In honor of National Novel Writing Month, Medium is offering you a chance to go meta and write about writing by providing prompts once a week. The author of the response with the most Recommends will be sent a Medium Eccolo journal — because let’s be honest, writers never have enough journals.
The five posts with the most Recommends will be added to this collection.
The prompt for November 4, 2014 is…
When you hit a writing roadblock, what inspires you?
This morning, nothing inspired me.
Combine that with the clock reading 5:30 a.m. and my precious 60 minutes of writing time eroding, minute by minute, I wanted to scream at my characters, “Do something! Say something! Give me something to work with!”
I don’t know about your characters, but mine don’t work under duress.
I felt my character turn to face me with a smirk on his face as I thought, “How did I think I could do this again? How did I think I could write a book about places I’ve never seen?”
I got up and refreshed my cup of tea. Sitting back down, I set my timer for five minutes.
I poised my fingers above my keyboard and encouraged my character. “Drew, tell me everything you think and don’t want to think about your 15-year-old daughter. Tell me about everything that frustrates you and pisses you off.” I let him rant every ounce of frustration through my fingers and onto the page.
Timer rang and I checked my word count: 1516. Good enough!
So that’s my answer — refresh the beverage of choice, be it Earl Grey or whiskey, set a timer for a small amount of time, and let my characters be frustrated instead of me.
How do you get inspired
when confronted by the blank page?
- Do you go for a walk? Listen to music? Have a favorite blog you like to scroll through to get your mind working?
- Do you have to call your best friend to chat and distract yourself from the task at hand? Or do you get quiet, meditate, and refocus?
- Whatever it is, we want to hear about it!
Hit the button that says “Write a response”
at the bottom of this page and tell us what inspires you.
The response with the most Recommends at 11:59 p.m. PST on Friday, November 7 will win the aforementioned journal and a Tweet from the @Medium Twitter account.
The next NaNoWriMo writing prompt will be revealed on Tuesday, November 11.
Remember to Tweet your story using #NaNoWriMo, post it on Facebook,
and email your story to all your friends to accumulate Recommends.
This contest is now closed.
With 17 Recommends, the winning post for this week was Shawn White:
Congratulations, Shawn!
Be sure to check back! The next prompt will be released on
Tuesday, November 11, 2014.
Also, congratulations to Carina Sitkis, her post “Old McDonald Had a Farm, NaNoWriMo… Oh?” was the winner of our first NaNoWriMo prompt, Why Are You Participating in NaNoWriMo?
