7 Good Sources of Creative Writing Prompts

For some students the hardest part of starting a creative writing assignment is generating an idea to write about. Here are seven good sources of writing prompts that you can share with your students.

The Imagination Prompt Generator randomly generates prompts for starting a fictional story. Imagination Prompt Generator is part of the Creativity Portal which offers ideas for free creative projects. Most of the project ideas in the kids section of the Creativity Portal are appropriate for elementary school and possibly middle school age students.

Story Wheel is an app for the iPad and iPhone that is designed to promote audio storytelling. Spin the Story Wheel on your device and when it lands on an image, dictate a short story based on that image. When you are finished recording, you can play your story back with animations generated by Story Wheel. The basic Story Wheel app is free. You can add more thematic sets of images like the Pirate theme to the app with a $.99 in-app purchase.

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Toasted Cheese is a daily writing prompt site that publishes prompts on a monthly calendar. The whole month is laid out for you with a different prompt each day. Don't see anything you like on the current calendar? That's okay, click through the previous months to find old prompts. Periodically, Toasted Cheese holds writing contests which you can learn about by clicking on the links on the calendar. The writing contests are based on one or more of the prompts from the calendar.

One Word is a simple writing prompt generator. The way it works is the user clicks "go" on the One Word homepage and they are presented with one word. Users then have sixty seconds to write in the text box whatever comes to their minds regarding that word. The idea is not so much to write definitions of the words, but rather it is to write sentences using the word.


Plinky is a good place to find writing prompt ideas. Plinky provides users with a new writing prompt everyday. The benefit of Plinky over other writing prompt websites is that once you've created an account you can see how other Plinky users responded to the prompt.

Write Rhymes is a fun little site where you can find a word to rhyme with just about any other word. I tried to use words for which I couldn't think of obvious rhymes, but each time Write Rhymes came up with something. To use Write Rhymes simply type a word in the text box then option-click on it to see a list of rhyming words.

Quotes Daddy, as you might guess from the name, is a compendium of quotes from famous and not-so-famous people. Each day new quotes are featured on the homepage of Quotes Daddy. If you have a class blog you can add a Quotes Daddy widget to your blog.