory lane. Taste, touch, sounds especially music, they all work too. For me, anything from a kitchen drawer or in the bathroom cupboard can be useful. Hold whatever it is, really feel its textures and smells, its possibilities, its past, take a moment, then start writing…

A single word can be a good jump start sometimes. Specific words – blanket, door, pebble, rings, pages, trumpet – or abstracts like peace, exile, home, need, money, hope.

Character writing is excellent of course and my blogposts about getting deep inside your characters are useful there. A way back into writing a novel after a time of distraction is to choose an emotion (rage, love, grief etc.) and write a monologue for each of your main characters where they talk to you (and you write on your page or screen) how they feel about that emotion and how they are when they are deep in it. That should have them wading back into your imagination, ready for action.

Happy writing, however you do it. Here is a taster of my photo prompts for today:

Prompts from Churchill Writers last Saturday

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Still, at least somebody had noticed. This whole time, I was calm. I was the picture of calm.

Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk

And they looked from one to another in sudden understanding.

The Hound of Ulster, Rosemary Sutcliff

‘He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church,’ Mrs Bennet said. ‘If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.’

Eligible, Curtis Sittenfeld

Without stopping, without even turning his head, he passed the little blue house. But he looked at it out of the corner of his eye.

The Age of Reason, Sartre (tr. Eric Sutton)

He sat at the table, stood up, sat down again, stared gloomily at the wall for some minutes, lit his pipe, and then, laboriously, with a single first finger and his heart heavy with misgiving, he typed the first news story of his meteoric career.

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

No more of my writing groups are scheduled now until September, to allow everyone to enjoy the so far chilly and rather wet UK summer. Wherever you are, happy writing.

Prompts from Where to Start Writing in Margate last Sunday

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What is it you hoped to see, on the other side?

Places of Poetry (OneWorld), The Road to Skye, Suji Kwock Kim

I am still in my heart in search of safe harbour –

the wide shallow basis I’ve heard called a haven.

Places of Poetry, Longboat at Portaferry, Siobhan Campbell

Some men fought to beyond the end of their strength and courage

The Highland Clans, Alistair Moffat

In the porch I met my father crying –

Mid-Term Break, Seamus Heaney

And very softly, her lips almost touching her reflection, she breathes the name and clouds the shaving-glass

Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas

Below is Sunday’s view from Marine Studios where we meet https://rosiejohnstonwrites.com/4076-2/

Prompts from Churchill Writers last weekend

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He wonder’d, / He stood in his / Shoes and he wonder’d.                                 

John Keats, ‘A Song about Myself’

The birds were silent in their nest, / And I must seek for mine

Wm Blake, ‘Night’

They are not long, the days of wine and roses       

Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) trans Horace

And there was his house, clear against the skyline:

A solid-looking, stone-built place, fenced about with split oak

Neil Curry’s translation of The Odyssey: The Bending of the Bow.

When all the hills are flat, / and all the seas run dry…              

Anon

PROMPTS FROM CHURCHILL WRITERS

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Last Saturday we gathered in Churchill College again to chat about writing and have a scribble or type together. My prompts are in bold – have fun with them:

Mr Robinson’s expense book for May (1845) gives no hint that anything was wrong.

The three hours he had intended to stay stretched into three days.

(both from Daphne Du Maurier’s biography: The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte)

No coward soul is mine

(Title of Emily Bronte’s poem)

From Marion McCready’s poem Ailsa Craig

I write your name on a slip of paper /with a question mark, /place it under my mattress.

From Auden’s poem Epitaph on a Tyrant

He knew human folly like the back of his hand.

Prompts from Churchill Writers last Saturday

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We jumped straight into writing together last Saturday, almost as soon as we sat down. For a good twenty minutes everyone was absorbed, head down, scribbling or typing. Members of the group are free to write whatever they like, to respond to a prompt any way they like or not at all. The important thing is to free up the writing muscles and enjoy it. Very often, the writers are surprised and proud of what comes to them. Here are our latest prompts in case something works for you:

‘No one is immune to her power: the gods themselves are as much at risk of falling in love as the rest of us.’

Natalie Haynes, Divine Might

‘The evidence is in, and you are the verdict.’

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

‘We look before and after/ And pine for what is not’

PB Shelley, Ode to a Skylark

‘I don’t know nothin’ of what life’s about / just as long as you live, you never find out.’ Don McLean’s song, Wonderful Baby

At Serge Gainsbourg’s home in 2005