writing prompts

10 Ways to Write More Each Day

One of the things most writers would like to be able to do is to write more on a daily basis. While the obvious answer to this problem is to spend more time writing, that’s not always an option. If you like to write or you have a book project brewing in the back of your mind, there are some steps you can take other than to spend more time which has the potential of helping you to get more words down on paper each day.

Set goals and stick to them

If you’re writing a book, you should have an outline of your plot and your chapters in advance. How far do you want to get this week? What should your daily progress be? Set a realistic goal and stick to it even when the going gets tough.

Set milestones, and decide how you’ll celebrate them. Turn it into a game or a challenge. If you know how much you’re progressing every day and want to up the ante, ask a little more of yourself. Are you writing 1,000 words a day? Push it to 1,250, it only takes a few minutes longer, but in four days you’ll have gained an extra day’s worth of progress. Researchers say that we can boost our productivity by as much as 25% just by setting goals.

Use your most productive working time

Many of us find that we progress fastest with our writing in the mornings. Your brain’s still half asleep, but somehow it’s still fresher and you get more writing done. Other people like to write after everyone has gone to sleep. Try writing at different times of the day to determine your most productive time of day and plan your writing time around that.

Use down-time to think things through

Use times when you’re not writing to think about what you’re going to do next. Stirring a pot in the kitchen doesn’t occupy your brain, so use the time to think about where you’re going with your writing. Generate ideas as you sip your morning coffee or while you’re driving around town on errands. Even if you don’t record your thoughts, you’ll have a greater sense of purpose when next you sit down to write.

Don’t try to perfect your writing when you’re in an inspired space

Nobody can be inspired all the time, but when inspiration hits, the faster you can get your ideas down, the more you’re going to get out of the moment. You can always go back and correct things later on, but your inspiration won’t last forever. So write. Be fast. Be furious. Be glaringly inaccurate. You can fix all of that when your brain reverts to plodding along.

Use writing prompts

If you’re blogging, journaling or just writing for fun, getting ideas for something to write can take nearly as much time as the writing itself. There are tons of weird, wonderful, interesting or inspiring writing prompts available online. Pick one at random and go crazy. The creative challenges will sharpen up your thinking, and all that writing practice is sure to improve your skill.

Take breaks

Spending hours at a time hammering away at your writing might not be the best way to boost your productivity. Take breaks every 25 minutes or so, even if it’s just getting a glass of water or looking up from your work and doing a few stretching exercises. It’s a scientifically proven fact that people who cut themselves some slack in the form of short breaks are way more productive than the constant plodders.

Don’t dump your workout

Forget the stereotypes of lumbering (and slightly dim) muscle men and ditzy ‘gym bunnies’. Getting exercise improves your circulation and gets extra oxygen into your bloodstream. And that goes to your brain, helping you to think more creatively and effectively. A study on creative thinking showed that people who did exercise, even light exercise, fared better at a task set to measure creative thinking.

Figure out how you waste time

Relaxing is important, but a lot of the unproductive things we do in our free time aren’t really relaxing. We get annoyed with our TV shows, we aimlessly search the net or we engage in less-than-meaningful interactions on social media. Remember, if it relaxes and refreshes you, it’s productive. If it doesn’t, it might be that cutting out that activity will give you more time to boost your writing productivity.

Shut out distractions

Do people ping you on Skype while you’re writing? Do you have your Facebook tab open and peep to see what’s going down every time you hear a notifier? You could be losing hours of productive time just attending to these ‘little’ distractions. When you return to your work, you have to compose your thoughts all over again, and that wastes time too.

Drink lots of water

This might sound like just another of those ho-hum health tips, but it really works. Think about it. Your body consists mainly of water, and your brain has an even higher percentage of water than the rest of your body. If you’re dehydrated, which many of us are as a matter of course, how can you expect your brain to function at its best? Keep a glass of water handy, and keep on sipping!

(Photo courtesy of inthepotter’shands)

50 Creative Writing Ideas and Prompts

When it comes to writing, there are plenty of excuses people use to justify not writing. One of the most common excuses is writer’s block (whether that really exists or not). There’re few things worse than wanting to write but nothing seems to come out. I’ve found over the years that one of the best ways for me to tackle writer’s block is to step away from whatever I happen to be working on at that moment, and just get myself writing again. For me, if I can begin to write anything, then the words begin to flow on the original project where the writer’s block started.

One of the best ways to do this is through creative writing prompts. These appeal to me mainly because they are fresh ideas and I don’t have the inhibition of writing badly since I know I’m the only one who is going to be reading them. The problem is finding new writing ideas to prompt me into writing. With that in mind, and knowing others may also be in a similar situation as I, here are some creative writing ideas to help you beat that writer’s block.

50 Creative Writing Prompts

When it comes to these writing prompts, there are no rules to how you should write. Whether you decide to write a short story, a poem, an essay a haiku or any other form, the main objective is to simply begin writing. Choose ant of the prompts that speaks most to you and let the words begin to flow…

1. Suddenly, I knew…

2. “How long have I got?” she asked.

