Category

Prompts

Daily Writing and the Power of a Good Prompt

By | Creativity, Habits, Prompts, Writing | No Comments

The value of a daily writing habit can take many forms. A few hundred words a day might be my therapy; your brainstorm session; his story workshop; her blog building.

Whatever your creative goals — from journaling to ideating to reflecting to storytelling to teaching to inventing to sharing — there are unifying factors what it comes to mustering the will to write on a consistent basis.

Writing can help you bring clarity to your thinking, generate new ideas, build discipline, and make progress on long-term goals. These benefits are tied together by threads of exploration, invention, and discovery. And at root, they’re all united by a powerful practice of giving yourself space to focus and create.

Finding a Creative Catalyst

However, it’s often not enough simply to set yourself a writing goal — like most challenges worth taking on, this is easier said than done! If you want to make your writing habit stick, one incredibly useful way to start is to find a strong catalyst. That could be an external goal like NaNoWriMo, a certain structure to hold you accountable (a class, a writing group), or a reliable source of creative inspiration.

For this latter class of catalyst, one of the best things you can do for your writing is harness an array of sparks or prompts to use as inspiration. Read More

Creative Prompts to Spark Your Writing: Part 1

By | Creativity, Prompts, Writing | No Comments

From October 2013 to October 2014, I successfully completed a personal challenge of writing at least 750 words per day for 365 consecutive days. Over the course of the year, I found myself writing about a ton of different things, and came up with a huge list of writing prompts to draw on — an important resource, given that in-the-moment inspiration doesn’t always come so easily!

I’ve gone back through all 365 of those posts and drawn out my favorite writing prompts. I’ve rewritten them to be a bit more clear and specific, and listed many of them here — from reminiscing about quirky favorite childhood activities, to mining your everyday experiences for stories, to considering what you’d change about how your favorite subject is learned — for you to use as you like!

I hope they’ll prove a useful resource, whether you’re just starting to build your own writing habit, or are a long-time writer looking for new sources of inspiration.

This is Part 1 in a series where I’ll be sharing my complete collection (thus far!) of my favorite writing prompts. Scroll to the bottom and enter your email to download a free PDF of all 50+ sparks. Read More