Is Writing Exercises and Prompts suitable for beginners in creative writing?

Updated

Yes. Writing Exercises and Prompts (writingexercises.co.uk) is a reasonable starting point for beginners, mainly because it combines beginner-oriented articles with low-stakes generators and exercises that remove the hardest part of getting started: deciding what to write about. The site describes its prompts and exercises as "completely free," and the material is organized so you can begin with a single prompt rather than a full story idea.

What a beginner actually gets

The site is not a structured course. It is a collection of tools and short articles. For a new writer, that is usually an advantage: you can pick one thing, write for ten minutes, and stop.

Category Examples on the site Why it helps a beginner
Getting-started articles Creative Writing First Steps, Unlock Your Inner Storyteller, The Perfect Opening Line Explains basic concepts before you write
Plot tools Plot Generator, Quick Plot Generator, Common Plot Lines, Plot Structure Gives you a skeleton when you have no idea
Character tools Character Generator, Random Traits, List of Character Traits, Character Exercises Prevents flat, unnamed characters
Prompt generators Dialogue Prompts, First Line Prompts, What If? Scenario, Random Words Exercise Produces a concrete starting sentence or situation
Setting and naming Create A Setting, Town Name Generator, Name Generators Fills in details beginners often stall on
Craft articles Choosing Your Narrative Perspective, Pacing Your Story, Using Literary Devices, Revising Your First Draft Teaches the skill behind the exercise
Extra practice Anagram games, Anagram Solver, Scrabble Trainer, Rhyming Dictionary Warms up vocabulary without pressure

How to use it as a beginner

  1. Start with an article, not a generator. Read "Creative Writing First Steps" to get a sense of what a first draft is supposed to look like. Expectation-setting matters more than technique at this stage.
  2. Pick one generator and write immediately. Open the First Line Prompts or What If? Scenario, take the first result, and write without changing it. The point is to produce text, not to choose the perfect idea.
  3. Use plot and character tools only when you stall. If your draft has a person but no event, run the Plot Generator. If it has an event but a blank character, run the Character Generator and the Random Traits list.
  4. Verify by finishing something short. A useful check: can you complete 200–300 words from a single prompt in one sitting? If yes, the site is working for you. If you keep restarting, switch to the Random Words Exercise, which forces a scene rather than a premise.
  5. Then read one craft article. "Pacing Your Story" or "Creating Character Dialogue" will make more sense after you have a draft to apply it to.

Where beginners hit friction

  • Generators give fragments, not stories. A plot generator hands you a situation; you still have to write the scenes. Beginners sometimes expect a finished outline and are disappointed.
  • No progress tracking or feedback. Nothing on the site tells you whether your writing is improving. If you need correction, pair it with a writing group or a class.
  • Breadth can be overwhelming. The homepage lists dozens of tools across plot, character, anagrams, and articles. Pick two or three and ignore the rest for the first few weeks.
  • Free access is stated, but no account features are described. The site presents its prompts and exercises as completely free; there is no indication of a login-based tier, so treat it as a no-signup resource rather than assuming any saved-progress feature exists.

Who it suits, and who it does not

Suits you if: you are new, you freeze at the blank page, you want short exercises rather than a syllabus, and you prefer to write first and study craft second.

May not suit you if: you want graded lessons with feedback, a deadline structure, or advanced literary theory. The site's own article list stops around revision and genre basics, so writers past the beginner stage will likely outgrow it.

A practical next step: open the First Line Prompts page, take one line, and write for fifteen minutes. If that produces a page you did not have before, the site is doing its job for you.