Writing anything – finding inspiration in prompts

Update January 27th: The Fiction Friday prompts are stopping this week, at number #244, a week after this post was first published. I’ll have to find another source of prompts for future inspiration.

In December I set myself the challenge of writing to weekly prompts from Write Anything. (I also challenged myself to record the things I wrote for Spoken Sunday, but that’s a different story.) I wrote four out of five weeks. The last prompt, anti-resolution, was a list rather than a narrative and didn’t tickle me at all. So I ignored it. This is what I learned from the prompts I did write to.

• Writing for a short burst of time can be very productive.
  I set a timer for ten minutes and off I went. The first few words are the most difficult – they always are, you don’t want to mar the page – but since the target is to write something, not to write a commercial masterpiece, they were not as difficult as they could have been. Often I’d cheerfully continue once the timer went off.
• Writing from other people’s prompts can take you places you wouldn’t otherwise go.
  Zombies and Santa are not characters I’ve ever wanted to play with.
• Style and genre will show.
  My four stories show the genre I write in: a scene of someone running from something unnamed but probably nasty; zombies in the city; a sourceror’s apprentice and PR people. OK, that last one doesn’t really fit the theme. But then, I was trying to write something that didn’t involve magic or monsters. Tricky. Realist fiction’s not really my thing. (Santa? Realist? Well, sort of.)
• Ideas sometimes just appear.
  Although all the stories I wrote followed, in my head, naturally from the prompt and a germ of an idea I had of how to approach it, unexpected things came out of it. There are kernels of ideas in all of the scenes that I would like to revisit. Itsy-bitsy ideas that I want to play with and that I hadn’t thought about before.

Writing to prompts doesn’t have to take a lot of time but it can have great benefits. New universes and characters appear and let you play with them. It gives you a chance to practice particular skills: description, notes, writing something you wouldn’t normally.

I’ve enjoyed my experiment and will return to Write Anything’s Fiction Friday prompts regularly.