Loading…
12
The prompt about the empty house sat in my notebook for 6 months because I kept typing instead of talking
Last week I was at the Panera on High Street in Columbus, killing time before a dentist appointment, and I pulled out the beat up notebook where I keep all my writing prompts. I had one from back in March that just said "describe a house where someone left in a hurry, but never say who or why." I must have opened that page 20 times and every single time I froze up, because I kept trying to type the opening line perfect on my laptop instead of just letting it be messy. So right there next to a half eaten bagel I flipped to a blank page and wrote it out longhand, no backspace, no delete key, and the whole thing came out in about 15 minutes. Turns out the story was about a woman whose sister left a wet towel on the bathroom floor and a pot of soup still on the stove, and that wet towel ended up being the whole emotional center of the piece. The longhand version was way better than anything I'd typed, mostly because I couldn't sit there fixing every sentence. Now I do every new prompt on paper first, even the ones I think are dumb. Does anyone else have a prompt they've been sitting on way too long, and what finally got you to just start writing it?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
logansullivan6d ago
The part about opening that page 20 times and freezing up is so real. I had a prompt sitting for almost a year that just said "write about the last thing your dad fixed before he died" and I kept avoiding it because I wanted the first line to be perfect. What finally got me unstuck was setting a timer for 10 minutes and telling myself I couldn't stop writing or cross anything out, even if it was garbage. The first draft was messy and had like three sentences that didn't even make sense, but one of them turned into the real opening. So my advice is pick a timer, pick a pen, and take away your own ability to edit. The mess is the point, you can clean it up later.
10