I’m definitely a cat person; there’s no denying it when you own four of them. For the most part, I try not to be one of those annoying pet parents that always finds a reason to show off pictures of the furbabies or work them into conversations.

That said, pets can be a very useful tool for a writer. The animals a character owns—and how they view and treat them—can do a lot to characterize them for the reader. Pets can be characters in their own right, too, or can serve nicely as symbols to reinforce the themes or imagery you’re playing with. They can also be a great way to introduce movement and sensory details like touch, smell, and sound, not to mention emotions—depending on the situation, they can be a catalyst for grief, frustration, and fear, or a source of comic relief from them.

In that spirit, here are three pet-based prompts that can help you play with ways to utilize pets in your writing.

Christmas-themed things can be a bit of a landmine for storytellers. It’s pretty easy for them to veer into cliché or maudlin territory, and a lot of the familiar themes and plots have been written to death.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get inspiration from the holiday season, though. Here are some prompts that can get your brain going on some stories in the Christmas spirit.

I recently got back from my cross-country adventure to Yosemite and back to Pittsburgh by train. Trains and buses are my preferred method of traveling when I have the time. Planes are efficient, sure, but there’s something special about seeing the landscape go by while you’re passing through it that’s inspiring for me. The constant stream of inspiration and potential new ideas going by outside the window makes it easy for me to get my head into a creative space.

In that spirit, I thought it might be fun to write prompts based on the things that gave me ideas or piqued my interest during the trip. Here are 3 writing prompts based around travel.

Stories can come from the most unexpected places. Training yourself to pay attention to these small moments of inspiration can help you to find the stories that are floating around you in everyday life.

Case in point: even just your regular trip to the grocery store can be a goldmine of potential stories. Here are three prompts to help you develop that paying-attention-to-the-mundane muscle.

There are always stories all around us, waiting to be told. Finding those stories is often just a matter of looking at things in new ways, taking the time to uncover the narrative within them.

That’s the goal of the exercises below: unlocking the stories that are inside objects you see and use every day. You can use them to start a new story from things in your environment, or picture the objects in your characters’ environment in a work-in-progress when you’re stuck in a story and not sure where to take it.

I love a good writing prompt. Or even a not so good writing prompt. Honestly, anything that gets my creative mind going and takes it into a new place is a winner in my book. And starting from something that’s inherently entertaining, like a board game, can be especially valuable, in my opinion. It shifts your mind out of work-brain and into fun-brain, taking away some of the pressure of producing words and helping to silent the inner critic so you can just enjoy the process.

Because that’s what writing should be, even if you’re writing about a serious topic, even if you’re a capital-A Author who does it for a living: joyful. If you’re not engaged by your own writing, no reader is going to be, either. When the writer takes joy in the creation process, that comes through on the page.

I’m a sucker for a mailing list. Anytime I research new journals and presses to submit to, or go to a conference or bookfair, I end up subscribing to a plethora of new lists.

Of course, doing this, I’ve signed up for a bunch of newsletters that were…less than helpful. Inevitably, I’ll come to realize my inbox is getting inundated and embark on a purge. But there are newsletters I’m always excited to see pop up in my inbox, and a few I’ve come to anticipate, to the point I’ll go searching through my spam folder to double-check if I don’t see them.

There are times ideas spring into your brain faster than you can get them on paper, but even the most prolific writer sometimes feels the frustration of staring at a blank page waiting for words that don’t want to come.

I’ve read several short story advice books that give the mildly infurating solution to “just start writing,” which is kind of like telling a lost traveler how great the subway is but not how to find the station. If I knew how to just start writing, I would already be doing it.

To be fair, I get what these writers are saying. Once you start putting words down, they build on each other sentence after sentence until you find that flow that carries you through to the end. The question is how to unlock those crucial first words to open the door for the story you want to tell.