Does this scene look familiar? You’ve cleared your schedule for the day, you have your coffee brewed, and your phone on silent. You open up a new document on the computer and are ready to write… and then you spend 20 minutes staring at the blinking cursor and realize you have no ideas worthy of writing down.

Maybe you attempt a sentence or two, only to select all + delete a few minutes later. What exactly are you trying to say? We’ve all been there. As writers, we’re constantly seeking out new and interesting ideas to turn into stories. But sometimes the well runs dry.

Luckily for you, in this video, we discover 9 different ways to get the juices flowing again! These start out kind of abstract, but they get very concrete towards the end. The first idea for jumpstarting your next story is to look at a photograph. Like the one pictured above. We can already tell there’s some action happening here – the woman is fanning her face, or maybe she just lost and she’s about to scream! Then there’s the little girl who looks like she’s about to laugh. And let’s not gloss over the details here – the cards are skulls and swords! There’s got to be a good story behind that. A good picture sets a scene – and you can use that scene as a building block for your next story.

See what other prompts we have in the video below!