Exercising Your Imagination
The first thing you need to do as a writing is to learn to stretch your mind.
I was thinking one day that I really needed to refinish my coffee table. That one thought sparked my imagination and I wrote a story about a woman who buys magic varnish off the Internet and uses it to kill her mother-in-law.
Is there a trick for coming up with an idea for a story?
No matter what your creative process is for story development, I think we can all agree that it begins with a single thought. Where that thought takes you is the tricky part. Learning to translate a solitary idea into a story takes practice and that is where writing prompts come in handy. Think of a writing prompt as an exercise for your imagination.
Stretching the Mind Muscle
Every person is born with some degree of imagination. Creative people, like writers and artists, tend to have more developed ones, but every person has that potential–although I suspect many fight the urge to use it.
Working regularly with writing prompts is like taking your mind to the gym. I don’t care who you are or how boring you may be, you have the ability to tell a story. You just need to learn how to use it. If you aspire to be a writer, whether you want to write fiction, content or news stories, you need to stretch your mind the same way an athlete stretches his or her muscles.
Ellis Island
Let’s try one writing prompt and see where it goes. I pulled this off the Internet.
“On this day in 1982, Ellis Island opened.”
As I stood in line waiting for my chance to enter the new world, I ran my fingers over the bronze plaque trying to imprint those words into my memory. I squeezed my mother’s hand nervously and she glanced down to reassurance me. A new day was dawning and it would be my first in America.
It is not much of a story, but it doesn’t matter. The point is not to develop something usable from the prompt but learn to expand on a thought to create a story.
Getting Over the Hump
If you are one of those people always asking me how to get over the hump and start writing, I have two words for you – writing prompts. I can honestly say I’ve never met a person that I couldn’t see as a writer with a little work. Everybody is born with an imagination, but some minds take a little bit more of a kick start to get going.
In my experience, once you write a couple of sentences of anything, the rest comes naturally. If you get in the habit of expanding a single thought into a few sentences, soon it will be a paragraph and before you know it, you are three pages deep into that story you are destined to write.
Here are a couple places you can find writing prompts, so go have some fun.
Writers Digest
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