Writing Inspiration
The following is a list of starting places for daily writing outside of class. If you don't know what to write about, try one of these.
- Pick a current issue. Describe variously held positions. Respond to the issue or to one of the positions.
- Narrate a moment of being as a child. Try taking on the child’s perspective using tone, word choice, organization, etc.
- Do you act differently around certain people? Who? Why and/or why not?
- List things you are curious about.
- Describe an experience that has changed a long-held viewpoint or opinion that you have had.
- Other than anatomy, what things make you a woman and/or man?
- Pick an emotion (anger, sadness, envy, fear, joy, lust) and write in a way that illustrates (through detail, arrangement, stylistics, tone) that you are feeling that emotion.
- Pick a type of person (farmer, teacher, 3 year old, grandpa) or someone you know and an emotion. Write a paragraph or two that attempts to arouse that emotion in that person.
- Write about the last social event you attended. You could write about it in an autobiographical way, composing it as a reflection on a past event; or, you could try to write about it in the present tense.
- Think about a moment when you had a disagreement with someone. Rewrite his or her point of view in your own words.
- Read Joan Didion’s essay “Why I Write” (on D2l). From your own experience, describe an “image that shimmers” in your memory
- Pick a recent personal experience. Describe it. Analyze your feelings about it, answering the question, "Why do I feel this way?"
- Express something that has been bothering you. Try to discover why it is bothering you. Propose a solution.
- Describe a place. Discuss the feelings associated with it. Tell an event that happened there.
- Compare an event, object, or feeling to something different. Try to draw as many parallels between the two as possible.
- Imitate someone else’s style writing style, but use your own subject.
- Copy a saying or short passage from someone else’s writing (story, book, poem, essay). Tell what it means to you, how you feel about it, and why.
- Explain what you learned about yourself in your first job.
- Explain a worship service you have participated in to a person who has never gone.
- Create your dream apartment.
- Write down every thing that is within six feet of you.
- Write about the first time you returned home after leaving.
- Describe a process you often go through: brushing teeth, programming the VCR, ordering pizza.
- Describe your most memorable celebration experience--a birthday, holiday, wedding, graduation.
- Close your eyes and listen. Describe everything you hear.
- Close you eyes and feel your surroundings. Describe everything you feel.
- Do something you've never done, and then write about it, describing what you did and how you feel about it.
- Write down the lyrics of your favorite song; explain what they mean.
- Describe something you use all the time (a pen, a fork, the sidewalk) and describe it from a new perspective.
- Write a poem.
- Go someplace you never go alone--out to eat, bowling, a show-- and explain how you feel.
- Write a character sketch of someone you are close to and admire. Describe their appearance, their mannerisms, their speech. Tell a story about them.
- Write a character sketch of someone who aggravates you or of someone who makes you angry.
- Write a scene in which you say something you wish you had said (but didn't).
- Watch an animal for a while and make up a life story about it.
- Dream a little. Describe what kind of life you will have ten years from now.
- Walk down memory lane. Tell stories of your past experience. Describe people you once knew. Describe places you've been. Tell how you used to do something.
- Assume the role of a character in history and write to another character in history.
- Name the most terrifying moment of your life so far.
- What three things would you change about your life right now? Why?
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