Prompts for the New Year

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New Year Creative Writing Prompts

By Maria Chatzi

The beginning of a creative new year! It is the time to weave new dreams and new hopes for your creative life, as well as reflect upon the plans of the prior year that have gone wrong and the resolutions that have been broken. The following short list of writing prompts could be used to ignite your imagination for journal writing or just as an exercise to get you back to your daily creative thinking and creative writing habit, after the holiday break. So, grab a pen and a cup of coffee, get cozy and start writing!

10Imagine a wicked witch had put you under a spell and you had fallen asleep through winter. What would you have missed out on? What if, instead of the witch, it was a compassionate wizard or your fairy godmother — what would they have saved you from by casting this spell?

9Think of two words you hated the previous year and two words you loved. Think of “why” you felt the way you did about them. What could have made things be the other way round? When could at least one of your hated words have become a loved one, and in what case would at least one of the loved words turn into a hated one?

8You receive an unusual email message. It is a letter from one of the mistakes you’ve made last year, which has come to life. Write what your mistake wrote to you.

7You wake up one morning to find you are travelling inside a snowflake. What was the weirdest thing that happened to you on this journey.

6Write about a snowball that was actually a camouflaged tiny planet.

5Write a list of winter-related words. Then use them all in a piece of writing on a Spring theme.

4On returning home, you find a huge snowman standing in your living room. “I came for the interview.” he says in a strange sounding voice. You notice that, although close enough to the burning fireplace, he’s not melting. Continue the story.

3Write about a time when the turning of the year came with the disappearance of your most treasured possession.

2If your present creative life was a quilt what would it look like? Describe it in detail. Try to make the description as vivid as possible, so that the reader could live your creative experience through it. Also describe what the quilt looked like in the beginning of the previous year and what it is going to look like a year ahead from now.

1You’re hosting a party for New Year’s Eve. An Unfulfilled Wish (or Dream) and a Broken Resolution, both coming from the previous year, come to life and sneak in, uninvited. They start a conversation with one of your guests. Write part of this conversation.

Happy writing! •

© 2013 Maria Chatzi. All rights reserved.