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Prompt service.
Oct. 30th, 2009 03:29 pmSo today I tried something a little different that I think I'm going to stick with, because the results are promising. I asked Jack last night to text me each morning with two story prompts in the morning that I could use to write little bits of flash fiction. On a daily basis, writing flash fiction helps me warm up. As an ongoing thing, it helps me keep my writing apparatus in shape.
The problem is coming up with ideas. Little self-contained things are far from being my forte. I can come up with any number of premises for elaborate long form stories. Coming up with an idea for a single short scene is another matter. Most of what I write is a matter of writing what happens next.
That doesn't mean I can't write little self-contained things. I took his prompts and I banged out two stories, neither of which took more than half an hour to write (30 minutes on the dot for the first one, 22 minutes for the second one.) The prompts he gave me today were: "Write something about shoes." and "Write about an argument between Faith, Hope, and Charity." I suppose there may be days when I look at one of the prompts and can't think of anything, but that's why I asked for two. In general, I feel like I can take almost anything as a starting point and just start writing.
I wrote the shoe story while lying in bed, using the phone that I got the text on. After that, I felt up to finishing the MoarMU I'd been going back and forth on for the past two days. I had a lot of disconnected paragraphs and lines of dialogue that weren't joined to anything yet, which is how things usually go when I'm not feeling the flow, but I was able to just sit down and write it. I'm not 100% thrilled with the results, but it's at a better place for the next installment. I can see what happens next.
After that I started working on the next chapter of Tales of MU, but I lost steam about a thousand words in. I turned to the second prompt. Writing the arguing virtues story didn't quite shake it loose, but it got me to write the next installment of Tribe, and again, I can see what happens for the next one.
So, I'm going to keep this up. Two prompts a day. I'll write at least one of them. Who knows? Some of them may turn into longer pieces. Even if they're nothing but short-shorts, though, more writing = more writing. This is how I got to the point of being able to sit down and write every day: by sitting down and writing every day.
Once I've got my routine built back up, I may for fun do things like ask readers to throw out prompts... but for now, the beauty of having one person doing it is that I don't have to decide, I can just jump right in and start writing.
The problem is coming up with ideas. Little self-contained things are far from being my forte. I can come up with any number of premises for elaborate long form stories. Coming up with an idea for a single short scene is another matter. Most of what I write is a matter of writing what happens next.
That doesn't mean I can't write little self-contained things. I took his prompts and I banged out two stories, neither of which took more than half an hour to write (30 minutes on the dot for the first one, 22 minutes for the second one.) The prompts he gave me today were: "Write something about shoes." and "Write about an argument between Faith, Hope, and Charity." I suppose there may be days when I look at one of the prompts and can't think of anything, but that's why I asked for two. In general, I feel like I can take almost anything as a starting point and just start writing.
I wrote the shoe story while lying in bed, using the phone that I got the text on. After that, I felt up to finishing the MoarMU I'd been going back and forth on for the past two days. I had a lot of disconnected paragraphs and lines of dialogue that weren't joined to anything yet, which is how things usually go when I'm not feeling the flow, but I was able to just sit down and write it. I'm not 100% thrilled with the results, but it's at a better place for the next installment. I can see what happens next.
After that I started working on the next chapter of Tales of MU, but I lost steam about a thousand words in. I turned to the second prompt. Writing the arguing virtues story didn't quite shake it loose, but it got me to write the next installment of Tribe, and again, I can see what happens for the next one.
So, I'm going to keep this up. Two prompts a day. I'll write at least one of them. Who knows? Some of them may turn into longer pieces. Even if they're nothing but short-shorts, though, more writing = more writing. This is how I got to the point of being able to sit down and write every day: by sitting down and writing every day.
Once I've got my routine built back up, I may for fun do things like ask readers to throw out prompts... but for now, the beauty of having one person doing it is that I don't have to decide, I can just jump right in and start writing.