Story Inspiration Sundays
I blog about inspiration both here and over at Book View Cafe. Feel free to comment either here or there.
I’ve finally finished the last (sixth) short story for my anthology workshop!
WOO AND HOO!
I’ve actually really enjoyed the process of being given a general idea about what the anthology theme is, then being told, “Go!”
Then again, I like writing prompts.
My favorite prompts are from the book A Writer’s Book of Days, by Judy Reeves. This book has a prompt for every day of a year. I found them to be good, thoughtful prompts.
I started using this book back in 2006. I had stopped writing for a while-my life had imploded and I wasn’t emotionally capable of writing. (I want to emphasize that I did NOT have writer’s block, which I define as the desire to write without any words showing up. That wasn’t my problem. I didn’t want to write. I was mostly okay with that, as I knew I was emotionally whacked.)
Eventually, I felt healed enough to write again. But I was having problems getting back into it. So I picked up this book and set myself a goal of writing every day. It sucked at the start-I hadn’t written regularly in a long while. It took a while for the pump to get “primed” as it were.
But the practice was good. Writing for myself was good-nothing I produced from any of those prompts ever had to see the light of day. Getting back into the flow of words was wonderful. I blogged a lot about this process, and thinking back about it, I remember feeling like it was finally spring, and I was blossoming after a long cold winter, finally coming alive again.
So, getting back to inspiration, do you use writing prompts? Frequently, with a writing prompt, I’ll only use half of what’s suggested. For example, the prompt might be, “Write about your father’s hands.” I might just write about hands, or just my father.
I used to have several sites that I could go to and browse through when I needed to write something and I didn’t know what I should write about.
This is one over at Live Journal, and includes both word and photo prompts (though it hasn’t been updated for quite some time…)
This site has some interesting prompts, though I find them a bit too suggestive. I just want a sentence, not a complete story line.
On this site, the prompts are all aural, which I found very interesting. They don’t work for me, but maybe they’ll work for some of you.
Of course, there’s an app for that…. Several, actually.
In fact, while writing this post, I found that many of the writing prompt sites that I used to frequent no longer exist. However, there are now a bunch of apps, when there used to be only 1-2.
So do you use writing prompts? How do you use them?
Crossposted from my website. If you'd like to comment, you can do so here or there.