What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing Prompts

If you were teaching a writing workshop, what’s a great writing prompt for writers to get started on a piece of writing?
Or is there a method you find helpful when you’re sitting at your desk and can’t think what to write about?

I don’t say this as a humblebrag, but I’ve never suffered from Writer’s Block.

My issue has always been starting with the right image or phrase. Get that right, and I’m in the zone. Hours go by. Sentences seem to write themselves. (Flow, as the nerds say.)

So let’s stop treating writing prompts like caffeine for writers and start using them more like tuning forks. A way to find the pitch you’re writing toward.

My approach: Tie your prompt to a craft goal.
The prompt isn’t the spark—it’s the lens.

 

1. Craft Focus: Perspective

Prompt: Look at the letter W.
Is it the 23rd letter of the alphabet?
Or upside down—or an M?
Or turned sideways—the letter E?

The lesson: Any scene, character, or plot point can be recharged if you shift how you see it. Sometimes, the solution isn’t new material—it’s a new angle.

 

2. Craft Focus: Emotion

We’ve all heard “Show, don’t tell.” But how do you feel your way into emotion without stating it outright?

Prompt: Pick a color. Now ask:

• What emotion do you attach to that color?
• Is that association cultural? Personal? Both?

Example: In the West, black is death. In parts of Asia, white is.
Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel” plays with this beautifully—blue as mood, setting, danger.
Or look at Chandler’s “Red Wind.” The Santa Ana wind is a red hot, and dry wind that affects people and the detective’s investigation psychologically.

The lesson: Emotion can live in the atmosphere—in color, in light, in objects. Let the reader feel what’s unsaid.

 

3. Craft Focus: Visual & Sonic Narrative

Sometimes you’re stuck not because you don’t have an idea, but because you don’t know how to stage it.

Prompt 1:
Read the final lines of Chandler’s “Red Wind.”
Then watch the last scene of High Noon.
Chandler’s pearls = Cooper’s badge.
One gesture, no words, tells the whole story.

Prompt 2:
Watch Midnight Run.
Listen to the dialogue.
Almost every line is a question.
Even the answers are more questions.
It shouldn’t work. But it does.

The lesson: Dialogue can dance. Props can carry weight. Storytelling isn’t just in plot—it’s in how people speak, what they drop, what they won’t say.

 

4. Craft Focus: Time (The Hidden Architecture)

Writers often get tangled not in what happens—but when.
Time on the page is slippery. Is the story moving forward? Looping? Stuck? Too fast? Too slow?

Prompt:
Write a scene twice:

• Once in real time (moment-to-moment, like a film).
• Then compress that same scene into five sentences, with time jumps built in.

The lesson: Narrative time is elastic. Knowing when to stretch a moment and when to skip ahead—gives your writing rhythm. It’s what separates pace from plot.

Look at how Toni Morrison handles time in Beloved.
The novel loops, haunts, and slips between past and present—not randomly, but with purpose. Memory is the structure.

 

Now, it’s your turn.

A Prompt About Subtext (Your Carver Moment)

Prompt:
Write a scene between two people who both want something but neither can say it directly.
Every line of dialogue must be either:

• a question,
• an evasion, or
• an unrelated comment.

Inspiration: Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”
What’s being discussed in that story is never named but you feel it.

The lesson: Sometimes, the most powerful writing is what’s not on the page. Let tension build in the unsaid.

 

Let the prompts be more than warm-ups.
Let them be invitations to depth.