Why Writing Prompts?
How is it that so much hemming and hawing is done when it comes to writing a report, a diary entry, a thesis, or a work of fiction? We do not find a million other things to do when it comes to eating, but when it comes to writing we will find any number of distractions. The connection between mind and hand is a strange one, useful when we are eating soup or buttoning a shirt, but put pen to paper and procrastination ensues. I am a writer. I know other writers. I know we all encounter the same difficulty. That is why there are writing prompts. Writing prompts encourage and cajole us into creativity. There are no rules. You write whatever the prompt suggests for you, in any style, in any genre, in any person, using any point of view with whatever characters you can fathom. Prompts free a writer. They jog a writer’s puzzle-solving self. John Gardner is still the master of writing prompts, although I am sure he would have refer...