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5 Good Ways to Help Students Start Writing Projects

Whether it’s a short fiction story, a poem, a persuasive essay, a report, or any other writing assignment, the hardest part for many students is just getting started. Here are some good tools that you and your students can use to generate fiction and non-fiction writing prompts.

DIY Writing Prompt Generator in Google Sheets

Flippity offers a Google Sheets template called the Mix & Match template. This is a template that you can use to create fiction and non-fiction writing prompts. In this video I demonstrate how to use Flippity’s Mix & Match template.

Comics as Writing Prompts

Make Beliefs Comix offers more than 700 writing prompt pages. The printables section on Make Beliefs Comix is organized into dozens of categories. Some of those categories include A Book of QuestionsHeroesHistory, and Poetry. All the the printable writing prompt pages include artwork designed to spark a student’s imagination. Some of the artwork is in color and some is in black and white. A perk of the black and white artwork is that you’re essentially getting a coloring page and a writing prompt in one package.

Keep Writing or All Progress is Lost!

The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts forces you to write for a minimum amount of time or minimum words without stopping for more than a few seconds or all of your work is lost. If you do reach the minimum (you choose what the minimum is), you can download your writing as a Word doc to continue the writing and editing process. The Most Dangerous Writing Prompts contains 500 writing prompts. See the site in action in this video.

Pictures as Writing Prompts

PicLits aims to provide inspiration for writing short stories through the use of pictures. PicLits tries to reach this goal by providing users with images upon which they can build their writing. To get writers started, PicLits provides a list of words which can be dragged and dropped into sentence form. If you don’t want to use or don’t need a word list, you can select the “freestyle” option to begin free-form writing.

Shake Your iPad to Start a Story

Story Dice for iOS is a free app that lets you select up to ten dice from four story categories. The dice feature pictures that are intended to prompt you to write about them or include them in a story. You can roll the dice by shaking your iPad or by just tapping the roll icon. Want to write your own Star Wars fan fiction? Story Dice has a Star Wars category.