In the Land of Prompts

I'm normally not big on prompts. I'm still on the fence as to whether I'll do Inktober next year, if only because the prompt thing is just not my favorite. My high school days were filled with other kids getting me into trouble by whispering to me asking if I could draw any number of things I wasn't drawing. Cars, ships, planes, dinosaurs... Even thought I know Inktober gives you so much room to play with the word of the day, I still feel that twinge of annoyance I need to get over that now sounds like 'hey, can you draw a tattoo of a bear, eating a bear, eating a bear that's eating Goldilocks?' While I'm sure that it would turn out pretty cool, it would be hard for me to work up the desire to do it. Even if I love you, I don't always have full control of my motivational focus and enthusiasm to finish.

However, it might be partly to do with presentation or just people coming up with prompts that sound like bad Mad-Libs. Not every original idea needs to be done and some are avoided for a good reason. In high school, I might have joyfully taken the writing challenge of: write a story where a ghost obsessed with knitting haunts a mafia boss until it gets to see a kangaroo for the first time. It would have sucked, but if you told me it couldn't be done well, I'd try to prove you wrong. Hell, my teenage ego would even have insisted you were full of shit if you didn't like it.

Okay, the ego might be better managed, but let's face it-- the writers that last are STILL the ones that write even when people tell them they suck.

One challenge I have been taking up are the Young Reader's prompts that come with my word count badges. I pop open my tablet and pound out stories that... well, I may publish them on my blog later, but they aren't part of my book at all. One involved pretending I was my character writing a farewell letter to the author (actually me). It's a huge spoiler if you haven't read the book (don't worry; no one has-- UnSung hasn't come out yet and UnHeard will take another year after that to write and clean up) so... I wouldn't be able to post it for quite some time anyway, but even the second (include an awkward dinner scene) doesn't actually fit into the theme, but was still fun to think up (oddly, I did just write a dinner scene prior to the email, but 'awkward' would have killed the intent).

Perhaps it's because it was presented with a milestone (congratulations for reaching 40K words!) that somehow made it feel like an extension of the reward. I'd pulled out my tablet and hammered it out and I usually loathe typing on my tablet.

Not that I expect every part of writing to come with some little trophy, but self-rewarding is often a motivational tool for creatives. You allow yourself that sinfully fattening favorite coffee or nibble on chocolate or buy yourself a reaffirming treat like a nameplate that says "Krista Gossett, Author." I haven't done that yet but you shouldn't either. It would be really weird if you keep my name on your desk.

It can be difficult to come up with simple but motivational prompts. Writers already know that day-to-day motivation changes with the wind and even great prompts aren't something most of us care to keep up with. Unless it's really doing something for you, then don't force it. As with all things writerly. you're not guaranteed to force your muse to work. Being prolific for most people often requires assloads of time and even if you're not working with said assloads of time, it can be a chore to even get out a couple thousand words towards any main writing project.

Of course, prompts, short stories, challenges-- all of them could have unique palate cleansing properties. As a rule, I never sink into a writer's block mentality unless I've tried all I could to dig myself out. For me, I usually know ten minutes into doing anything if I'm going to warm up to it. If I'm not, I walk away, even if it's a ten minute break before I change tact. Muses can be divas/divos (or is that divx? Nah, that's a file format already...), but you can sometimes warm up to a task by changing how you approach it. 

Maybe you only have an hour that you were hoping to turn into a word sprint. If after 40 minutes, you manage to find your flow, then treasure the 20 minutes you get. Beating yourself up over the struggle to get there is pointless, so crumble up the thought and pitch it in the wastebasket. 

Open File in Word, select New, name it Useless Thoughts, save as docx or rtf, throw it in the desktop wastebasket and enjoy that lovely crinkle sound. The more effort you put into being a smart-ass with a sense of humor, the more chance you'll recover from your own misplaced disappointment.

I'm going to assume that you're awesome because you're reading my blog. I'm also going to assume you're not superhuman and make a lot of stupid mistakes. You're going to be your own worst critic at times and sometimes, to your detriment, your biggest fan. Being critical is always where you'll grow.

So, don't rule out prompts, buuuuut also don't rely on them. Even if you're sure of everything else-- what genre you want to write, the overflow of ideas, your unblocked mind, how many fingers I'm holding up-- there's always room to improve as an artist.

Plus, no one ever wants to hear that your craft bores you because you're so ahead of the game, there's nothing left to learn. Not only do most of those people stop doing the thing they claim to be infallible at so they can't be weighed against their ego, but they're also complaining to whoever didn't unfriend them that everyone who did was jealous.

PSA: No one is really that jealous. In 99.9999% of claims that someone is jealous of them, they're just in denial that they were a total asshole.

That sounds like a prompt though. Write a story where the protagonist is actually jealous of someone. I bet it's harder to pull off believably than you think. It's such a fleeting response, if at all, that I think people mistake it for a grudge. It's impossibly psychopathic in rapid fire...