Abstract: Motor imagery based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems can provide an effective communication channel for the physically impaired to control external devices. The performance of MI based BCI mainly depends on the individual's ability to self-modulate EEG signals and proper training can help individual learn to modulate brain activity proficiently. Because the MI based BCI system typically involves abstract motor tasks that is time-consuming for training subjects, it is important for improving the performance of BCI systems to design a reasonable interactive motor imagery paradigm. Aiming at the deficiency of the traditional paradigm only prompting imaginary object (left or right hand), not the specific content of imagination, this paper proposes a novel motor imagination paradigm based on Chinese character writing, which can prompt individual to imagine writing Chinese characters by left and right channels. Comparison experiments with eight healthy individuals (5 male, 3 female, at the age of 23-27, mean 24.5) have been made, in which every individual's task is to imagine hand movements following the sequence of writing strokes in the Chinese character and individual's EEG signals are collected and analyzed. Experimental results show that the proposed paradigm can attain significantly better classification accuracies (p<0.05) than the traditional paradigm. Writing Chinese characters is more complex than squeezing one of the hands and other simple tasks, due to involving in the movement sequences. Imagining writing characters could greatly increase the activation of motor areas compared with imagining a simple task, so it can ensure more reliable signals for classification. According to the questionnaire replies, most individuals think that the proposed paradigm can reduce the difficulty of the motor imagery task effectively.