3. He knew it couldn’t last forever.

4. Suddenly, she began to laugh aloud.

5. Everything had changed, and he knew that he’d have to change too.

6. It had been a terrible year, but at the same time, she wouldn’t have changed a thing because…

7. The old man had looked like an easy victim, but…

8. It was the coldest winter on record, and all the roads were closed.

9. As the storm became fiercer, there was a knock at the door.

10. If my car hadn’t broken down that day, I’d never have…

11. I broke every one of my New Year’s resolutions that day.

12. It was the best summer ever.

13. She could hear the crowd cheering her on.

14. Would you believe that a butterfly could change your life?

15. The traffic policeman scanned the horizon and saw an approaching dust cloud.

16. If only Harry had remembered to close the window.

17. It was the first time I’d ever tried to sail a boat.

18. The world exploded into a rainbow of colors.

19. Sometimes, the wrong thing turns out to be right after all.

20. “You can’t do that!” he exclaimed.

21. I never thought I’d be famous until…

22. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life.

23. Choose a photo and develop your story around the scene.

24. Pick a family anecdote and turn it into an amusing story.

25. Think of a famous person and write a journal entry as if you were that person.

26. Begin with “I used to believe that” and simply write.

27. I never liked a sore loser…

28. The coals were still smoldering long after midnight.

29. She never looked more beautiful than she did at that moment.

30. He fiddled nervously with his phone and wondered about…

31. Everyone was afraid of Mr. Wilkins.

32. Describe a person’s appearance in a way that reveals something about their character.

33. I have never met a cheekier child.

34. Something strange happens every time I hear that song.

35. I had never cooked a meal before…

36. Today, I knew that I needed a complete change.

37. Choose ten clichés or idioms and find creative ways to say the same thing.

38. We didn’t plan to get lost in the woods.

39. The plane was rapidly losing height. He knew he had only one chance.

40. If only I had remembered what my mother always said.

41. It was the most inspiring thing she had ever seen.

42. He never thought he’d end up being a hero.

43. The silence was more powerful than any scream.

44. Aliens? I never believed in them until…

45. They always called him ‘the mad hermit’, but he was saner than any of us.

46. Imagine being caught in an earthquake or a flood. What happens? What would you do?

47. That day, he discovered that magic was real…

48. A desperately poor man finds a priceless artifact. What happens to him as a result?

49. The strangest dream I ever had.

50. Write a witty essay about writers’ block.

Do you have a good creative writing idea or prompt that has helped you in the past? Or have any of the above prompts made you think of new ones that could benefit other writers? Feel free to share any writing prompts you’d like and we’ll add them to this list!

(Image courtesy of Julie Jordan Scott )

Using the Sims to Facilitate Writing

Use the Sims to help with creative writing

I confess: I’m a huge fan of the computer game, The Sims. I’ve played it since the first iteration and have spent an embarrassing amount of money and time on the game. It used to be a guilty pleasure until I discovered that I could use it to further my writing. I could play and work at the same time! (Well, sort of.)

The Sims lets me quickly create characters and let them live through situations (well, most of the time they live, sometimes they die) that would take me weeks of outlining to accomplish. I can experiment with various personality traits. I can give them jobs (they can even be writers), let them run their own business, keep them unemployed, or get them fired or promoted at work. They can be criminals or good guys. I can make them rich, or keep them poor. I can make them happy or mad. I can put them in relationships with other Sims (both hetero or homosexual), leave them unattached, or I can make their relationships go bust. They can even have affairs. I can give them pets or kids. Heck, in the latest iteration of the game I can even experiment with zombies, vampires, and witches and even send my Sims into the future or off to college. All of this is fodder for my creativity and stories.

More than once I’ve created a character and let them go about their business with very little assistance from me, just to see what they’d do. I’ve taken notes and used their actions and reactions in my work. If things get completely out of control, I can just exit the game without saving and go back to a time when things were better. That’s hard to do after you’ve spent a hundred pages going down the wrong path in a novel. Even better, I can save a pristine version of my character and use him or her over and over again in new games to create new stories. I can then pick the story I like best and write about it. That’s a lot easier than working through four or five stories on paper.

The Sims is a great way to spark my creativity when it’s at a low ebb. Sure, I still sit down with paper and pencil and sketch out characters and novel ideas. There are some things a computer game can never address, after all. But it is fun and different and it goes beyond just superficial details like looks and jobs. For example, I can create characters that are “made for” another character, or I can create characters that I know are going to antagonize or even hurt other characters. (These can later become supporting characters in a novel.) I can reform bad characters, or make good characters go bad. And then I can sit back and see what happens without having to slog through pages and pages only to discover that it wasn’t such a great idea after all.

I’ve even taken some of my characters and their stories and posted them to the online Sims community and let other Simmers give their input as to what the character should do next. It’s amazing what other people think of and getting their input expands my work even further. I can also take characters that others have created and add them to my game, creating even more mayhem. In a way, it’s a form of fan fiction that spills over into “real” the novels and stories that I’m working on.

Even if you don’t use it for your “serious” writing, The Sims can be a big help during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) if you participate. When you get stuck, just boot up the game and play for a while (but not too long or you’ll waste too much time). You’ll quickly have lots of fodder for your story that will push you toward that 50,000-word goal.

If The Sims isn’t your thing, or if you need more of a fantasy element for your character creation, there are other options. There are plenty of MMORPG’s that allow you to create your own characters and situations, or you can try traditional paper and pencil role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder.

Okay, so The Sims is never going to qualify for a tax deduction as a “business related expense.” But it has helped my creativity and given me a chance to explore new characters and situations while having some fun in the process. I just have to be careful not to spend too much time with the game because then it just becomes a tool for procrastination.

(Photo courtesy of Eurritimia)