Writing Prompts: A Follow-Up

Back in June I wrote about my disdain for writing prompts; and my determination to see what all the fuss was about. It’s been two months since I’ve taken it upon myself to devote a portion of the day job’s lunch breaks on Mondays and Wednesdays to them.

I’ve come away from the exercises with a lot more respect for writing prompts, but not the respect I was expecting.

The biggest lessons I’ve learned boils down like to this: the writing prompts I tackle two days a week are allowing me to get words any way I can; they are allowing me to flex my writing muscles at what I would deem are inopportune times; they are forcing me to switch my brain into writer mode as quickly as possible; they are making me produce when I would otherwise be sitting on my phone looking at social media (read: wasting my time).

Like I said in my initial post, I’ve spent “years…only sitting in front of a blank page when I had something to write and not enough time spent sitting in front of said blank page needing to produce and coming up empty.” This has become a huge problem as far as my writing goes.

I’m one of those people who likes to block out specific time for tasks so that I have a big window in which to do lots and as few interruptions as possible. I also like to wait until everything is optimal: I’m well rested, prepared, my environment is neat, and I feel jonesed to get something done.

As any writer, any human really, can tell you, that formula is the perfect set up for failure, because 9 times out of 10 life doesn’t work out that way. Then there you are having done absolutely nothing. And here I am, it’s been months since I’ve opened my manuscript to work on it because everything hasn’t been just right for me to feel able to work on it.

I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing because my brain can’t be bothered to switch to writing mode because I’ve trained it to only function when everything is perfect. Nothing is ever perfect. And this has really negatively affected my creative output. I’ve missed out on opportunities because I just can’t get in the zone.

My major takeaways from my writing prompt exercises are that I can actually sit down for 10 to 15 minutes, look at my prompt, quickly brainstorm, and actually write something. Some days are really great and some days are really painful, but each Monday and each Wednesday I walk away having produced words, and that matters to me. Plus it’s a huge morale boost.

I used to think that using writing prompts would just lead to distractions from my main WIP and exhaust the little creative energy I had that could be put towards my WIP. Wrong! I’m learning to take the little pockets of time I have and apply them to writing instead of waiting to have time. And some of my writing prompts have even led me to think about aspects of my WIP’s protagonist that I never would have thought of.

Others are just fun, and a fascinating insight into my psyche.

I am no longer disdainful of writing prompts, they’ve given me too much food for thought in the short amount of time I’ve been using them. I’m actually quite grateful at this point because I needed a kick in the butt like this.

I don’t intend to stop writing on my lunchbreaks, but I do hope to one day figure out h

ow to get my manuscript to work so that I can actually work on the story at hand. My lunch breaks are very short though, so that’s going to require some finagling.

Baby steps. At this point I’m just happy to be writing again. I hope you enjoyed my favourite writing prompts to date peppered throughout my post. Let me know if any inspire you!

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