#0038 Don’t Wait for the Muse
Prompts to get the creative juices flowing
Gotta write to have something to submit, am I right? Don’t wait for the muse; instead, use prompts to get the creative juices flowing.
Here’s your first prompt: Why haven’t you been creating? I’ll go first.
Reasons I haven’t devoted time and energy to my creative pursuits: busy with Teen Issue right up to the launch May 18, sick forever weeks with the cold/cough/gunk bug that circulated throughout the school district (thanks for sharing, sweet child o’ mine), catch up on the daily duties for the four days of feeling well, now in recovery from a bad reaction to medicine for an outpatient procedure on Thursday (graduation day for our school district).
Okay, your turn.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
All done? Good.
Get over the shame, shake off the guilt. Literally. I find it helps to shake my body while chanting “Let. It. Go.” (Give it a try.) We all have fallow times. No worries.
Now that School’s Out!! I want to dedicate time and energy this summer to creative self-expression. Guess what? We’ve added a second weekly writing meetup for Inlandia’s 100 Rejections Club in the evening. Since I’m the one opening and closing the zoom portal, I really should (could?) devote those 60 minutes to writing and doodling fragments toward my larger creative nonfiction WIP (aka work in progress) or at least flexing my creative muscles toward a poem or a comic character or a story.
The more we create, the more we can submit. And the more we submit, the more rejections we can embrace. Together!
Sometimes I know what I want to focus on, where I’m headed with a topic. Other times, not so much. That’s when I turn to prompts.
Prompts come in a variety of flavors:
Prompt generators
Prompts by genre
Calls for submissions
Books of prompts
Character sheets
Journalism Qs
Dream up prompts
Prompt generators abound online. There’s lots of AI-generated prompts on the interwebs. Give them a try if you want, but I’m not going to partake. I’d rather go where the humans roam. But you do you. Here are two I recommend.
I recently discovered Art Ideas Generator, created by Yasmina Harbi, a French freelance webmaster and artist who serves Kira the Cat. The generator is clean and quick with French and English languages as well as a new-to-me accessibility feature: Dyslexia ON or Dyslexia OFF. Though named “art ideas,” this website also works well for writers. From the nine generator options, I tried Location Generator and got “Location: brand new library in heaven” and “Details to include: decorated Christmas tree, holographics, doll.” WoW what fun!
In the 2010s, I heard about diyMFA.com. There’s a book by the website’s founder, Gabriela Pereira, where she explains how people can write, read, and build community without spending the time and money on an MFA (like she did). Gabriela outlines some of the full-service website with many courses and lots of content available. On the website’s main navigation bar is the (free) diyMFA Writer Igniter. I hit SHUFFLE, which simulates a slot machine spinning the four possibilities, and got “Character = Witch,” “Situation = Trespasses,” “Prop = Underground passageway,” and “Setting,” photo of a Victorian interior overstuffed with furniture and many floral textiles. Lots of possibilities!
Prompts by genre often come from organizations that support writers, including magazines (Asimov’s Science Fiction) and nonprofits (Writers’ League of Texas) as well as for-profit businesses that connect writers to parts of the world of publishing, such as designers (Reedsy), book packaging (Book Baby), or promotion (BookBub). Here are two I recommend.
When I became aware of newsstand magazines for writers and the writing craft, I picked up three: The Writer, Writer’s Digest, and Poets & Writers. Sorta good, better, best in the general writing category in print. For easy online access to prompts, definitely Writer’s Digest (branded as WD online) wins the gold medal of the three. WD runs challenges for a month. Each day offers a prompt with a particular constraint. In 2024, the WD February Flash Fiction Challenge included this prompt for Day 4: “Write a story in the form of a museum exhibit placard.” In a past life, I edited materials, including exhibition labels, for museums, so this flash fiction piece could tread… Close to autofiction!
Not sure when I ran across the Writers Write website, but I was a devotee in the 2010s to the British-American spellings and peculiar examples embedded in the daily emails from Johannesburg, South Africa. (Perhaps my life-saving South African hematological-oncologist had something to do with the devotion?) The top of the month email often included themed prompts for fiction or poetry. A different one from the archives is “25 Memoir Prompts: take pictures of… 25 days to document your life in photos!” with the encouragement:
This is an excellent idea for anyone who is considering writing a memoir. We suggest you take the 25 photographs and use them as prompts. Free write to each photograph. You will be astonished at how many memories you find in these images.
I enjoy #7: take pictures of “your handwriting.” Many potential sallies!
Calls for submissions often include opportunities based on a theme. For example, Duotrope sends an optional weekly email full of open calls, including a section titled Upcoming Themed Deadlines. From the June 13th email, I like:
We Are Monsters (Sublimation, poetry and visual art, closes July 15, 2024)
Pieces composed entirely of speech/dialogue (Conversation Piece contest, nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, closes July 1, 2024)
A New Routine (THELMA: the theme-related journal, nonfiction, poetry, fiction, visual art, closed June 15, 2024)
Sound and Melody (Young Ravens Literary Review, nonfiction, poetry, fiction, visual arts, closed June 15, 2024)
Don’t feel pressure to submit an unpolished piece, especially since the last two themed calls are already closed. (I only include the information in case you get curious to find out more about the source.) Choose a theme that sounds fun. Perhaps pick several themes for a monumental mashup. Maybe: write about fuzzy blue monsters discussing a new exercise routine, emphasizing their melodic speech with guttural tones. Bonus points for accompanying illustrations. School’s out silly!
Considering I’m still in the recovery zone, kinda fine with getting through three of seven types of prompts this week. The other four (and maybe more) will be posted soon enough.
Next time: Books of prompts, character sheets, journalism Qs, dream up prompts.
Thanks for the info on Gabriela Pereira’s Writer Igniter. I read her book, but have not used her website. I sometimes like to use quotes from my reading as prompts (albeit, very different kind of prompts than that spin of the wheel would produce).