13 Freewriting Prompts to Help Break Your Writer’s Block

Freewriting is a creative exercise in which you sit down and write without stopping for a certain amount of time or until you reach a certain word count. It’s designed to help you loosen up your creative energy and actually put pen to blank page (or fingers to keys) without worrying so much about whether or not what you’re writing is good. It’s one way to help you love writing again.

One way to freewrite, made popular by author Julia Cameron, is a freewriting exercise called “morning pages,” in which you handwrite three pages immediately after you wake up. You could also schedule yourself a ten-minute writing block or specify that you’ll write 300 words.

Whether you’re suffering from writer’s block or just want to shake things up, here are some free-writing prompts that will help you make the most of your writing time. Think of them as story starters or warm-ups to get the creative juices flowing. And remember: The goal of freewriting is to get you to start writing—not to produce publishable work. So when you sit down to try a few of these story ideas, you should remind yourself that everything you’re going to write is just for fun (it shouldn’t be hard work) and won’t be part of your next fiction writing project.

1. 1. Think of the last time you were really scared, and put a character in that same situation.
2. 2. Write about a seventy-year-old woman who has lived her whole life in a dystopian society but has survived long enough that things are starting to become stable again.
3. 3. Pick one of your favorite books and rewrite the conflict of the first scene using your own characters.
4. 4. Write a scene in which all of the character development comes from dialogue—no descriptions of how a character is feeling or what they’re doing.
5. 5. Write a one-paragraph ghost story thriller—but set somewhere surprising, like a beach resort or Mars.
6. 6. Write a scene about a woman who finds out that a close family member has just robbed a bank. Describe how she reacts to hearing the news for the first time.
7. 7. Write a story about a man who loves journaling, but when he sits down one day to write an entry, he sees that someone else has already written one for him.
8. 8. Write a scene set in a fantasy world where everyone who dies is reincarnated and can remember each of their past lives.
9. 9. Write about a college student who’s favorite place is the local bar—because he’s friends with the ghost that lives in the toilet stall.
10. 10. Write a story in which the main character wants so badly to go back to high school that they invent rudimentary time travel to relive the days of their younger self—but end up going too far and getting stuck in middle school.
11. 11. Write a first-person narrative from the point of view of a tree that suddenly has a treehouse being built in it.
12. 12. Write a meta-story in which a character is writing a book, but they’re having such a hard time that they decide to enroll in writing classes or join a writing group led by the town’s arrogant and infamous local horror writer.
13. 13. Pick a random word from the dictionary and use it in your story’s first line.

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