As writers, it’s sometimes useful to write something random before starting your real work. A warmup, or sorts. It could be anything from a random scene to a complete short story.
Writing Prompts is a great way to get your creative juices flowing for such a short piece, challenging you to write something based on what it tells you. There are ton of great writing prompt generators out there, but one endless version that will give you unique results every time is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has this great randomizer feature which sends you to a random article on Wikipedia. You can access it by clicking that link for the english version or adding Special:Random to the end of any language wikipedia address, just after the /wiki/ bit (for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random).
Now, the challenge is to write something where the subject of the article you got plays a part. Whether it’s mentioned in passing or the main focus of the story is up to you, but it has to feature somehow! For added difficulty, you could use the randomizer several times and make something that involves several random articles in the same story.
Not only will this make your brain work extra hard attempting to figure out how to involve your article in a story you’d like to write – you might also learn something unexpected by being given an article about something you’d never research on your own.
Learning in creativity combined – what’s not to love?
