10 Childhood Writing Prompts

To help combat writer’s block, look to the past for story and character ideas, and your memories will inspire childhood writing prompts.

A person’s beliefs about themselves grow from childhood experiences. Traumatic events shape a child’s entire future. But even small things hold value in a story. How a character plays, for example, can reveal a lot about who he is. Consider a character’s past, how they grew up, and the type of kid they were, and it adds story details, even if none of your novel takes place in childhood. Posing childhood writing prompts for your characters gives you and your future readers more insight.

I had many sleepovers growing up, but two memories stand out. First, the night Carrie and I made a Polly Pocket water globe in a Pepsi bottle. And second, the night Rachel and I found a poster-sized piece of cardboard and constructed a collage of things we liked from magazines, things we hoped to have someday (I realize now this was a vision board, but I didn’t know then). Using our imaginations produced something really, really cool. Not only did we fill the time, but we made memories together.

Here’s our teenaged vision board, recently salvaged from my childhood home.

teenage vision board

In Rachel’s defense, I believe I was the boy-crazy one. 🙂

Based on these memories, you can probably guess a few things about me, Rachel, and Carrie. We’re creative types. We had many romantic ideas about our futures, and we found positive ways to entertain ourselves when bored.

Likewise, creating childhood memories for your characters–whether you use them in your manuscript or not–pulls back the curtain into who they are. And you can’t get your readers to care about the story without making connections to the characters. Just thinking about those sleepovers inspired many awesome childhood writing prompts on character development–the coffee helped. The more we know our characters, the more the reader will, too, and the better we can push them forward, even if our plot has little or nothing to do with their childhoods.

Here are 10 questions to ask about your main character’s childhood:

  • A vision board could spark ideas about your main characters. What would you clip and paste to represent your character and what she wants? Cooler writers than me create novel aesthetics, and here’s an excellent blog on how to do it with lovely examples. If your character created a vision board as a kid, what would it look like?
  • Was your character a creator during childhood? Or a destroyer? A pretender? An exaggerator? A nervous, shy type? Or the type to talk to anyone? If you had to assign your character’s childhood an emoji, what would it be?
  • Was she big on toys or more interested in the boxes they came in? What did she play with most? Does she still own her toys? Did they all burn in a fire? Did she sell them to her friends to afford bread and peanut butter?
  • Did your character host or attend sleepovers? What are her best and worst sleepover-related memories? Or did she even have friends?

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” ~ Thomas Edison, inventor

Of course, the man who invented the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture (just to name a few) probably wouldn’t have thought much of our water globe and collage, but two friends creating something out of trash, I think Edison would agree that’s an evening well-spent. 

  • What would your character do with a pile of junk as a child? What about now? Does she collect something? Or have a hobby?
  • When your character was a child, what monopolized his spare time? Video games? Books? Football? Vicious pranks on his neighbors and parents?
  • What’s your character’s most treasured childhood possession? A magazine collage, perhaps? A home run ball? A letter from his mom?
  • How does your character learn best? Through seeing, hearing, or feeling? Check out this list to determine your character’s learning style.
  • What was in your character’s lunchbox as a kid? And book bag? Did he ride the bus to school?
  • A friend is being bullied… What does your child character do? Now that he’s an adult, would he react differently?
  • What’s an invention she couldn’t live without now that she didn’t have as a kid?

Come up with some spectacular ideas to drive your story forward. Join (or start) the conversation below…I’m here. Waiting. Also, check out more story writing prompts on my blog.

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