It’s OK to Hate Writing Prompts

But here’s how to use them when you have to

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

I recently took part in an online flash fiction workshop and the writing prompts were terrible.

We spent 10 minutes writing about what we could see outside our window before some of the other participants volunteered to read out what they’d written.

It was excruciating.

Thankfully, my webcam was switched off so no one saw me peeling my own eyes with a nail file.

I should add it was a free workshop and the tutor was very lovely, but it wasn’t marketed as a beginner’s workshop, and I can’t have been the only one sitting behind a keyboard praying really hard for Zoom to go down.

I spent 60 minutes of my life in that workshop that morning but nothing I wrote will ever be used.

Writing prompts don’t do it for me, but I realise that they do work for other people. I can also appreciate how useful they are in tutorials or workshops when they’re used as a warm-up or ice-breaker with the blank page, but I can’t be the only person who thinks they’re otherwise quite unhelpful and dull.

I particularly hate the ones that feel like therapy like write about something that terrifies you or describe your childhood bedroom.