Finding Your Own Prompts

Introduction

Sometimes I feel that I have nothing to write about and today is one of those days, so I end up writing a piece like this. People inspire me to write but at the moment I feel I am trying to knit smoke or nail jelly to my ceiling.

I'm also in the mode where I feel I have written too many poems and revived too many Seven Days In pieces recently, which makes me feel like I am a lazy charlatan.

But What Can I Do?

The latest Vocal Challenge is the Next Great [American] Novel challenge.

But for this, you have to be able to write and be American and able to win a Vocal Challenge and I fall at all those points. I am sort of considering writing a chapter about trying to write an American novel (I am currently reading "The Great Gatsby") but that is putting me off. I see similarities between it and JD Salinger's "Catcher In The Rye" and they don't impress me much.

The Mythmaker challenge is a bit more accessible to me and I have entered one story which I thought was quite good.

But Vocal themselves provide lots of prompts as well so I have no excuse not to write (isn't that a weird double negative?).

Vocal's resources are full of ideas and jumping-off points to help us to create our stories.

The thing is these almost make a story in themselves, but it is fine to take a bit of a prompt or combine multiple prompts to kick off your stories.

I have started my Plagiaristic Poetry series which I can hook into at any time, but my laziness monitor demon tells me that I am being lazy when I do that, but I will keep creating pieces for the series because I do want to use it to create an anthology.

I had thought about taking a song title as a prompt for a story, and Otis Redding's "Sittin' On The Dock Of The Bay" immediately sprang to my mind. I have used this method for creating poetry, but I don't think I have used it for fiction or any variation in that genre. This one used a Yoko Ono song as a jumping-off point:

This poem from Oneg gives some pointers as well if you are unsure where to go next.

And What Else Can I Do?

I am always worried about repeating myself, but I think my audience knows the touchpoints I have for finding things to write about. I love it when there is a challenge that grabs me, the Painted Prose resulted in fourteen stories, unfortunately, as usual, none good enough to make the Vocal shortlist. The thing is, just because a challenge is closed does not stop you from using it as a prompt, and this looks like it could be an inspiration for me for a while.

You should never think there is nothing to write about, there is always something. This piece is me writing about not having anything to write about, so that is an almost paradoxical concept.

I was looking for some inspirational music to go with this and "A Design For Life" by The Manic Street Preachers was chosen, I love the opening lines, but you get these sort of concepts in many of their songs.

Libraries gave us power

Then work came and made us free

What price now

For a shallow piece of dignity?

This verse could be another point to jump off. I do have ideas floating round in my head, but I really hope this has given you an idea or two.

Thank you for reading.