Resources

WRITING PROMPTS

• Explore a scene or story from your memory by reimagining it from an alternate perspective. Write the event from the point of view of a passing bystander, another person close to the event, or an inanimate object.
• Create a timeline of events depicting your life by using newspaper headlines.
• Tell the story of a place, a location. Maybe one that is very close to your heart. Or maybe a new one that inspires your curiosity. Pay particular attention to your own connection to the place, however small or large that connection may be.
• Choose a location that you’ve come to know as an adult. Compare how you interact with this setting now to how you interacted with similar settings when you were a child. How has your perspective changed?
• Revisit a special birthday from when you were younger. Describe specific details, with emphasis upon the senses. Now that you have years of context, how do you feel about what your parents and family did or did not do for you? What does that event mean to you now?
• Choose an event in your life that someone else remembers differently. Describe both memories and debate the differences. Who do you think is right? Why do you think you remember it differently?
• Choose a strong emotion and think of two memories associated with it. What are the links between those two memories?
• Think of a lesson you learned recently and apply it to a memory. How would your behaviour have changed if you had applied the lesson back then?
• What do you want more than anything in your life? Write about your desire, and how that desire has changed over your life.
• How has your identity changed over the course of your life? Write a scene from your teenage years that epitomizes the type of person you were, and then write a scene from recent life that shows how you’ve changed.
• If you could throw five items into a fire, what would they be and why? To be clear, by throwing them into this fire, there would be no trace of them left anywhere, even if it’s something on the Internet or a memory. What would the consequences be?
• Write about a fork in the road in your life, and how you made the decision to go the direction you did.