Our most creative and original writing is often spontaneous and intuitive. Responding to writing prompts within a limited time frame can help you to write without over-thinking. This is why I offer fifteen minute writing prompts in workshops and classes.
creative writing
Writing to Heal
We are the stories we tell ourselves. Image by Sabine Van Erp The stories we live become the stories we tell, and the stories we tell become the stories we live. What stories do you tell yourself? Are they reinforcing beliefs that no longer serve you? Writing can help us to heal by transforming the … Continue reading Writing to Heal
Write Now
We create the stories we live by, and live by the stories we create. We can’t change the past, but we can transform its influence on us with creative writing. It turns out, writing can have side effects. Happiness is complicated. Write to heal. Find out more at http://www.ellenszabo.com
Saving the World One Word at a Time – Writing Cli-Fi
Available on Amazon Discover how writing fiction can make the world a better place. This book offers instruction, inspiration and prompts for writing cli-fi; speculative fiction that focuses primarily on the ways that climate change is transforming our world. Explore how plot, place and character development can make climate change personal. By anticipating and elaborating … Continue reading Saving the World One Word at a Time – Writing Cli-Fi
Love and Apocalypse – Externalize Your Inner Apocalypse with Creative Writing
Available on Amazon. This book is for anyone who wants to use creative writing to feel better by externalizing their inner apocalypse. Using 25 writing prompts with evocative photographs, readers are encouraged to make meaning of their life experiences by discovering, emphasizing and illuminating changed perspectives. Every character and every story we write, is autobiographical. … Continue reading Love and Apocalypse – Externalize Your Inner Apocalypse with Creative Writing
what shoes mean
Write the story that begins: "We arrive barefoot, and leave shoeless..." photo: ebszabo
taking leave
How and why we take our leave from a place can define who we become - and it can make us unreliable narrators of our own lives. ebszabo Write the character who has lived here, beginning with the moment they walk away. Capture the ways in which memory (back-story) is influenced by their reason for leaving, … Continue reading taking leave
co·nun·drum
In great story, the beginning starts in the middle, and the ending is in the beginning. ebszabo Writing Prompt: Demonstrate this truth, with a story from this photograph.
first light and bad love
The Sun coming up is an illusion so convincing that, though we know it is the Earth's motion that causes the Sun to appear on the horizon, we persist in calling it 'sunrise'. This is because we on earth are in a rotating reference frame. Something that I don't fully understand. But I think it might … Continue reading first light and bad love
who would?
Who lives here? Who swims here? Write their story, teach us how to believe this pool is just perfect. photo: Jonathan Hogue Start with the summer afternoon when someone decided to fill the empty milk bottles and put them to use. Take us through the days to winter, convince us it was a good idea to … Continue reading who would?
Szabo Creative Consulting 