Every writer, regardless of their experience, occasionally looks at a blank screen and the words just don’t come. I used to think writing prompts were a silly waste of time. I’ve since learned differently. Anything that can get you typing and your brain cells firing is worth employing. The thing I like about them is that they bypass our inner critics, help us forget about perfectionism (because these silly things don’t mean anything anyway, do they?), and, especially for me, they remind me that my job isn’t to think about writing, it is actually to write something, anything, even really bad stuff. I’m a writer, right? I write. I’m not a sitter.
When I have a creative block, it usually isn’t because I’m short on ideas. What holds me back is getting lost in that sense of perfection. It’s not that I don’t have an idea; it’s my overthinking that I may not have the right way to write it. When I’m stuck, I tend to think, “Okay, Clay, what do you write?” When I’m stuck, sometimes I find the better question is, “What if I just respond to something?” That’s where prompts come in. This little game of prompts reawakens a part of me that plays with language, thoughts, images, and emotions without my brain’s supervision or approval.
If you’re a professional writer, you can’t and shouldn’t wait around for inspiration. In fact, most experienced writers aren’t overflowing with inspiration. They’re just stuck in being perfect in getting down the words. Writing prompts help get the engines in gear. Sometimes, when I freewrite, I’ll find a sentence that gets me started. Other days, I write a lot of interesting things (to me), but nothing that I think would be of interest to anyone else. I like to think of these little play times the same way I used to think of piano scales. I don’t think I ever sat down to perform a series of scales. No audience would sit through that. All I did, and the whole point of scales, was to maintain the dexterity I needed when I was a musician. But sometimes—and this is how writing prompts work—I would often do my thirty minutes of scales, and then I’d hear something, not from the piano, but in my head, that turned into an original song. It’s crazy how the brain works.
There are different kinds of prompts, and I think that’s where biases against prompts come from: someone has seen a prompt, thought it was stupid, so now all prompts are silly. Truth is, none are. We each crave different things. The types of prompts that work for me may not work for you. Some feel mechanical to me (“describe your kitchen table”), while others, the kinds I like because they dive down into human experience, are conceptual (“Write about what you’re unwilling to forgive”). Regardless, the best prompts bring out the best in us, not by just asking for adjectives, but by encouraging us to see things we might not have seen before (about the table or about ourselves and forgiveness).
I use several different kinds of prompts. I don’t go online; oddly, I tend to create my own prompts and then take off. For some reason, they seem more personal that way. Sometimes these might turn into a poem. Sometimes a short story. At other times, I get an idea that I think might carry me for 80,000 words. Most of the time, the stuff I write is trash. But you’ve got to go through the garbage to find the jewels.
Prompts hit me in multiple ways: sensory (“describe the last sound you heard before falling asleep last night”), memory (“when was the last time you looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize yourself”), emotional (“how did you feel when you yelled at your son, not because of what he did, but because you were an ass”), perspective (“what exactly does the sun see”), or constraints (“write about how you feel about worms but never use the word worms, yet make it make sense”). All of these are silly, but I have published short stories, essays, and poems because of them. But, again, don’t get your hopes up. Most of them have died a slow death, discarded as a file on my computer. The goal isn’t really to be brilliant when you do this, but to have fun, to access a part of your brain your judging self doesn’t want you to find for some reason today.
We think of creativity as boundless. It’s really not. Neuroscience has shown that creativity thrives when there is a mild constraint, rather than when the possibilities are endless. Prompts, like the ones I made up above, narrow the brain’s field of choice. We no longer have the whole world to start a paragraph; we’re stuck with something finite, and we have to tinker to make it work. It becomes a puzzle. It seems the subconscious loves to play within boundaries. And this playing overrides our brain’s “executive control network,” which was what froze us up looking at that blinking, but horizontally unmoving, cursor anyway. Each time you write to a limiting prompt, you teach yourself to begin with clarity (there’s one thing I want to get across), to generate without judgement (there’s really no wrong way to start this because it’s not going to be published anyway), and to learn to trust that meaning starts emerging when the fingers start moving (and that’s when I suddenly find it easy to go back to the current work-in-progress leaving this little prompt behind).
More professionals than you think begin with writing prompts. A random freewrite about a childhood scent evolves into a memoir essay. A character study turns into the basis for a chapter in a novel. Don’t ever dismiss what comes up during a prompted writing session. You may find some great raw ore. With revision, that ore might become gold. I’ve made a few dollars off these little ditties and learned even more about myself in the process.
Unlike what I used to think, prompts aren’t a crutch or a waste of time. They’re fun. Like a crossword puzzle, they prompt us to think back to curiosity. They get our brain cells firing. They help us stop judging. And what really works for me is that they remind me to trust the process of “just writing” over perfection; just get the words on the page with the impulse of curiosity and exploration, rather than preplanned attempts at perfection. Every time you start a prompt, you tell the world, you tell yourself, I’m not just sitting here, I’m a writer. What you write then comes. And some of it turns out to be pretty good. It’s better than just sitting and staring at a screen.
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