Writing Challenges and Prompts: How Online Resources Can Inspire Better Writing

Last Updated: October 27, 2025 by Michael Kahn. Published: January 13, 2025.

The famous American writer Elizabeth Gilbert, in her book Big Magic: Creative Living Without Fear, dedicated to the role of creativity in everyday life, wrote that ideas for inspiration always exist, just waiting for the right person who can bring them to life. In her opinion, regular practice of the creative process is important since consistency and regularity help to develop creative skills. But what if, at the moment, there are no ideas for writing?

Writing challenges and prompts

One of the biggest challenges that writers face is a lack of ideas and not knowing what to write about. Students especially often deal with this problem. Fortunately, there are specialized services to guide you. You can write a custom essay step by step with expert assistance, ensuring your paper will capture the admissions committee’s attention and potentially secure financial aid. The essay sample that you receive will serve as a source of inspiration.

Always try something new

Routine reduces creativity, so the first thing you can do is try to find sources of ideas and inspiration for something new. It doesn’t have to be something complicated and extreme; you can start with something simple: read a new book, watch a movie in an unusual genre, listen to music by unknown artists, and look for a new hobby. Learning a new language, for example, Spanish or German, can also be an inspiration for better writing. In the process of learning a new language, not only vocabulary and grammar rules are remembered: learning involves getting acquainted with the culture, history, habits, and thoughts of people from other countries, which can also become a source of inspiration for writing.

Try to connect completely unrelated ideas

David Kadavy, the author of the book Design for Hackers, wrote that obvious connections are an obstacle to new ideas. Therefore, you can try to connect two unrelated objects or concepts and try to establish a connection between them. Pick one thing that is related to your work and another completely random thing, like an object lying around your room, then try to combine the two different ideas into something new. This is a good exercise for developing creativity and finding interesting ideas for writing.

Take inspiration from competitors

One way to generate ideas is to take inspiration from the work of other writers. This does not mean copying their content, but instead, you can study their work to understand what topics they cover and how they approach them. By analyzing your competitors, you can identify gaps and fill them with your own work, as well as improve on the topics they cover and bring more value to your audience.

Studying other writers’ work can help you identify popular topics in your industry. However, it is important to remember that you should not plagiarize your competitors’ ideas. Plagiarism is not only unethical, it is also illegal and can cause significant damage to your reputation. Instead, you should use other writers’ content as a source of inspiration and create your own unique work.

Online resources for writers

Scrivener 3

This program is more suitable for writers and screenwriters than journalists. It allows you not to get confused in all the twists and turns of the plot, the names of characters, and titles. Scrivener 3 is not just a text editor. It is a tool for storing and structuring ideas.

Storyist

A full-featured text editor for writers and screenwriters. It offers a wide range of styles, allowing authors to use convenient settings for their works. There are also many standard manuscript and script templates.

Storyist has structuring tools and note cards that can be displayed next to the text being typed. The application also allows you to work with scripts in the correct format. This simplifies collaboration with screenwriters when creating films and TV series. Manuscripts can be prepared for printing and saved in PDF format.

Wattpad

Wattpad is an online community for writers with nearly 85 million registered users worldwide. The service allows you to read other authors’ work for free, as well as write your own texts using a convenient built-in editor.

Day One

It is very important for a writer to record their ideas whenever they appear, and Day One will help with this. The application is convenient to use from a smartphone. In the future, all the records with information about where and when they were created can be viewed on a computer.

FocusWriter

FocusWriter is a free and convenient editor that will suit minimalism lovers. The interface is clutter-free, so you can focus on the text. At the same time, the program provides timers and sessions that will help you work more productively.

Sudowrite

The online service helps to collect ideas for texts, supplements fragments of records and allows editing of completely finished works. The tool uses a neural network to generate interesting results. To the right of the main input window, Sudowrite offers its own options for continuing stories. It is useful for beginning authors.

Use the prompts and online resources we offer, and you will become better at writing.