January 2025 Prompts

Adapt these prompts as you like. The assumption is that you can add things like, "Explain," "What happened?" or "How do you feel about it?" Similarly, if you aren't interested in pursuing the topic, don't. These prompts are meant to be helpful and not feel restrictive or prescriptive!

Also, if you want to use these as character development exercises rather than general journal prompts, that would work! Replace "you" with any of your characters. These are adaptable to all kinds of forms--poetry, drama, etc. Stretch to what feels best for you (or feels challenging).

Birthday prompt: On the day that it is your birthday (or you can adapt this to someone you love), write X number of things for the year that you (or they) are turning. So, if it is your 21st birthday, write twenty-one random facts about yourself. If it is your son's 14th birthday, write fourteen facts about your son.

Before we start the new year, on December 31, this is the prompt: Write a letter to the self you were on January 1, 2024.

1: Write a letter to the self you will be on December 31, 2025.

2: In EJ Koh's poem "Clearance," she images a list of things the CIA would dig up on her through a background check, from elementary memories to how she cannot hold her bladder to family pets to faith. What would the CIA dig up on you? Make up a list, imaginative, exaggerated, or exactly as you remember it.

3. Write out a hospital memory that stands out to you.

4. We all of collective lists of what Audre Lorde calls "intersectionality"--all of our identities like gender and faith and education and profession and passion and race and I could go on all day. What's an identity you had when you were younger that has either changed or vanished completely? What happened? How do you feel about it?

5. What makes the home you live in now different from the one you grew up in? The same?

6. What is a conspiracy theory that has always interested you? If not a conspiracy theory, what is a mystery that you've always wished were solved? What are the details of it and what to you think the truth is?

7. Growing up, we spent a lot of times researching and presenting biographies of people famous for many things--hero essays, wax museum projects, Google slide presentations. Who is someone that fascinated you when you were in elementary school? Do you see weavings of this person in your life today? 

8. What is something you still feel guilty about? What can you do to make peace with that guilt?

9. What's a place, in your past or present, where you feel the safest? What kinds of safe do you feel in that place? What kinds of happiness do you feel?

10. If your parent or guardian were to tell your life story, what details would they be sure to include? What do you wish they would exclude/include that you know they will exclude/include?

11. What is an aspect of politics that you fall on the opposite "side" of the party you generally vote for? In other words, what is a belief you have that others who usually agree with you politically would disagree with you on?

12. What's an item of the news that has been on your mind lately? (It doesn't need to be something that has happened recently or even in your lifetime--just something that might linger or even haunt you.)

13. Write an ode to the best relationship you've ever had. This needn't be a romantic one--you could write about a friendship, a bond with a relative, a mentor or student, etc.

14. If talent, training, logistics, and anything else weren't standing in your way, what would you do for a living? 

15. You've been given a ticket to fly anywhere on this planet (or another). Where are you going and who are you bringing with you (extra tickets included)? What do you hope to do when you get there? What will surprise you about your visit?

16. What was one of your favorite games you'd play pretend at when you were a kid? What were some of the stories you'd make up as you played?

17. If you could go back in time--with no butterfly effect--what time period would you go back to and what would you do on your adventure?

18. Write a list of five to ten people in your life you feel you know the best. These needn't be people you are close to--just people you think you have pinned. Now write three adjectives beside / underneath those names. Pick one of the people and one of the adjectives from another column and write about that person's relationship to that word. 

19. What is a hope you have for two months from now? What are you going to do to achieve it? If it is lofty--say, you'd like to see something happen in terms of peace, or ending something like homelessness--what is something you can and will do to contribute towards that change?

20. Write about a faith system. It doesn't need to be an organized religion or even your own religion, but when you read the words faith + system, what comes to mind?

21. What was the pandemic like for you? 

22. What do you feel people respect you for the most? (Alternatively, what do you wish they'd respect you for?)

23. What is something that you failed at but it became something wonderful instead?

24. This prompt might last many days or weeks--it might be something you do once, or you come back to again and again. Start a collection of your favorite words. Words that you think feel delicious to say or speak or evoke something in you that make you happy. 

25. Write a food making memory. Not the meal itself, but the act of creating.

26. What are some of the techniques that are most successful in calming someone you love? Do those same techniques work on you?

27. Take out the bag you carry with you every day or look into the everyday contents of your pockets. What do these objects reveal about you? What conclusion would a stranger come to about those objects? Someone from your own culture? Someone from a very different culture? (In my M.Ed program, we exchanged three random objects from our backpacks and were told to write stories about the people who carried those objects. This was before we had gotten to know each other, so it was a fun exercise.)

28. If your dream job were offered to you tomorrow, what would it look like? What's holding you back?

29. Remember a time when you encountered the law in some way. Write about how it affected you then and how it impacts you now. 

30. Write a letter to someone who is no longer in your life. Maybe this was a childhood pen pal, an old friend, or someone who has passed on. What do you want to ask them? What do you want to tell them? (This is sometimes a technique I use when I feel blocked in my own writing--I'll write a letter to my beloved grandmother, who passed away a little over a decade ago and used to get daily mail from me!)

31. What is something you wish you said no to?