1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers
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About this ebook
Ideas, emotions, images, intriguing questions, perplexing dilemmas—these are the raw materials from which great stories are built.
1001 Evocative Prompts will stimulate your thinking wherever you are in your writing journey and get you writing today. It provides story starts and writing inspiration for a wide variety of genres by focusing on emotions, character development, and pivotal moments.
You can face a blank page with confidence when you use these prompts to warm up, beat writer’s block, develop and maintain a writing habit, change up your routine, start a new project, experiment in a new genre, deepen parts of an existing story, or overcome burnout.
What are you waiting for? Dig in and get writing right now!
Laurel Garver
Laurel Garver holds degrees in English and journalism and earns a living as a magazine editor. She enjoys quirky independent films, word games, British television, and Celtic music. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.
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1001 Evocative Prompts for Fiction Writers - Laurel Garver
Introduction: Why write with prompts?
To warm up
No ballerina simply straps on her toe shoes and dances Swan Lake. Nor does an Olympic sprinter roll out of bed and walk directly to the blocks. These pros know you can't perform your best unless you first warm up and stretch.
If you find yourself endlessly procrastinating when you know you should be writing, consider adding to your routine a low-pressure warm-up time using a prompt. You may find that, like the sprinter, it enables you to go faster when you do hit the track
(work on your manuscript), and like the ballerina, it enables you to move with greater ease and grace.
Choose one of the prompts, set a timer for 10 minutes, and scribble, on paper with a pen or pencil, whatever comes to mind in response to the prompt. No wordsmithing; just let the ideas flow freely.
To develop and maintain a writing habit
For beginning writers, consider writing to a prompt a necessary exercise, like a pianist practicing scales and arpeggios in order to develop dexterity and muscle memory. Prompt writing can quickly become a method of beginning short pieces, from drabble and flash fiction to short stories and novelettes. Prompts can be spun for many different genres, and such experimentation is crucial during your apprentice phase, when you are developing your skills and your true authorial voice.
For more experienced writers, prompts can help you keep your writing muscles strong and stay in a creative frame of mind even in busy seasons of life, or when major projects are in the revision or editing phase. When the emotional demands of querying agents or marketing a new release hampers your ability to focus on a long project, writing to prompts will keep you agile and having fun—and in a routine.
To change up your routine
If you want to get out of the vicious cycle of staring at a blank screen because you have nothing to say, try responding to a prompt with a pen and paper. Chances are pretty good that you'll have more to say than you might believe.
Educators and cognitive scientists have been looking into why longhand writing is so beneficial to our brains. Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, used brain scans in her research on the benefits of longhand. She found that a much larger portion of the brain’s thinking, language, and working memory regions were activated when executing strokes of a handwritten letter than when typing. Keyword there? The language portion of the brain is more actively engaged.
Another study of elementary-aged children found writing by hand improves students’ creative writing skills, and elementary students actually write more quickly by hand than when typing. Compositions are also longer when written by hand
(Gwendolyn Bounds. How Handwriting Trains the Brain.
The Wall Street Journal 5 Oct. 2010. Web.). When writing longhand, you will likely find you are more apt to generate more ideas and edit less. There's something about the physical act of moving a pen across paper that keeps ideas flowing.
Some writers prefer to handwrite only in a leather-bound journal with artist-quality paper. Such a lovely thing calls one to lofty heights of imagination, it is said. But that beautiful, costly journal in your lap might bring with it a certain performance pressure. It can seem like hallowed ground where only the best of the best words deserves to reside. The very niceness of a journal can make it a poor tool—it can call forth not true creativity, but preciousness. You know, those affected sorts of words that sing in your brain on moonlit nights at a lakeside. The stuff of corny, cringe-worthy poetry.
Preciousness can be an enemy of productivity. One needs to be free to make an utter mess and not feel that one has desecrated something in the process. So by all means, grab a stack of cheap spiral notebooks and simply play.
To start a new project
Consider several possible directions to take a prompt, moving past the easiest, most obvious to get to more intriguing takes and exciting