21+ Fun Creative Writing Starters for Summer

How does one unleash creativity?

There’s art, there’s music, there’s writing…

In all of these, the key to true creativity is in lettings your ideas simply flow.

For many students, however, it can be hard to “flow” when typing on the computer, because they are too busy trying to find the right keys on the keyboard.

Thus, one of the main reasons behind why we teach students to touch type is to enable them to type without looking down at their fingers or thinking about them. Basically, the goal is to be able to type as you think!

Only then can you really begin to unleash the creativity.

To help students practice their typing skills and explore their creativity, here are some fun creative writing prompts to use over the summer (or any time).

Creative Writing Prompt Ideas

1. Write a Fantastical Fiction Story

Scholastic Story Starters is a fun online tool to help students from grades K – 6 jump into creative writing. Students start by choosing a theme such as adventure or fantasy. They then pull a digital lever that randomly generates a creative writing prompt by giving them a format, character, and scenario. (i.e. Write a thank you letter to a humble explorer who saved your spaceship.) The prompt possibilities are endless and an easy place for kids to get started!

2. Write the Backstory to an Interesting Image

Choose a thought-provoking, perplexing, or interesting photo or piece of art and ask students to generate a piece of writing based on what they see. You can give as much or as little structure as you like. Maybe students need to write a dialogue between the two people in the photo that explains what’s going on.

3. Write an Answer to a VERY Open-Ended Question

Provide students with creative writing prompts or story starters. There are tons of these online to choose from. Here are a few of our favorites:

• If you could, would you want to visit the moon? Write a speech convincing your classmates to agree with you.
• Imagine you were 20 feet tall. Describe what life would be like.
• Describe your ideal life when you’re 30 years old.
• Where is your favorite place in the world? Describe it and tell why you love it.
• Imagine you had a hundred dollars, but you couldn’t keep it. You had to give it away to a person or charity. Who would you give it to? What would you want them to do with it?
• Invent and describe a new food.
• What would you do if 300 mice had just gotten out of their cages in a pet shop where you worked?
• What would you do if you could travel into the past?
• Invent a monster and describe it. Tell where it lives, what it eats, and what it does.
• Think about an incident that happened to you and exaggerate in the telling. Make it into a tall tale.
• What law would you like to see enacted which would help people? How would it help?
• Be a building you know well. Talk about your life and memories.
• If you could go somewhere where you’ve never gone before, where would you go and why?
• Is there a machine you feel you could not live without? Explain.
• What is it like to go shopping with your mother?
• If you had to escort a visitor from outer space for a 30-minute tour of your community, where would you begin and end?
• I really hate it when my mother/father/sibling…
• It started out as an unusual Monday morning, when I…
• If you could be a character in any book, TV show, or movie, who would you be and why?
• What would be your ideal job when you grow up? Explain.

Regardless of how you set your students up to get their creative writing juices flowing, throughout it all, encourage students to only look at their computer screens, as the best writing comes from uninterrupted thought. So, get creative in thinking about how you can develop and reinforce these two essential skills in your classroom!