A Year of Creative Thinking: 366 Daily Inspirations for Writers and Artists

A treasure trove of prompts, provocations, and practical exercises to help you spark new ideas, hone your craft, and unleash your creativity.

In A Year of Creative Thinking, award-winning writer, director, and filmmaker Jessica Swale guides you through 366 fun and rewarding activities--one for every day of the year (including leap years!)--to fire up your imagination and flex your creative muscles.

You’ll find a host of writing prompts and imaginative challenges to get you going, quick-fire exercises to help you focus on key aspects of craft (including inventing scenarios, writing dialogue, building subtext, creating atmosphere and plot, and developing your characters), and plenty of quirky and unusual challenges to test your limits and help you explore new avenues. Some are writing exercises, others encourage you to draw, to listen to music, to get outside and find inspiration in your surroundings. Work through the activities day by day, or dip in to suit your needs--the choice is yours!

Fun, engaging and pressure-free, this book is designed to supercharge your imagination and boost your creativity, helping you build a set of expressive tools that you can apply in all aspects of your life.

Jessica Swale is a writer and director, and the Artistic Director of Red Handed Theatre Company. Her first play, Blue Stockings, premiered at Shakespeare’s Globe and won her a nomination for Most Promising Playwright in the Evening Standard Awards 2013. Other plays include: Nell Gwynn and Thomas Tallis (both Shakespeare’s Globe); All’s Will That Ends Will (Bremer Shakespeare Company); adaptations of Far from the Madding Crowd, Sense and Sensibility (Watermill Theatre), The Secret Garden (Grosvenor Park) and The Jungle Book (UK tour 2017 and 2018); and an original play, The Mission, about illegal adoptions in the 1920s.

In addition to a slew of directorial credits across the UK and Canada, she has directed a number of award-winning productions for Red Handed, which is dedicated to creating new work and rediscovering forgotten plays. Recent productions include The Rivals starring Celia Imrie, the London premiere of Palace of the End by Judith Thompson, and the first major revival of Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem, which won her a nomination for Best Director at the Evening Standard Awards.

She is the author of A Year of Creative Thinking: 366 Daily Inspirations for Writers and Artists (Nick Hern Books, 2025) and has written three titles in Nick Hern Books’ popular Drama Games series: Drama Games for Classrooms and Workshops, Drama Games for Devising, and Drama Games for Rehearsals.

She is an associate artist with Youth Bridge Global, an international NGO which uses theatre as a tool for promoting social change in war-torn and developing nations.