Okay, Writers, Can We Talk About Prompts?

Am I the only one who doesn't see a use for them?

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

First of all, let me just say in my defense that I’ve never been good at writing from prompts. When the person in charge says something like, “Write about an event from your past that is still with you today”, or “Write about how you felt when somebody gave you a compliment or hurt your feelings”, my first inclination is to ask, “Why?” My second inclination is to say out loud, “I don’t want to”.

Prompts are different from assignments. When I was doing freelance work for magazines and newspapers my editors would tell me what they were looking for and possibly who to interview and I would build a story based on solid information. I enjoyed doing that. It made sense.

Prompts—I’ll just say it—don’t make sense to me. Maybe, when a potential writer is first starting out and hasn’t gotten into the habit of writing about things that might be meaningful to them, it might help to give them a nudge with a couple of suggestions. But when does that stop?

How does it help your creative mind to take it away from your own unique thoughts about the stories you might tell and, instead, influence it with something totally different? Something you will have to force yourself to think about in a way that feels ‘off’ and requires some deep thought in order to come up with a clever play on someone else’s ideas.

Granted, there may be those moments when you actually like what you’ve written based on a prompt. You may even be excited about what came out of it. But what did you learn from it? Was it really worth doing?

I ask these questions not to be the smartass in the room, but because I really want to know. I just don’t get it. I’ll admit, too, that I’ve had no classroom training in writing, so it could be I really am missing something. But these are my thoughts, and they won’t go away.

They’re with me for two reasons: First, there’s the writers retreat I just came back from. We did prompts and we did quiet writing, and they were my least favorite parts of what otherwise was a wonderful experience. The more I think about them the more I wonder why they were a part of the journey. None of us were newbies. We’ve all been writers for a while now, some of us longer than others. So why did we need it? Why do it? (Some of us didn’t, to our credit.)

The second reason this is coming up for me is because I’m seeing mentions of prompts and timed writing Zoom meetings all over Substack Notes these days. It’s becoming a business, it seems, and I’m looking at it from my Writer Everlasting window, where my emphasis, as always, is on creative writing, and I don’t see anything creative about writing from prompts.

But now I’ll add more fuel here: I also don’t get spending group time writing about anything that comes to mind for, say, 15 minutes. I don’t see any benefit to spending 15 minutes in a classroom setting writing off the top of your head. It’s simply a game with no logical ending. You’ll rarely write anything worth keeping, and it’s 15 minutes you won’t get back.

Maybe if you’re a rank beginner who has never spent 15 minutes just writing… But even then, there are better ways to practice writing. (Quietly, in a space by yourself, drifting with your own thoughts, discovering how surprisingly adept you are when you don’t have to be.)

I believe we all become better writers first by studying other writers, then by listening to what they have to say, and then by going off to practice what we’ve read and heard. Practice, practice, practice. Using our own thoughts. Not someone else’s. That to me is essential for our writerly well-being.

We have to build our confidence, and we do that by making mistakes, by discovering our mistakes, by looking back at our mistakes and realizing we’ve grown enough to spot them.

I think at first, we have to do all of that by ourselves.

Is there room for instructors and classrooms? I guess there is. They’re all over the place. But could they be more inspirational and less instructional? Do those new writers, still so unsure of themselves, really need someone prompting them to move away from writing what’s inside them already and, instead, write about things they hadn’t thought of and probably don’t care about?

So I’m throwing this out to you all. Some of you, I know, are big fans of prompts and joint writing time, and I would love to hear from you. What do you think I’m missing here? What do you see as the benefits? Are there any real benefits or has this become habit after so many years of instructors pushing prompts and now they’re a thing entrenched, with no real value?

The comment section is open, as always. I’m looking forward to having this conversation. I think…