Creative Writing Prompts for Middle School

Middle School Creative Writing Prompts

Get your imagination to work via these prompts designed to get middle school students interested in creative writing. Try your hand at poetry, fiction or playwriting, drawing inspiration from art, history, and more!

Favorite Song Story

Think of your favorite song at the moment. What do you love about it? Now do some writing inspired by that song. Use your favorite elements of the song to influence your writing. If you're writing in a class or group, share the songs and pieces of writing. Find out whether other writers can see the connections between the two works.

Historical Figure Monologue

Take on the persona of a historical figure that you've learned about, and craft a monologue for this person. Challenge yourself to have them speaking about something that wouldn't be found in the textbooks. Maybe they are addressing a close friend or family member, or maybe they are speaking about something personal. How can you use what you know about them to create their voice in a different context?

Current Events Poem

Poems are often written in response to local or world events. Choose a current event that interests you from a recent newspaper, and write a poem in response to it. If writing in a group, share your poems and see if you can guess the current event that inspired the writer.

School Subjects Scene

Write a scene or story in which you personify different school subjects as characters. For example, what kind of person would math be? What about history or science? Let the personalities of the characters inspire the action of your story.

Reverse Chronology

Change things up by writing a story that ends with the phrase 'once upon a time' and begins with the phrase 'they lived happily ever after'. What sort of story can you create that makes those phrases make sense in that order?

Time Hop

Choose a historical event or time period that you've studied, and write a story about people who lived in that time. Consider the norms and expectations of that time as you write. Alternatively, write a modern story in the style of writing you've read from a different time period. How does this impact your word choice and style?

Advice for Middle School Creative Writers

• Read your work out loud: Reading your writing out loud will help you catch grammatical errors, run-on sentences, or incomplete ideas.
• Be organized: While it's well known that most good writing has a beginning, middle and end, sometimes simply thinking about this basic structure in your own writing will help keep you on track as you go. When you're editing, ask yourself how a detail/plot point/etc. helps you get from the beginning of the story to the end.
• Have fun: Although this may seem like a somewhat cliché piece of advice, it is essential. The writing you create expresses your creativity and imagination, so have fun letting that side of yourself shine! Don't be afraid to be bold.

Creative Writing Resources

Study.com offers several resources to help middle school students improve their writing skills. Check out the chapters below for guidance as you work to refine and hone your craft.

• 6th Grade Language Arts: Writing
• 7th Grade Language Arts: Writing
• 8th Grade Language Arts: Writing

The Study.com courses in Common Core writing standards shown below offer lessons on essays, narrative writing, editing, research and text analysis.

• 7th Grade Common Core Writing
• 8th Grade Common Core Writing