Introducing Wednesday Writing Prompts

Several years ago, a friend introduced me to Examiner, where I ended up writing posts about writing. I did some book reviews and did updates for local appearances by authors and for writing groups. I was trying my best to help writers with my posts. At some point, I realized that one problem many writers have is just getting started. A story, or especially a novel, seems like such a huge undertaking you don’t know where to begin. So I started posting a Wednesday Writing Prompt where I’d give two random words and ask people to write a sentence using both. And to show how easy it was, I’d give an example that I had written. It didn’t have to be good, it didn’t even have to make sense; the point was to just write something. Now perhaps that sentence could grow into the great American novel, but most likely it was something stupid you soon forgot about. But the whole point was just to give the reader a problem and have them write a solution.

After doing this for a year or so, I left Examiner. But I liked the idea of having prompts, so I posted them on my old writing blog. And then I heard about this site called Bubblews. So I started doing these prompts there, and kept it up for about a year.

It was there that I decided to try something different with the prompts. First, I went to a daily prompt and then instead of giving two random words, I gave a topic. The idea was that instead of just writing a sentence and leaving it as a comment, perhaps the topic would spark an idea for a post of your own. Personally, my idea was to write a short story for each topic, but I never seemed to have the time.

It was lack of time, and then issues with Bubblews, that made me stop doing my prompts. I had thought to start writing prompts for this site called Elite Visitors, but then a whole bunch of stuff happened there. Time issues and disillusionment with writing sites in general made me shelve the whole idea for a time.

But after a few months, I decided to restart my Wednesday Writing Prompts at Bubblews (which was still hanging around) and at Persona Paper.  This version of the prompts were of the, “Here’s a topic to write about,” kind.  I would then add a few thoughts of my own to show how it could be done.

Things were going along, but then Bubblews died completely.  I continued them on Persona Paper, until they announced they were closing just a few days ago.  So my Wednesday Writing Prompts will be reborn – yet again – here on this blog.  The first one will go up tomorrow. If you’re looking for a random topic to write about, I hope you’ll check it out. Maybe it will inspire a post of your own.

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Image from Pixabay.