Creative Writing Activities

The reason for coming up with as many creative writing activities as possible is to help to keep your students' or kids' writing fresh and exciting. If you simply sit them down to write over and over again, all but the greatest of writing lovers will get bored. Heck, I even tend to get bored, and I write for a living. This is why you need to spice things up with variety and these ideas may be just what the teacher or parent ordered. Feel free to pair these with creative writing prompts from my books, 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More or 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade.

Creative Writing Activities

1. In your classroom or house, leave clues that lead to one another in the form of story prompts. Only when the kids have written short stories from each clue can they claim the secretly located treasure (in the form of candy or games).

2. Give each of your students the name of a character on a small piece of paper. Divide them into groups of three or four and have each group create a story with the names of those characters. You can use character names that are obvious, like Jenny Shoemaker or some that are more ambiguous, like Tom Smith.

3. Turn any free writing activity into a game show! Create a wheel (or find a computer program that will create a wheel for you) that has a series of different words or phrases that could start a sentence. Have someone spin the wheel to choose a word for your students to start their first sentence with. Every few minutes give them a new spin. Encourage them to cheer for easier words like "the" or exciting ones like "suddenly."

4. Pick out some music with intentionally vague and interesting lyrics. Have them all listen to the song and the lyrics specifically at least three times. Then have your students write a story based on what they've heard.

5. Pile a bunch of random objects on the top of a long desk or table. Let the students walk around the table and make note of at least five objects from the table to include in a story. Let them write and watch the many different directions the stories go in.

6. Tell your students that they have become the board members of a television network and must decide what shows they want to keep and which ones to ditch. Have them make up names of television programs and what they're about. You can even have them write an episode of a television show for extra credit.

7. Have your students bring in their favorite books to read as younger children. Give them the assignment to re-write the ending of the stories completely.

8. Share a small except from a play by William Shakespeare with your students while explaining blank verse and Elizabethan English. Have them do their best to write scene that Shakespeare might have written at their age.

9. Without giving your students any prompts whatsoever, have them write a short story. Next, have them re-write the same story giving their main character a certain emotion. Then, change the emotion and have them re-write the story one more time.

10. Give your students the instruction that after writing one sentence of their story, they must walk one lap around the classroom. This will more than likely infuse a silly energy into the room which may help them to push past their writing fears. 

I hope you can get a lot of use out of these creative writing activities. For more tips and tricks that you can use for different creative writing activities, check out my page on Creative Writing Tips. 

Done with Creative Writing Activities? Go back to Creative Writing Prompts.