Ready. Set. Write!

 

If you were teaching a writing workshop, what's a great writing prompt for writers to get started on a piece of writing? Or is there method you find helpful when you're sitting at your desk and can't think what to write about? 

A friend of mine once gave me a gift called The Writer's Toolbox, which includes different ideas, prompts, and games that promise to stimulate your creativity and crush writer’s block. That was many years ago. I am happy to say, knock on wood, that I've not had to use it, yet. Still, I keep it handy, just in case.

 My actual writing process is unbelievably simple, I either plop my butt in the chair and just start writing on whatever idea that is percolating in my brain at the moment, and fortunately there always seems to be a few. Or I stress read while berating myself about procrastinating about writing until shame chases me back into my chair to write again. Now, I'll admit as processes go, it might not be the glamorous, sexy, answer but it's the truth. 

There is one writing prompt that I really do enjoy and find helpful for kicking that lazy idea factory into gear, the free write. In fact, it was a free write in a random English class that made me think that maybe writing was something I could be actually good at. It’s a wonderful thing to be given a word, a sentence, or even a subject, along with few minutes to allow whatever story that may be trapped in your head to come flowing out onto the page without judgement. And it does come, good, bad, and almost always ugly, it comes.

So, if I were teaching a workshop I would start with a fresh piece of paper and a pen and fifteen minutes to write without thought just words on paper, no grammar, no structure, not even a story, just ideas being born in real time. I’m never not surprised at what appears on the page. I think my students would feel the same.

I would also prompt them to read Stephen King’s, On Writing. As every writer should.😊