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The Blank Page

Writing prompts to aid the creative process

October 2, 2020

Staring at a blank page is one of the most anxiety-creating activities one can do. You probably know the feeling - you're sitting there, looking at the page, pen in hand, expecting the creativity - willing the creativity - to flow out and along the lines. But there's nothing.

How do you overcome this? It's not writer's block (you've got ideas buzzing around your head), and it's not procrastination. You need something to kick-start the process.

I find that, at times like this, having some writing prompts really helps. There are many places you can get them - I've got some cards, like a deck of playing cards, and there are sites online that offer lists of prompts, too.

Recently, I've been using 130 Story to help get me started. This is a website / twitter account / hashtag (#130Story) that provides a daily writing prompt (a single word) and solicits responses that use the prompt word, in 130 characters or less. Whether or not you want to submit a tweet in response to the current day's prompt is up to you, but it is a great way to get the ball rolling on your own writing.

Over the last couple of days I've used the prompt words to write two short poems. I would never have written these if it were not for the prompts. They are short poems (just a few lines each), as I wanted to try and get them into the character count. In both cases, this was not going to be feasible, if they were to be of a quality that I was happy with, and so I created the shortest poems I could and then abridged them for the tweets. It was a great exercise in wordplay, rhyming, feeling and meaning. I would recommend you to try it for yourselves.

The two poems are published on this site: "Lisa" and "Execution".

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