This week has been good for writing in a few different aspects and I have so far been faithful to doing a couple of writing prompts each day. They’ll be sprinkled into here because sometimes I write two and sometimes I write twelve, I also discovered something interesting yesterday that really shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I wrote a longer writing prompt, from a writing prompt I wrote by looking for prompts. Now, that sentence is a mess but I will explain it a bit better further on, I just want to share my realisation now: just write it.

Just Write It.

It’s the advice that’s given by authors to authors all of the time and yet it sometimes seems so difficult. Though I’ve learnt to apply this to general writing and ideas, I only just realised that it can be neatly applied to writing prompts to help flourish small pieces of writing. When I was writing my prompts, I would stop if I couldn’t think of the complete piece of prompted writing quickly, feeling like writing prompts should be quickly decided and quickly written. But it’s not the case at all.

I have a little notebook where I’ve started doing my Better Homes and Gardens writing prompts and I’ve learnt that even if it feels frustrating to not get it all out, to just write down that snap thought I had when I looked at the picture. Though I couldn’t catch the fire, I can catch the spark. I discovered that I could do this when I wrote pg. 57. I wavered, not thinking I could capture my thought and almost didn’t write the prompt, but I ended up jotting it down and then coming back to it and fleshing it out in my post. I’ve done this again since and it’s honestly freeing. It’s so bizarre that things that seem so simple can sometimes be complicated to understand, especially when it comes to ‘just doing it’. The anxiety of not being able to replicate what’s in my mind and the frustration of that would often cause me to just abandon something or not write it down, but I just need to have more faith in myself. I then did it again with my piece A Dreary Party and it was a shock at just how little faith I had in myself to put the words down. But that’s what anxiety does to you, and that’s why it’s important to work at it.

If you think of something but can’t trust yourself to put it down the way you want it, just write a line or two about it and trust that you can go back later and with time put it into words that you wanted to. Don’t let it run with the wind, pocket it for later.

Nothing has to be perfect on the first go, if it is, congrats, but it’s the expectation that I should write from a prompt once and that is the piece that inhibited my writing a lot. Editing and expanding and evolving and adapting in writing is growth. And I’ve definitely found it a valuable lesson to have learnt.

Picture > Paragraph > Scene

This seems to be what works for me and I’m going to continue using it to better develop and practice my writing. I have a little square blank parchment flip notebook that I write in with pencil with the Better Homes and Gardens Magazines next to me. Because of my wrists, I can’t hand-write for long periods of time, but I miss writing stories in pencil and so doing this for writing prompts is fun. I think I’m really starting to understand how it is I work when writing and how to get the most out of it.