My niece said my prompt about a lighthouse was boring, so I rewrote it as a text message
Last weekend my niece Emma, who is 14, read one of my story prompts about a lonely lighthouse keeper and said nobody her age would care because it sounded like homework. So I rewrote the same idea as a string of unanswered texts from the keeper to his daughter, and suddenly she wanted to write the whole story herself. Now I keep a second version of every prompt in text message form, and I am 4 for 4 on getting her to actually write. Has anyone else tried flipping a prompt into a format like texts, voicemails, or to-do lists to get younger writers going?