Channeling Creativity

A good analogy for inspiration would be a dam. Sometimes, little leaks will trickle through (and almost always in the middle of the night, of course) and, other times, the whole dam will burst and you will be flooded with ideas for characters, stories, conflicts, or whatever else your muse may want to share at that moment. Conversely, there are also those days when there is little to no chance you’re going to tap into the inspiration on the other side of the dam, no matter how hard you try.

A good way of getting the water flowing again or the gears moving would be to use prompts.

I rely on writing prompts quite a lot. With numerous short stories compiled in each collection that I write, needless to say, a great deal of story prompts are utilized to come up with so many different plots. Out of the twenty stories in Good Cop Bad Cop, about 5 did not use prompts in some way shape or form.

A prompt can be just about anything: a word, a sentence, a scene, or even a picture. A simple web search of “creative writing prompts” or “fiction prompts” will yield various websites with a multitude of free prompts. If you’re old fashioned like me and prefer a hard copy of books, those are available too. Here are some ideas on where to find prompts:

-Websites

There are several websites that offer daily or weekly prompts. Magazines like Writer’s Digest will sometimes have contests that use prompts or pictures for entrants to compose a 25-word or so sentence or a flash fiction (WD contests are typically under 750 words). Other online literary magazines can offer words or even a sentence as a prompt. On The Premises has a word for each issue that the story should be based on: Good Cop, Bad Cop was inspired by “Straightforward,” and For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls was originally for “Property.” Some take a more creative approach, like The First Line; the magazine gives you the first line of a story to use and you have to come up with the rest. Pull up your web browser and do a simple search to find all of these gems out there.

-Random Word Generator

Random Word Generators are fun to use. They can be found online and are usually free to use (the ones I’ve used have been). You can get a few words or several words and use all or some in a story. For example, I pulled up a random word generator while writing this and here is the list of words that I rolled: copper, explain, ill-fated, truck, neat, unite, branch, educated, tenuous, hum, decisive and notice. It was definitely an eclectic list of words! As a mystery writer, I could already feel the wheels turning and conceiving some sort of crime that happened involving a truck. Granted, I didn’t delve too far into it since this was just a quick random roll, but I got a good view of the scenery (dark, rainy and a warm, sticky, somewhat humid feel) just from those few words.

-Prompt books

If you’re a fan of Amazon or online book shopping, you can search “creative writing prompts” or “fiction prompts” or whatever type of story you’re working on (there are poetry and nonfiction prompts too) and find several books with hundreds of prompts. I received a prompt book for my birthday a few years ago and I have used that book time and time again. For my stories involving Sam and Dahlia, I went through the book and wrote out several of the prompts that I thought might make a good basis for a mystery plot. I keep that list with me and will highlight the ones I’ve used already. I still have quite a few left and will add to the list with additional prompts from various websites or ideas that I’ve come across. My senior year of high school, I took a creative writing class and the teacher had a prompt flip book, which was pretty sweet. It had three sections that could be flipped randomly to give prompts such as an item and a feeling. I don’t remember the first thing I got, but the item I flipped was a “snow globe” and the feeling I got was “peace.” I ended up composing a poem that I really liked; it was published in the school literary magazine and my English teacher from my junior year used it in class as an assignment for the students to break down to dissect the different literary elements I used in the poem.

-Writing Challenges

When I started writing fan fiction a few years ago, there was a challenge going around where people would let a CD or an Mp3 play 10 or so songs at random and they would have to compose a scene or a story based on the songs. It was called the “Ipod Challenge;” although this particular challenge is dead and gone, I still remember it because I thought about what a great idea it was to help spark one’s muse! If you’re a part of fan fiction communities or writing communities in general, there are sure to be several different challenges out there that you may want to try your hand at. I’ve read some quality fan fictions that were inspired by some challenges, for sure!

What are your favorite methods to get your creativity flowing?