Creative and persuasive writing prompts in the form real assessments use — scenario, stimulus material, constraint, planning note. Tune the world, reroll the materials, set the clock, and write.
Write a creative response to the prompt below, supported by the other materials and your own ideas.
A lighthouse keeper on a remote island wakes to find a rowboat pulled up on the rocks, oars shipped, perfectly dry. Nobody has landed on the island in eleven years. What happens next?
‘You checked the mooring twice. I watched you.’ ‘Then explain to me why the boat is gone.’
The fishermen keep to an old rule: whatever the sea returns, you do not keep. Nobody remembers who made the rule — only that the one family who broke it left town within the year.
The lighthouse log has been kept without a missed night for sixty years. The last entry is half a sentence.
Take care: responses must be fully enclosed narratives.
Five minutes of planning. Consider setting, characterisation, structure and grammar — and how the drama of the prompt can be carried within 20 minutes of writing.
One prompt each month is taken further: write it, send it in with a parent’s consent, and every piece receives a short private reading back — two or three each month are annotated in full and published.
Write a story in which a character returns to a place they know well and finds one small thing changed. The change is never explained. Your story should be complete — a beginning, a turn, and an ending that lands — in no more than 600 words.The full prompt, and how to send a piece in →
Every prompt here follows the structure used in scholarship and selective-entry writing tasks: an instruction line, a central scenario or proposition, stimulus material to draw on, and a constraint. The habit worth building is the same one the exam rewards — five minutes of planning before any writing, every time. The materials are an offer, and the strongest responses use them selectively rather than dutifully: one image or one quotation, absorbed properly, beats all of them mentioned in passing.
A fully enclosed narrative — one with a beginning, a turn, and an ending that lands inside the time limit. Markers reward a small story finished over a large story abandoned. Plan the ending first: a writer who knows where the piece closes can spend the opening on atmosphere and character instead of working out the plot mid-sentence.
Take a position in the first minute and hold it. Spend the remaining four ordering two or three arguments from concession to conviction: acknowledge the strongest opposing point early, answer it, and let the final argument be the one you would defend in conversation. Technique — rhetorical question, rule of three, direct address — earns marks when it carries an argument, and loses them when it decorates one.
Two prompts from the Argo assessment series, with a note on how I’d read them — the same shape this generator produces.
Someone is lost at sea and suspects that one of the other few remaining survivors may have caused the horrible accident. They are stranded on a beach and much of their crew-mates are missing. What happens next?
The prompt hands you suspicion, which is more useful than it looks: suspicion gives a narrator a reason to watch, and a watching narrator produces detail. The trap is scale. Eleven survivors and a shipwreck is a novel; one suspect, one beach and one conversation held back too long is a story that closes in twenty minutes.
Everyone, regardless of how good or bad they are as a person, should have an equal ability to vote. Do you agree?
The stimulus quotations pull in opposite directions — Addams on rights, Chesterton on the quality of the voting — and the strongest responses notice that tension instead of quoting one side approvingly. A position that survives the best opposing quotation is worth twice one that ignores it.
Written one? Send it in.
A prompt is half the practice — the reading is the other half. Send the piece your child wrote and receive a short, honest reading back, the way I’d read it in a first lesson.
A paragraph, a reading →