The unconventional guide to Writing Prompts

Last year I co-ordinated the Student Write Club at school and I loved putting together interesting writing prompts for students.

You might ask me ... so where do you get your inspiration from?

Here are a few strategies that I used throughout that year.

Reading meaning into random words

You can either take a line from a less than conventional song or use one of the song lyric generators.
I normally look for one or two lines that make sense and then use them as writing prompts.

Similar to the song lyrics, using a line of computer generated poetry as a writing prompt. Poem Generator allows you to choose words that will be used randomly and they have sample lists that you can experiment with.

Using your senses

StereoMood can set the mood in terms of music. Type in what your mood is and it will set up a playlist for you to listen to. Musicovery is another site which performs a similar function.  Another option is to get the students to shut their eyes and allow them to inhale some essential oil. What does it make them think about? Or perhaps touch fur or sandpaper. Prompts don't have to be written!

A picture tells a 1000 words

Flickr Explore is worthwhile taking a look. 20Under20 has some great photo's that could be used as writing prompts or if you want you can use google to find images which represent genre's. You can also generate random images in Flickr using BeesBuzz and BigHugeLabs.

Students can bring their own images from home and swap them with each other for writing inspiration. Take a normal picture and use various filters to make the image say something different.

The art of observation

One of my favourite past times is to wander the city for a day with my camera and just observe. What is down that lane way? What happens at the top of a building? Who is that person sitting and reading?

This article appeared on Junkee and I loved the way that the owner of the garage turned what would have been an annoyance into an opportunity to write something about the backstory of the graffiti and who might have created it.

Part of being a writer is to observe and read meaning into what others might pass over.
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How do you find your writing prompts?

Winter Reading Packs

At the end of last term, Kaitlyn (our wonderful Library Tech) and I put together some winter reading packs at the end of last term.

Our goal was to encourage students to borrow a book that they were unfamiliar with. A classic, a brand new book or a book of a lesser known author.

We tried to combine at least two books that related to each other in some way:

• A classic and the modern day equivalent,
• A book and movie of that book,
• A collection of different styled poetry books,
• Themed books and similar topics, for example: two books about dogs.
• Books from the same genre.
• A popular book, such as Hunger Games, and a less popular book of the same genre.

The books were wrapped up with a strip of wrapping paper and string and students liked that after we "processed" the books we wrapped them back up again for them to take home.

By the end of last term we had 24 packs (at least 48 books) borrowed in addition to our normal borrowing patterns.

Many students who borrowed the paired up books returned the first one and re-borrowed the second one so that they could finish it.

We are hoping to survey students who borrowed the Winter Reading packs to see if it would be worthwhile to do it again, perhaps as a Spring Reading Pack.