It’s always important to keep the creative juices following with every writing class. In order to spark a new story or inspiration for your writers, try out these helpful writing prompts and exercises:
The Dialogue Challenge
This writing prompt is a great way to challenge your writer’s creativeness and teach them to write better dialogue. With this exercise, they must write a story or scene only using dialogue. One side of the conversation should be unspoken or redacted so the reader can guess at what the redacted parts are by what the other character is saying in the story.
An Emotional Object
Start by assigning each student an object then write down five emotions on slips of paper and put them into an envelope for each of them. Students will draw one emotion from the envelope and try to describe their given object from the perspective of a character feeling that emotion. The class can read each other’s work to guess the emotion they are trying to describe.
The Disliked Character
Tell the class to think of someone that they do not like. They will then need to create a minor character based upon that person they dislike. Have them encounter the main character in their story and have them feel sympathy or empathy. This not only helps them develop a new character, but it challenges them to convey emotions in a new way.