#0039 “I Am Always On Time”
(Not that kind of prompt)
Last time I shared about finding inspiration via prompt generators, prompts by genre, and calls for submissions (Don’t Wait for the Muse: Prompts to get your creative juices flowing, #0038). Today, let’s dive into books of prompts, character sheets, journalism Qs, dream up prompts, and commonplace books.
The more we create, the more we can submit. And the more we submit, the more rejections we can embrace. Together!
Back in the dark ages, people gathered sheets of printed paper, bound them together between covers, and called it a book. Okay, okay, I’ll stop teasing the younglings. I have a kindle with ebooks, so I’m not a complete gatherer-hunter or cave dweller.
Books of prompts tend to lean into particular categories (prose or poetry) or genres (mystery or memoir). Here are two from my bookshelf.
The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice, by Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, is filled with specific, detailed, descriptive prompts. As the founders of Two Sylvias Press and published poets themselves, Agodon and Silano know how to encourage the words to flow. Here’s the prompt for today, June 23rd (happy birthday, Bridget!):
Self-Taught
Anna Akmatova, whose birthday is today, wrote a poem titled “I Taught Myself to Live Simply and Wisely.” Maybe you’ve learned how to live extravagantly, or within your means, or stupidly. Write either a serious or comic poem about what you’ve taught yourself.
(To find out more about Anna Akmatova, considered one of Russia’s greatest poets, check out the biographical entry from the Poetry Foundation.)
Though not technically a book of prompts, Abigail Thomas’s Thinking About Memoir includes many encouragements to write. A former editor and literary agent turned bestselling memoirist, Thomas confides her truths to readers in a best-friend’s voice. This slim volume, running a bit more than 100 pages, encapsulates what Thomas knows about memoir and how to go about writing one, including “The Habit of Writing” (chapter 2) and “Structure” (chapter 4). Throughout the text, she shares by example followed by an invitation. Here’s an example from page 16:
My mother tells me that the first thing my father checked for when I was born was a gill. This is because he had a gill, a tiny hole at the top of one ear, vestigial, but he was proud to find I had one too.
Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited or passed on.
(Read an interview with Abigail Thomas at the launch of her 2023 memoir, Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, on the Brevity Blog.)
Character sheets are usually used to conceptualize the many aspects of a character. From Dungeons and Dragons to animation design, character sheets become the resource for consistency. For the plotters (who plan before they write), character sheets — also called character questionnaires — are a way to go from a one-dimensional sidekick with a tic to a fully fleshed out person inhabiting the world.
Since 20- or 50-question character sheets by genre are plentiful on the interwebs, I want to share an option to use across genres. The Novel Factory, a UK-based company, sells software kinda akin to Scrivener with a touch of Novlr Academy writing lessons embedded right (write?) in. I especially enjoy how The Novel Factory’s character questionnaire organizes the 150+ questions into groups, including Personality, Past and Future, Values, and Daily Life.
A quick sample:
How do they display affection?
What smells remind them of their childhood?
When did they last make a promise?
Are they minimalist or clutter hoarder?
Journalism Qs can succinctly propel us into a story worth writing. Though I read physical newspapers through college and probably knew of these questions via osmosis, I first learned of this journalistic technique as a freshman in a high school introduction to journalism class.
For a breaking news story, the reporter is trained to answer these 6 questions:
Who?
What?
Where?
When?
Why?
How?
Creative writers can then look more closely at the motivations, the Why, of what happened as well as dig deeper into not only How the incident occurred but also How the characters feel in the aftermath.
Dream up prompts for yourself or your writing group. By looking around your home or neighborhood, you might find two or three seemingly unrelated words or concepts that, when juxtaposed, set your imagination engine roaring. Or open a dictionary or other reference work, close your eyes, and point to a word or phrase. Maybe the next time you gather the junk mail for the bin, you choose two or three bolded words before recycling the pieces.
Another great example of dreamed-up prompts comes from my three-person online writing group I wrote about in a post on gathering together in creative community (#0036). Usually, our award-winning journalist member dreams up the three-word prompt — Friday was hummingbird + enchilada + blowtorch — and we write for 20 minutes, beg for more time, read our attempts aloud, and chat. How challenging was the prompt? Were we able to sneak in all three words? Did we overlap in our approaches to one or the words?
Commonplace books, traditionally, are notebooks where people write down observations, inspirations, anecdotes, quotations from their reading, and other bits of wisdom for themselves. Dating back to when folks first felt overwhelmed by too much information — that’d be Shakespeare’s time — these “commonplaces” continue to evolve. Though creatives still use physical blank books, many prefer to maintain a digital document as a multitasking commonplace book: a diary, sketchpad, and research archive all rolled into one.
Ruth Ozeki, Canadian-American writer, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest, has kept what she calls a process journal in a Word document since 1996. In a LitHub article on how writers tackle writer’s block, Ozeki also shares:
I make To Do lists of things I need to research. I make notes about whatever I’m reading or watching and jot down things I want to use or steal. I track my progress, log the number of hours or words or pages I’ve written. I brag, complain, whine, worry, catalogue my biggest fears and smallest triumphs.
Last week in the Comments, Victoria Waddle (of Be a Cactus fame) mentioned her habit of taking notes in a google doc for some books she reads, a great source of writing prompts for her. I bet if she strung together all her google docs, the megadoc would nearly measure up to Ozeki’s process journal! (Or not.)
May character sheets, calls for submissions, journalism Qs, and commonplace books, along with the other examples, prompt you forward on your creative self-expressions.
Next time: Shift your mindset from wannabe to authentic creative, unless imposter syndrome takes over my mind… (See what I did there?!?)
My notes /quotes as writing prompts do take up many pages. I think I will post some of them as prompts soon!