Promptarama!
Daily Prompt: A Little Sneaky – Are writing prompts a useful exercise, or do you find them to be too limiting and/or hokey?
Okay, it’s a terrible title for a post. It’s not even a word. However, fully 10 minutes of Private Practice Season 6 Episode 8 have been and gone and I can’t think of anything else.
I love prompts! Here’s some history.
This blog was always supposed to be “my life musings”. Things that happened to me, “bloggable incidents” if you will. Things that occurred to me. However, it didn’t take long to discover the flaw in my plan.
Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing ever occurs to me.
It didn’t take long to run out of ideas. I limped along for 18 months like this. I posted maybe three or four times a month. I had a couple of followers (you’re still with me, you know who you are and thank you!), a few likes and maybe a comment or two.
Although I’m not writing this blog for comment-fuelled validation, everybody likes comments and “likes”, right? It shows us that people are reading our posts and are moved to say something”.
I’d seen the Daily Post but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know if I wanted to get involved in writing posts to prompts, but in January of this year I gave it a go and did my first Daily Prompt. I really enjoyed it, and better, not only did a bunch of new people stop by to say hello, I discovered loads of great new blogs to follow!
I don’t find prompts limiting. I do the ones I want to do, I feel no obligation to do them all. They give me ideas and sometimes I can expand on them, or maybe find a different angle. I can see other peoples’ takes on the same starting point and discover great new writers to follow. And the more we write, the better we get (theoretically).
It gave my seriously flagging blog a new lease of life. It now contains musings, poems, flash fiction, doodles and cartoons. Armed with my little fifty quid point and click camera I’ve even participated in a couple of weekly photo prompts!
I know people say that a “focussed” blog is the way to gather thousands of followers, but I’m not interested in that. I hope that my blog contains something for everyone lots of people. Ignore the fiction and enjoy the cartoons. Read the fiction but ignore the dodgy poetry.
I’ve participated in Rarasaur/Queen Creative‘s Prompts for the Promptless. I (very) recently started writing to the Friday Fictioneers photo writing prompts, and I’m really enjoying that (I’ve done two so far) – I hadn’t written any fiction for years and I’m rediscovering my love for it and it’s amazing to read all the other great entries.
So in conclusion, it’s a big thumbs up to prompts from draliman!
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draliman on life 
This is a great post. I haven’t been in WP all that long but I like that you can reflect on what you have done and how your blogging is evolving. I like some of the prompt challenges but I found if I do too many time for my own writing suffered. So now I pick and choose as some prompts leaving me with nothing whereas ones such as the haibun are an intellectual challenge each week. Important I think is that we are having fun. Your post has given me much food for thought as I connect with a lot you say.
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I’m glad you enjoyed the post and that it had some meaning for you!
I’ve actually read a couple of other posts recently in which the blogger also found that they were having to be more choosy regarding their choice of prompts, as the prompts were cutting into their serious writing time.
I have a little list of prompt sites – I chose Friday Fictioneers and I thought I’d see how that goes before attempting any more, otherwise I won’t be able to give the proper amount of time to any of them.
As you say, the important thing is to have fun, and desperately trying to churn out 20 prompt posts a week would not be fun for me.
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No that’s right. FF is a very good one to play with.
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Yes, FF is a good challenge when trying to fit everything in 100 words, but the 100 word limit also allows me to read many of the other entries regardless of how much time I have spare.
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I couldn’t have said it better myself. Wait, I think I said much the same thing. Just more graphically (usually you beat me on graphics … yours are so cute). Focused blogs are good for focused minds. I’m hazy about the details of life. Unfocused works very well for me, especially before I’ve had my coffee 🙂
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That’s a great way of putting it. My mind is certainly not focused enough either! My eyes, however, were focused enough to read the cool graphics to which you are referring in your post, and we do seem to be in agreement.
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Well, we’ll, well you wrote a happy post or article. You did that. Wow! I was smiling at your words when I finished reading it.
Dark DrAli wrote happy.
Did the earth tilt on it axis?
Happy happy happy your finding your happy in writing.
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Weird huh? And not only that, I wrote a piece of fiction last week and nobody died!
I must be on a happy roll 🙂
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In time, not too much time , I want to read a dark twisted fiction story written by you.
It will be good wether you think so or not.
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Dark twisted fiction – I like the sound of that!
I just need a combination of being in the correct mood and having a usable idea.
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