Speaking of Prompts…

Last week I got a nice little package from the people running the retreat I’m going to. In it, among other things, were some writing prompts to get the creative juices going.

At one time, Brazen Snake Books offered weekly prompts for both poetry and prose. Sometimes the prompts didn’t strike a cord, but more often they did and I ended up with an amazing variety of flash fiction and poetry. Enough I could probably put together an entire anthology just from those prompts (maybe I should).

Over the course of the summer I got together on a weekly basis with some of my fellow speculative fiction writers, and if we didn’t have anything to share (which was often the case), then someone would suggest a writing prompt and we’d all be sitting there in the outdoor café, scribbling furiously. It was really interesting to read our pieces and see the different directions our minds went.

When I went to Word on the Street in the fall, there were several writing groups and small presses with stalls, and almost every one of them had a writing prompt or two for you to take. One of them even had the unique idea of offering a seed with a word written on it. The idea was to plant the seed and watch it grow with your story.

And when I was going through a bag of books the daughter was going to get rid of (to see if there were any I wanted to adopt) I found a little booklet of writing prompts I made many, many years ago. I used to get the “writing prompt of the day” from Writer’s Digest delivered to my inbox, and this booklet contained a year’s worth of them.

I like prompts. I like writing from them – especially when I feel like writing but I’ve hit a dry spell with my current WIPs.

But one thing I’ve learned is that it’s easier (for me) to write from a written prompt, not a picture prompt. I vaguely remember doing a “Flash Me Friday” thing on one of my old blogs, and these were flash stories I was writing from a picture prompt. I also remember starting to struggle, as I did when I was doing just one prompt a month here (in 2017).

I’m seriously thinking of giving the prompt a week thing a try here again, but probably not from pictures. And probably not until after I’ve been to the retreat, which is in 10 days and counting.

In the meantime, if you’d like to try writing from a prompt yourself, Writer’s Digest is still offering them (although not on a daily basis). Here’s the link.