writing promptly
I first fell in love with writing using prompts in my high school English class — the birthplace of my writerhood. Creative writing topics — or, as I now see them, prompts — gave my pen the chance to explore new horizons in my work. I’d try writing from perspectives I hadn’t explored before, craft interesting characters, attempt unusual formats.
To feel that being a “writer” is one of the markers of my identity, I need to be writing often. The word identity was originally derived from the Latin words essentitas, which means being, and identidem, which means repeatedly. Identity is literally “repeated being" — I am a writer because I write repeatedly.
At first, I struggled to write daily unless I wrote from a prompt. But as I began writing professionally, much of the way I wrote was — in many ways — prompted. When people are paying you to write, they’re also telling you what to write (that’s what they call a brief, folks). But being a professional wordsmith can be a bit of a double-edged sword. The more I wrote for other people, the less I carved out time to write for myself.
Writing for myself is one of my great loves. But writing for myself is also one of the first things I push aside when life gets busy (and I’ve come to believe that’s simultaneously one of life’s most wonderful and irksome qualities).
It’s a strange line to straddle.
The curse of the artist is that we need our craft to process our lives, but as we grow more successful in our craft — the more our craft is commodified — the easier it is to prioritise work for others over writing for ourselves.
Anaïs Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” And that is certainly what much of my writing is to me — if you’ve read any of the posts on this blog, this won’t come as a surprise to you. But, I lost that habit, that ritual of reflection, of tasting life twice, as I continued in what felt like an upward trajectory of prioritising client work over my own writing — capitalism, am I right?
Losing that habit meant that when I finally realised how much I missed writing for myself, I felt lost. I didn’t know where to begin. Feeling rudderless as a writer can leave me panic-stricken — drowning in the white abyss of the empty page.
Sometimes, to delve within, I need help from without.
My lifeboat in this sea of writer’s-block-panic? Prompts.
Creativity begets creativity, and the more I write, the more I’m inclined to write, without needing a prompt. But, every now and then, when the blank page feels unbearably white, I turn to writing prompts to help me along the way.
I’d wanted to develop a daily habit after reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, in which she implores writers to make a daily appointment with the page — a writing habit to ensure the creative part of us doesn’t get tired of waiting. I didn’t want the creative part of myself — the part aching to be met — to tire of waiting, to dwindle.
The more I wrote with prompts, the less I needed them. Prompts gave me the push I needed to build a habit, a ritual. Now, life and its gifts and grievances are generally all the prompting I need.