“I learned that if you want to make it bad enough, no matter how bad it is, you can make it.”~Gale Sayers, American athlete
I was going to write about Writer’s Block, but I have writer’s block.
Small, random prompts are the best. An unexpected string of words. I forgot how much fun that was until my last Deadwood Writers Group meeting. Facilitator John gave us all a 5-minute writing prompt to use all senses with this opening line: “Kelly and Shawn stared across a wooden table, cups in their hand.” Our group had been critiquing a member’s piece involving alcohol, so naturally my mind leaped to Beer Pong.
In five minutes, I only got touch, sight and smell. Maybe I did get sound with my sentence, “He snorted.” I definitely didn’t get taste, but that’s an easy one to add in without that time constraint. I embellished that prompt–more accurately, condensed that–into a 100-word micro-fiction entry for this year’s Rochester Writers contest. I’ve been procrastinating about that entry, but this spontaneous exercise in my writers group inspired me. It was a short piece, anyway; I just had to make the tight words do double duty.
So if you don’t have a creative writers group with you, how do you come up with prompts? Here are some ideas:
• Grab a book or magazine. Open to a random page. Write down 10 words: five nouns and five verbs. Then, depending on the words, ask the question, “Who/What/Where is that?” Or ask all three.
• Play an I-Spy game. Look out the window, and in 30 seconds, write down the first 5, 10 or 20 images you see. Begin a writing exercise with: “I never expected to see a/an [image] doing that.”
• Use the above Kelly and Shawn prompt above.
• Type “writing prompts” into your search engine. A plethora of images pop up with prompts for dialogue, alphabet writing, holidays, scenarios, What Ifs, poetry, storytelling and lists. One website that stuck out to me is thinkwritten, which has a 365 creative prompts blogpost.
Of course, you could always start writing about having writers block.
Personally I don’t think there’s any such thing as writer’s block. It’s just laziness or a matter of not really wanting to write. As long as a person can think they can think of something to write. That’s my view on it anyway. But I like the idea of writing about writer’s block.
Arlee Bird
Tossing It Out
I’ve never known anyone who doesn’t believe in the concept of “writers block.” You have an interesting perspective. I’d challenge that by saying a person can be uncertain or uninspired on/to choose a direction, theme or character development but is too concerned with the end result to write down anything. “Writers stuck” may be the more correct semantics: editing the end result before Word One has been written.
“Writer’s stuck” is maybe a better description. To me “writer’s block” is somewhat hyperbolic in the same way that one might say “I can’t imagine such and such”. This is a term I try to avoid since if I consider myself to be a writer with an imagination then in reality I should be able to imagine anything. But it seems to make an idea more preposterous by saying, “I can’t imagine something”. I still find myself using the “I can’t imagine…” lead in and then catching myself to correct it. In the same way where I used to think I had a case of “writer’s block” I place myself in a situation of the writer on deadlines who has to come up with something no matter what.
Writer’s block is a debatable concept which I guess is something that is obvious since so many writers have written about the topic of “writer’s block”.
Arlee Bird
Tossing It Out
It’s similar to the phrase “I didn’t have time to do this” vs. “I didn’t MAKE time to do this.”
excellent example!
I’m not sure when I can get back to writing much, but I grabbed thinkwritten for my Writing Site favorites folder. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hope it helps when you’re ready to welcome back writing.