Writing prompts and constraints for word tiles and magnetic poetry

Spelling & writing · Published 2026-10-13

A pile of word tiles is already a constraint. Add one more rule and it becomes a game. Here are prompts to use with the magnetic poetry board or with paper tiles, grouped from quick warm-ups to more demanding forms.

Why constraints help

The idea that rules make writing more inventive, not less, has a famous champion: the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, "workshop of potential literature"), founded in Paris in 1960 by the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais. Its members invented and revived formal constraints and wrote whole books under them. The best-known example is Georges Perec's 1969 novel La Disparition, written entirely without the letter e and translated into English, also without an e, by Gilbert Adair as A Void (1994). Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) printed ten sonnets on cut strips so that any line could be combined with any other, giving 10¹⁴ possible poems, a hundred thousand billion. The Oulipo's own site (in French) and the Wikipedia article on the group describe many more constraints.

Word tiles fit this tradition naturally. You cannot reach for the obvious word because it may not be in the pile, so you write sideways into images you would not have planned.

One-minute warm-ups

1. First five. Deal new tiles. Without moving more than five, make a line that could be the first sentence of a novel.
2. Title only. Make the best possible two-word title. Then a three-word one. Then decide which book you would rather read.
3. Weather report. Describe today's weather using no weather words.
4. Overheard. Make a line that sounds like something you overheard on a bus.
5. Instructions. Write a three-step set of instructions for something impossible.
6. Headline. Make a newspaper headline that is technically true about your morning.

Constraint games

7. Lipogram. In the spirit of Perec, choose a letter and use no tile that contains it. Start with a rare one (k, w), then try a vowel. On the board, move every tile containing the banned letter to the far corner first.
8. Univocalic. Use only words whose vowels are all the same letter: salt, bread, map for a; moon, door, slow for o.
9. Snowball. Each line one word longer than the one before: one word, then two, then three, up to six.
10. Monosyllables. Only one-syllable words. Surprisingly forceful, because English's short words are mostly old and concrete.
11. No adjectives. Banish every describing word and let nouns and verbs do the work.
12. Same first tile. Every line starts with the same word, an old device called anaphora. Under, When and Because work well.
13. N+7. The Oulipo method invented by Jean Lescure replaces each noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. With tiles: write a line, then swap each noun for the noun tile nearest to it on the board. Read the result with a straight face.
14. Exactly the pile. Use every tile in a small hand (deal, then return all but fifteen to the box). Nothing left over.

Forms to try

15. Haiku-length. Three short lines that catch a single moment. Do not count syllables strictly at first; aim for short, long, short and a concrete image.
16. Couplet. Two lines that end in words that rhyme or nearly rhyme. Add your own tile for the second rhyme if the pile refuses.
17. Cento. A cento is a poem made of lines borrowed from other poems. Make one from lines you built in earlier sessions and saved.
18. Erasure in reverse. Write a paragraph of plain prose, then turn just its key words into tiles and rebuild something stranger from them.
19. Letter poem. Start with Dear and a name tile; end with a sign-off. Everything in between must be something you would never say to that person.

For classrooms and families

20. Silliest true sentence. Each person makes a sentence that is silly but true about themselves.
21. Pass the line. Players add one tile at a time to a shared line, without discussion, in the manner of the Surrealists' exquisite corpse described in the history of magnetic poetry.
22. Parts of speech hunt. Sort the pile into nouns, verbs and describing words before writing. Arguments about whether dream is a noun or a verb are part of the lesson: it is both.
23. Spelling bridge. Add five spelling words of the week as tiles and build a sentence around each. A good companion to the commonly misspelled words list.
24. Swap and finish. Each person starts a poem, shares the link, and someone else finishes it.

Making the most of a session

Set a timer: ten minutes is plenty. Use Read the poem often, because seeing the tiles as plain text shows you rhythm and repetition you miss on the board. Keep everything, including the failures, in a single document; poems you dislike today are raw material for a cento next month. And when one line catches, take it away from the board and keep writing in your own words. The tiles are a way in, not a cage.

All prompts on this page were written for Letterbench. Constraints attributed to the Oulipo are described from the group's published work; the specific tile versions are ours.