As a teacher, one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is this: when students are given the freedom to write their own stories, their own genres, and their own ideas, their writing blossoms in ways no daily prompt could ever capture. I used to think prompts were the way to go. After all, they seemed to keep everyone “on task” and gave me control over what students were producing. But over time, I realized that prompts often produced the same kind of writing over and over again—surface-level, f...