A creative writing guideline is a simple technique or a few words or phrases that you can use as a starting point for your creative writing.
Once you’ve started writing and used the prompt for inspiration, you can do it on your own.
Where your writing goes after this is completely up to you and your imagination.
Many creative writers are uncomfortable using creative writing prompts.
They think it is cheating or taking a shortcut and all their ideas must be 100% new, original and their own.
On the surface, that sounds like an honorable point of view. Of course, we all want to be able to compose a work that is solely the fruit of our creativity.
We know how bad we would feel if we simply copied someone else’s writing and claimed it as our own.
But the fact is, nothing is completely new.
Everything creative is based on the works of those who have gone before us.
For example, think about when a major automobile company begins designing a new model.
They can introduce many new features, some of which are truly revolutionary in car design and innovation. Most likely they will use cutting edge technology to design each new element of the new model.
But that new car, even after all the millions spent and thousands of man-hours of design and labor invested, will still have four wheels and one engine.
The same goes for creative writing.
At the extreme margins of creative writing, you could make up new words, you could even make up new letters. But they will have meaning in some way.
Creative writing is about the expression of ideas and emotions. Yes, it can be as experimental as you want, but it will always go back to being that human expression.
Creative writing prompts help us explore that creative expression.
If you are a dressmaker, you make the material from scratch. Do you have your own factory that processes raw fibers into larger pieces of material? Unlikely. You probably buy material that has already been knitted and then make your dress out of it.
If you are a musician who composes using computer software, do you write a completely new software program from scratch every time you want to start a new composition? Not very likely. You’ll find software that works for you and use it to help you explore your creative musical ideas from there.
If you are a photographer who specializes in photographing buildings and architecture, do you go and build a new building every time you want to take some photos? Do you build a new camera, piece by piece? No. You have cameras that you feel comfortable with, then you find buildings that inspire your photography.
Would you consider that any of the 3 artists described above “cheats” or “is not original”?
So if you have any concerns about whether using creative writing prompts is cheating or is somehow not allowed, think again.
You will no doubt realize that creative writing is, in fact, in many ways one of the simplest and purest ways to create, because we need very little equipment, tools, or technology to get started.
So using a few words or techniques as a starting point is an even less likely concern.