What’s a dead rat on a Leprchaun’s dinner table?

It’s a writing prompt. Writing prompts, which feature a potential plot scerario, are used to inspire writers to try out their skills and create a sense of adventure by writing a scene or a story based on the prompt. His works fine in a creative writing class where all the students work on the same project. The results are critiqued and/or discussed after the work is turned in.

I used a variation of the wrting prompt when teaching journalism classes. The students would be presented with a list of facts and asked to write a news story, feature story, editorial, or obituary. This allowed the class to practice the techiques and/or be tested on them.

What I don’t like are writing prompts that take over the content of a writing website or blog because they’re cheap excuses for providing meaninful content. Staff can think of dozens of these prompts with lot less effort than covering writing news, how-to discussions, book reviews, and other valuable content.

current P&W home page

Two sites that do this are the “Poets & Writers” organization’s website and the Indies Unlimited blog. The “Poet’s & Writers” site does present other valuable home page content, so the page isn’t a total loss.  I would prefer discussions there about the magazine itself or books and authors news instead of his cheap alterantive. I used to be a member of Poets and Writers membership program, so I’ve seen the website a lot.

Indies Unlimited is an authors’ blog that displays e-book deals submitted by involved small-press authors, a resource page, a knowledge base, and a flash fiction challenge based on a writing prompt. The website’s FAQ still says that it presents articles and editorials but as far as I can tell, the blog has had few, if any, of these in a long time. I believe IU is all-volunteer and that in recent years it’s gone through some staff changes and a declining number of available writers for other submitting content. However, I miss the other content and find no excitement in reading writing-prompt-based flash fiction. The site is still fun but would be more usefu without the heavy reliance and the flash fiction.

Margarita

Many other writing sites offer writing prompts, including “Writer’s Digest,” purportedly as inspiration and/or a way to combat writer’s block. Do they work? Possibly so. Personally, I’m not going to spend my time away from the work in progress writing about some BS that some staff member thought up while having a large margarita at the local watering hole.

–Malcolm