Today, I turned to my writer’s block for inspiration. That sounds like an oxymoron, I know, but this writer’s block is a small, squat book called The Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-start Your Imagination.
I rarely resort to using a prompt; it hurts my pride. But the weekly blog I’ve written for the past five years has fallen off to monthly of late and I’m starting to panic. If I’ve run out of interesting things to share, maybe I shouldn’t be blogging at all. At least, that’s what my mean-spirited internal naysayer would have me believe. My more charitable internal cheerleader reminds me that I’ve been so busy lately working on my manuscript that of course my blog posts have suffered. I’m grateful that the cheerleader can take the naysayer in a fair fight, but it doesn’t really change the fact that I’m coming up empty. And so I close my eyes and open the block.
In addition to prompts, which they call “spark words,” the block has short stories, advice and photos. The first page I open to is an advice piece called, “Write Naked,” something Victor Hugo apparently used to do. I shudder and flip to a different page. This time I land on the prompt, HEIST. I groan. Since I have never robbed a bank, or participated in any Ocean’s Eleven– (or Twelve- or Thirteen-) style activity, this is not a spark that will ignite a personal anecdote. (It did cause me to wander off to look at Mohegan Sun’s website, but that was a delaying tactic which is not at all what I’m after here.)
Writers have their own unique processes; what works for one may be stifling for another. It would be logical, then, to assume that there is no right way to use prompts. But I think there should be one basic rule: when you resort to looking for a prompt, you should use the one you stumble on first. The alternative is to reject the prompt and look at another one, and so on, and so on. When you allow yourself the luxury to hunt for an appealing prompt, you’ve defeated the purpose of the whole thing. You might as well use all that time to think about something you’d really like to write about, which leaves me with HEIST.
The last time I gave in to the urge to write about not having anything to write about was in May of 2011, in a post called Writing Prompt. In the end, it wasn’t about that at all. I hoped that this piece would also take an interesting turn near the end and I would be able to salvage an otherwise mundane offering with a soupçon of insight. I’m afraid, however, that will not happen here. (Ouch! My internal naysayer just decked my internal cheerleader.) Instead, I will spend the next few days thinking about ways to incorporate the word HEIST into my life. Perhaps my next post will be from jail. TTFN.
Everywhere I Go 