Struggled with a writing prompt at a library in Denver for 2 hours before a kid showed me the trick

I was stuck on a prompt about a haunted lighthouse when a 10 year old sitting nearby said just write what you dreamt last night. I tried it and got 3 pages down in 10 minutes. Has anyone else found a weird trick that unsticks your writing fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

paul_burns8d ago

I read somewhere that kids have way less fear about getting stuff wrong so their advice is usually just to do something instead of overthink it. That "write what you dreamt last night" thing makes total sense because your brain is already working on that material without you trying. Dreams are raw unfiltered nonsense but they have a flow that skips all the critical voice. I heard a writer say once that the best tool for writer's block is lowering your standards and a kid telling you to just dump whatever is in your head is basically that. That kid did you a solid.

felix4888d ago

Hold up though, I gotta disagree with this. Letting a kid tell you to just dump your dreams on the page sounds like a shortcut to writing a bunch of garbage. Your brain processes stuff while you're asleep but it's not like it's building a coherent story structure or anything. If you just write down whatever random dream images pop into your head you're gonna end up with a mess that needs way more work to fix than if you just sat with the prompt for a while longer. The whole lowering your standards thing is risky because it trains you to accept weak writing instead of pushing through the hard part of actually thinking about your story.