One of the reasons why I create all these writing prompt collections for my Etsy shop is that I got sick of seeing the same, tired writing prompts on Pinterest and Tumblr. But are “boring” writing prompts a lost cause? Could you still use them, and make your story interesting? Let’s find out.
Related: Is your story unique enough?
What kind of writing prompts are boring?
We all find different things boring or exciting, and if you’re only just reading something for the first time, then it isn’t trite or overused to you. But when I’m talking about “boring” or “tired” writing prompts in this post, I mean ones that aren’t particularly inspiring or ones that are actually a bit cliché.
The whole point of writing prompts is to give you new inspiration so that you can start writing straight away instead of having to spend more energy on trying to force it. If a writing prompt isn’t making you go “ooh, I wonder where that could lead!”, it’s not doing its job properly.
In short, a good writing prompt should make you curious and you should instantly be able to think of different, interesting scenarios where you could use it.
Examples of boring writing prompts
I felt a bit bad for including real writing prompts here because just the act of coming up with something that helps people write is a nice thing. No shame to anyone who came up with these – I just went on Pinterest and picked a few examples that just made me go meh.
“This is going to hurt, okay?”
Okay? The problem with a lot of dialogue prompts is that they sound like they’re straight from bad movies. It’s not that there’s anything wrong per se, it’s just that it’s something that’s been used a million times already, like “Look after your mother, you’re the man of the house now.”
A quiet girl likes reading books, and suddenly the events of the books start happening to her.
Events in stories becoming real has already been used so many times that you really should combine it with something new and unexpected if you want to pull it off. A “quiet girl” liking books, though? Hardly groundbreaking.
A couple in love goes on a date in a fancy restaurant, but it turns into an argument.
And then what? Did they also go grocery shopping? There’s nothing wrong with having a scene like that in your story, but in my opinion, a writing prompt shouldn’t just be a normal situation without any twist or surprise.
Anyway, I hope these examples illustrated what’s wrong with “boring” writing prompts. If you liked these prompts, great! But to people who have already read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies, they’re hardly anything of particular interest. You should usually keep digging for better ones – they’re definitely out there.
How to make boring writing prompts more exciting
Let’s say that for some reason you’re stuck with an uninspiring writing prompt. How could you make it more exciting and interesting? Here are some ways to do that.
Add a twist
I already gave you a little clue about this earlier, but when you add a little twist to the writing prompt, it can become a lot more interesting.
Let’s say you were looking for romance writing prompts and you found something to the tune of “a girl has the best date of her life at the beach”. Beaches are much loved locations in romantic stories, so that’s not enough to make it interesting, but what if you changed it to a place that isn’t notoriously romantic, like a hospital or a sport supply store?
You can also add a twist without changing the prompt when you add something to it. What if that lucky girl has the best date of her life… when she really didn’t want to? Or what if it put her in mortal danger? What if the person she was on the date with was actually trying to make it the worst date ever?
When you add a twist to a writing prompt, it helps you write a more interesting story and it actually gets you thinking instead of writing something by default.
Add an unexpected character or setting
When you hear a certain prompt, you might immediately get an idea of where it was “meant to” fit in or what kind of a story world it was borrowed from. But what if you went against expectations?
For example, that “This is going to hurt” prompt? Sounds like it could be from a battleground of sorts, or maybe a heist has gone wrong, add or take a few spells. What if your characters were at a kindergarten? Or at the altar, getting married? Where wouldn’t it have been heard a million times already?
Thinking about the earlier example of a quiet girl whose books come to life, what if you had a different kind of character there? What if a student who excels at sports but doesn’t care about studying (a bit of a cliché on its own, I apologise) is forced to read a book, and when the events start to come to life, she (you thought it was going to be a “he”, didn’t you?) has to keep reading more books to find out how to fix things?
Just think of anything that could make your prompt surprising or more interesting, and then take it there. Just thinking about these possibilities is good for your creative thinking skills.
Change the genre of the writing prompt
This is very similar to what we just talked about, but a little more specific. If you’ve found a writing prompt that’s a little uninspiring, one that is clearly meant for one genre, why not try it in a different genre? Or if you specifically want to write in a specific genre, why not go look for prompts in different genres to challenge yourself with? (I’m sorry I used the word “genre” so many times in a row, I think it lost all meaning to me now.)
When we change the context of something, we can often get really good and surprising results. For example, I simply had to write down this quote from Call The Midwife:
He says I’m his favourite. He always chooses me.
Potentially romantic, right? Unfortunately, the character was a sex worker and she was talking about a particularly violent client, so it’s actually quite chilling. I know it wasn’t a writing prompt, but I just wanted to show how much more interesting that line of dialogue was than if she’d been like “He’s really scary, he always hits me the most”.
I just found a very non-exciting “sad romance writing prompt”:
A woman who loses her husband in a tragic accident finds love again years later.
I’m sorry but there’s literally nothing new or interesting there! So, why not make it a science fiction writing prompt instead? Does she “find love” or does she build a new man from scratch? Or perhaps she finds love… on another planet? Instantly more fresh and interesting, I’d say.
Combine different prompts together
A fun way to get more out of your prompts is to combine two or more in the same story. In fact, I encourage people do this with my writing prompt collections.
Go back to the top of the post and look at the three examples of non-exciting writing prompts. What if you put all three of them together into one story? Yes, it’s more difficult, but that’s the point. It helps you by making you think, and when you pull it off, it makes a more interesting story because you came up with something your readers wouldn’t have come up with on their own.
I’m now going to look at one of my romantic writing prompt collections and my spooky writing prompts collection, and pick two prompts at random. Here they are:
Lords and ladies used to live in this house but it’s not them that haunt it. It’s the horses and the hunting dogs.
and
“I don’t want a box of fancy chocolates, all I want is you sitting next to me.”
How would you put these two prompts together? Will the animal ghosts help or hinder this love affair? Will this story be more spooky or more romantic? So many possibilities, and you can choose which ones to explore.
Try these creative writing prompts
This wouldn’t be a Protagonist Crafts post if I didn’t give you some brand new writing prompts, so here are a few that you hopefully haven’t seen before. Feel free to still combine multiple ones in one story or use them in surprising stories – we can always mix things up.
- “I never hated you because you were our mother’s favourite. I told her to love you more.”
- We kept the swing set so we’d never forget her and why we had to kill her.
- I never thought I’d love another person more than I love Reese’s Pieces, and I don’t even like peanut butter that much.
- She was the kind of person who could instantly tell what colour and size underwear you were wearing on any given day.
- Blood magic wasn’t that hard to do if you’d been starving long enough to forget what your parents had taught you but couldn’t stoop so low as to start eating cat meat.
- She was the most neurotic psychiatrist I’d ever seen, but it didn’t matter, I wanted to marry her anyway.
- “Don’t let the carefully chosen outfit fool you, I’m only role-playing an adult here.”
- “I’m not letting a man who doesn’t know how to spell ‘capybara’ make me feel bad about myself.”
- Some people claim to be allergic to electricity. You, however, can taste wifi, and it’s definitely not delicious.
- Turned out, dying of tuberculosis was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
If you’re still in need of writing inspiration and ideas, you can read all my other posts tagged with writing prompts, you can check out the prompt collections in my Etsy shop or you can get your very own story idea from the free Your Best Story Idea workbook.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
