BellaOnline Forums Career Fiction Writing Photo Writing Prompts Are Fun

Writing prompts help you to jump-start your imagination and generate ideas. You receive a prompt, such as an intriguing image, and you write down all the fictional scenarios that occur to you. You can do it as a timed exercise or not. The point is to have fun and to let your creativity roam free. Photo Writing Prompts Are Fun

Awesome, I just did this for am adventure I posted yesterday it really is a great way to begin on writing. Sometimes it's that first hurdle of just getting the pencil to move across the paper which is the hardest part.

Thank you, Leif! It's always good to get independent feedback that these kind of writing exercises are good for more than just writing. Again, I'm intrigued by the close parallels between creating fiction for an individual book and creating it for a community RPG. Writing prompts are one of those fun things that I keep forgetting to do just for the heck of it because I'm always toiling under a deadline, but whenever I remember, I find them a fun way to get the imagination going.

I dig the parallels, too

In the movie Finding Forrester, one of the prompts introduced is to take someone else's work and retrace the first few lines. Those are inspiration. Once you feel your own words, diverge and let them flow. Photo prompts remind me of that. Interestingly, that specific tactic is tied directly into the plot of the movie so I'll not ruin it, in case others haven't seen it. Sean Connery, Rob Brown, F. Murray Abraham, Anna Paquin, Busta Rhymes... Great cast and movie.

The parallels are most interesting! I think I saw that movie about a million years ago, but I don't remember much about it now. I will have to rent it and see because that type of writing prompt has never occurred to me. I'd like to try it. Thanks for bringing this to my attention.

Thanks for this great idea of a writing exercise! I am going to start with the photo provided in your linked article, and do my first photo prompted timed write tonight!

You're very welcome, and thank you for commenting! Sometimes something visual like a photograph can be just the thing to balance out all the left-brain abstract thought that we do in writing and stimulate our creativity!