So all week I've been trying to decide what to talk about. I've never done a blog before and I thought this would be easy. However, this is surprisingly hard. Despite what I thought at the beginning I'm already running out of things to write about. I think that I need to start thinking about these all week. And on top of that its hard to remember to do this constantly. I've had to set an alarm so I don't forget. But I digress.....
I decided that for this week I would write a post about prompters. Prompters are anything that you see or hear that can be an inspiration to you. For example, one of my pages is a writing prompt page. I update a new writing prompt every week for you to write about and get your creative juices flowing. As of now I only have two types of prompters up.
Before we start I have a really important note. DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT use a prompt generator. They tend to give you highly stereotypical writing prompts and they have no genre deference. Most writing prompt generators come up with stuff like: A thirty year old male who lives alone and discovers a new world in his basement.
Highly cliche. If you are one of those people who can take cliche stories like this and make them into something that people don't expect from that summary, great! But if your like me and you can't then DO NOT use writing prompt generators. Anyway, I digress again....
The first is a dialogue prompt. These are by far my favorite type although from what I've gathered at conferences, most people highly dislike dialogue prompts. So I guess its just a preference. Dialogue prompts are interesting because you can create a character around what someone says and that's why I find them fun to do. Lots of people like to build their own characters from scratch and not have to think about building someone around a certain piece of dialogue.
The second type of prompt that I have up on my page right now is a first liner prompt. These give you a phrase and you have to use it as the first line in your creative scene. These are also interesting because they don't give you any background like some dialogue prompts do. All you get is a first line that could mean so many different things. Sometimes though first liner prompts come with a little note of background and those are also interesting because with those you have to take the first line and the background and find out what's going on for yourself.
Another type of writing prompt are called scene developer prompts. (Or at least that's what I've always called them.) They are usually a whole scene idea with the ending left open for you to fill it in. These usually help if you looking for a new novel idea. Sometimes when you have no ideas for a new novel and you find a cool scene developer prompt you can try to write that scene and as you write it you can usually come up with a really good novel idea that could go with the whole scene. Sometimes the scene you write using a scene developer prompt doesn't even end up in the finished novel but it does help with new ideas.
The fourth and final type of writing prompt is a picture prompt. It usually involves some sort of interesting picture that captures your attention and makes you want to know the story around the picture. These tend to be more useful when you are trying to come up with whole novels and not just a little scene to help your creative juices rolling. They will make you come up with your own background and dialogue and first line but they are wonderful for full novels. Some people will take the pictures that inspired their books and use them as the covers but that is actually more rare than common.
So now that you know more about writing prompts you can know that dialogue prompts and first liner prompts don't have to come just from writing prompt pages. In fact you can find them in normal life just in the things that people around you say. One of my favorite things to do when I go places is to take the sentences and fragments of conversations from the people around me and use them as dialogue prompts or even first liner prompts. This tends to keep the thoughts real and believable. Whether writing prompts work for you or not it never hurts to keep one or two nearby just in case your story comes to a stop. Since I have a dialogue prompt and a first liner prompt up on my writing prompt page I won't post those but for examples, at the end of this post I'll post a picture prompt and a scene developer prompt. (Enjoy the two extra writing prompts for free. ;) ) Thanks for always reading.
{Picture Prompt}
{Scene Developer Prompt}
