Prompts help you trigger your creativity.
You ever think about writing a post and your brain just goes… blank?
Then you open your writing app hoping for inspiration and you get… blank?
Those are the times you need a trigger. Something to spark your creative fire. To send you off into a writing frenzy. Well, maybe not a frenzy, but at least a direction for your writing. We don’t really suffer writing block, we suffer from a lack of sparks. Writing prompts can provide spark.
What is a Writing Prompt?
A writing prompt can be a word, a phrase, a question, a scenario, a quote or just about anything that will create a spark. They are there for you to take inspiration from. You don’t have to end up writing about the prompt exactly. It doesn’t really matter, they are there for inspiration.
You might get a quote about success and decide to write about failure and how it can benefit you. Lots of people write about success, but why not be different and write about failure? Really, without failures, how do we know what success looks like?
A prompt might challenge you to learn a new word and explore how it became part of the language. I once decided to explore the word ‘gnarly’ and ended up learning its fascinating history from its first use in one of Shakespeare’s plays to becoming a slang term in surfing. It was a fun learning experience.
Where Can I Find Prompts?
You’ll be glad I asked that question. You can find prompts by searching on the web. Oh, do you want to go down that rabbit hole? You’ll find them, but, you know what choices does to us? Keeps us wandering around, looking for that ‘perfect’ prompt.
There is another way. You can join Prompt A Day and have them emailed to your inbox. I started Prompt A Day almost 2 years ago. It was a daily email going out. Then I hit a month where I saw several unsubscribes. I get it, if you’re not writing every day, that daily email can start to nag at you. It just fills your inbox up. Staring accusingly at you.
Each Prompt A Day email contains four choices of prompts:
- Word Prompt – The words I choose for this prompt are not usually everyday words. They challenge you to explore the word and decide to use it. Or go off on another path and write something else.
- Non-Fiction Prompt – This provides an idea for a personal essay, story or article. You may even decide to write a story based on the idea. The non-fiction and fiction prompts can be interchangeable.
- Fiction Prompt – I try to vary these to give you possibilities. They could be a short scenario, a possible title, a few words to send you in a direction.
- Quote – I choose these from a variety of subject areas. They are meant as food for thought, to think about the quote and it’s meaning. How it speaks to you or even how it doesn’t.
The Solution to the Daily Overload?
I switched the list to twice weekly. With four prompts in each email, you still had a prompt for each day and a bonus one. You just received them on Monday and Thursday instead of daily. I made the switch effect August 1st.
Before the end of the first month, I received some emails asking me to move them back to the daily list. Now there is a choice for you. Receive four prompts each day or twice weekly.
How to Join
You can subscribe to the list of your choice on my website. While you’re there, I also have the Shadows News list if you’re interested about the books I’ve been publishing. I have jsut over 100 waiting for upload. Many will make great Christmas gifts.
While I was doing some reading this morning I came across this great article on Medium about using writing prompts. Thought you might enjoy reading it: