A Note on Format/Content

[Updated: 1/29/18]

Content

I’ve skimmed through the book of prompts and a lot of them are what I’d call “interview questions” or diary prompts.  (“What is your favorite room in your home or apartment?” “Describe your ultimate sandwich.”) Some are more detailed, others are much shorter, but most are “something something you something something.” The purpose of this blog isn’t for me to detail my day or my hopes and dreams or really blather on about myself at all. I’m not really about that and besides, I have the other one for that.

That being said, they’re just prompts, things to get you thinking and writing no matter the shape the words take. Some of them aren’t really applicable to myself, but they might be applicable to my characters.

I love creating characters, but struggle with character depth. After reading some of the prompts in the book where I thought “I have no opinion on that,” or “This has never happened to me so how do I write about it?” it occurred to me that I could still make use of those prompts by asking the questions of my characters and writing from their points of view instead.

Format

So my goal is to write from one prompt every day, Monday through Friday. The prompts are not numbered in the book, but for organization sake, the post titles will be “Prompt 1,” “Prompt 2,” etc. To break the monotony, I will also try to add descriptive taglines in the title, e.g. “Prompt 3-Art.”

The prompt text will be the header of the post and will be emphasized in either bold or italic font. (In the future I might get just creative enough to make simple shareable images in Paint or GIMP and insert them into the post or get someone artistic-minded to do it for me but we’ll see how ambitious I feel.)

Everything that follows after will be what came out of my brain from the prompt. Since the idea is simply to write for a set amount of time in a day (at least an hour unless I’ve exhausted the prompt) I will not be doing any editing aside from proofreading for spelling and minor grammar mistakes. What you see is what you get!

At the end of the post, I will provide notes in italics to give further insight to what I had just written. I’m thinking this will be a snapshot of my writing environment (e.g. “Listening to: “, “Eating: “, “Current mood: “, etc). I might also use this space to clarify point of view if I take a prompt and write it strictly in first person. (Is this me? Is this one of my characters? Is there really a difference?) Maybe what I write will seemingly have nothing to do with the given prompt and I’ll clarify my train of thought. Or maybe I won’t and leave you to try and understand how I got to “nuclear winter” from “giraffes.”

The last thing in each post will be the next prompt. This will give readers (my fellow writers) the opportunity to write from the prompt without being polluted by my own interpretations. [Note: If you are browsing the archives, this will not be the case in the first 5 prompts. I implemented this going forward from “Prompt 6 – Worth It.”]

I was hoping to have this all ready for last week, but I came down with a nasty stomach bug that kept me out of work on Monday and I had to stay late the rest of the week to make up the hours (having a flexible M-F schedule is both a blessing and a curse). Being that it’s already Wednesday, I am going to hold off on starting the prompts until Monday. There’s no good reason for this other than I said in my first post that this was going to be a fresh start and despite my own insistence that “time isn’t real” I have yet to convince my own brain of this fact and so it will not accept that there is nothing wrong with starting on a Thursday. C’est la vie.

So, that’s all the housekeeping out of the way! From here on out, nothing but writing-related writing! Writing for the sake of writing! Fill the world with words! Until next time!