“Making art is the ultimate human act. The impulse to create is instinctual, untaught, innate to us as a species,” says Amie McNee in the introduction to her book We need Your Art.
Maybe you already have a project you’re working on (or struggling to work on), or you want to create something new but don’t know where to start. Perhaps you’re questioning whether it’s worth starting, or doubt your own creative ability. Wherever you’re at, I hope you will find something in this month’s prompts to kick start your creativity.
I hope, too, that the creative prompts are broad enough that you can use them as a warm-up for your fingers and mind as you turn up to the page, or to generate new material for your current work-in-progress. And if your preferred art form is something other than writing, please feel free to adapt them to suit whatever it is you’re working on.
And in the spirit of valuing the creative process, I will just add that none of these prompts have been produced with the help of AI. Some of them have been inspired by poetry I’ve read, some of them have been shared with me by other writers, and some have come from my own head as I think about my current work-in-progress. The images have come from Unsplash, and have been generously shared under a Creative Commons licence.
I say this because I want to emphasise that while AI can produce something quickly, it omits the creative process that I believe is essential for our art.
I find first drafts excruciatingly hard. But it’s as I muddle my way through the often-frustrating creative process, that I discover creative connections and links between disparate ideas. It’s also where I discover new perspectives and ways of perceiving, where nuance and complexity shine out over simple binaries. To me, the creative process is the whole point of why I keep writing at all.
These prompts are to help me kick start that process (and stop procrastinating).
I hope you will embrace the creative process too as you choose from the following prompts. Choose one each week. Or choose them all. It’s up to you.
Week One
1. One-word prompts (select one or several and include in a piece of writing): tea, mountain, bicycle, stream, hum.
2. Poetry portion: “August … and once again …”
(from “The Pond” by Mary Oliver. Read the poem in its entirety over on the On Being website. Thanks to poet Elizabeth Lewis for sharing this poem with me.)
3. An image:
4. Object: an item you use every day.
5. Theme/topic: an ordinary day.
Week Two
6. One-word prompts: nest, limbs, warm, hat, thread.
7. Borrowed from a book: select a book from your shelf. Turn to page 51 and select the fourth sentence. Use this to start or end your writing.
8. An image:
9. Object: a book or toy from childhood.
10. Theme/topic: I remember …
Week Three
11. One-word prompts: heart, lake, library, pen, walk.
12. Poetry Portion: “So much depends upon …”
(from “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. Read the whole poem over on The Poetry Foundation‘s website.
13. An image:
14. Object: an old photo.
15. Theme/topic: a turning point.
Week Four
16. One-word-prompts: tree, suburb, fish, question, voice.
17. An object: a souvenir or other object collected on a trip, holiday or visit somewhere.
18. Borrowed from a book: select a book from your shelf and turn to page 103. Select the last sentence (or partial sentence) on the page. Write.
19. An image:
20. Theme/topic: love.
Over to You
To circle back to where I started, let me finish with the words of Aimie McNee again: “Art is for everyone”.
So what are you waiting for?
Just begin.
