Why Use Writing Prompts?
Because they work, especially for freewriting exercises
A couple of weeks ago I started publishing a writing prompt every Friday here on Medium, and I’ll be carrying on until the end of the year.
Here are some reasons why it’s great to use prompts, especially for freewriting.
The freedom of freewriting
A freewriting session, typically 10 minutes long, is a chance to experience complete freedom and spend some time in the strange, unique, space of your own mind. In freewriting, you follow whatever thoughts or pictures present themselves and get down as many as you can on paper without hesitating to examine them for quality or ‘niceness’. Freewriting with no topic or start-off point, other than the thoughts going through your head, is the bedrock of the practice of freewriting and whenever your writing has begun to feel constricted by the demands placed upon it, freewriting will restore air and light and give you back a feeling of control and liberty as a writer.
Freewriting with a prompt
A good freewriting prompt, however, can elicit even more in terms of unexpected material. The prompt can act like the grit in an oyster and create a pearl of an idea or an image. The prompts I favour are short, with many…
