Do you ever start something and then kind of forget you were doing it and accidentally abandon it for months? Me too. Welcome back to my writing blog (she said to herself, shaking her head in disappointment).

As it happens, I haven’t only been taking an extended break from blogging, but also from writing itself. As a result of some light burnout, my creativity has stagnated recently, and I’ve been struggling lately to get myself back into gear. For a little help, I’ve been challenging myself to write a few hundred words every day from a prompt, just to get the juices flowing, and I have been having a ton of fun.

See, the thing is, I’ve never really done this before. Writing prompts have always been something I save on Pinterest with an overly-optimistic, “Ooh, I can totally use that!” and then never think about again. I am a person who likes having some structure in place when I start writing something, so this whole loosey-goosey, “here’s one tiny granule of a story – go!” approach has never really brought me much creative value. But as I’ve forced myself to do this more and more, I’ve realized there are more uses for these things than simply coming up with story ideas. Professional gymnasts are not called upon by the judges to stop midway through their routines and do ten push-ups. But you can damn well bet they do those push-ups on their own time, and it helps. And I think that’s what a writing prompt is for: not helping you write your exact story, but training you to write it better.

So today, I wanted to share with you not only the good word of the writing prompt, but a few ideas for people like me who aren’t quite sure what the point of this whole “writing prompt” thing is supposed to be.

Use it as a freewriting exercise

Let’s start with the obvious one. I’ve talked about freewriting before and how much I love it, but usually when I’m freewriting, I don’t start with a specific prompt. I just barf whatever is in my brain onto the page. Usually, anxiety and an overactive imagination will kind of take it from there. But for those of you not cursed with a swirling cloud of out-of-control words sloshing around in your brain at all times, writing prompts are a great way to tap into the benefits of freewriting. You might be surprised how far your brain wanders from the original prompt. That’s ok. The point here isn’t the prompt itself. The prompt is just something you’re using to light the match of your creativity.

This is a great exercise to do at the beginning of a writing session to quickly get your brain into gear. And although the point of it isn’t the quality of the thing you create, you might be surprised by how great it turns out.

Use it as the start of something bigger

While many prompts are intended to fuel short stories, it’s extremely common for writers to realize as they’re going along that the prompt is running away from them and turning into something much bigger. If you’re primarily a novelist, your instinct might be to approach a prompt as the first chapter of something rather than as a standalone unit. And in fact, this is one of my favorite ways to use writing prompts: as a low-pressure way of testing out a brand new story idea and seeing if it wants to go the distance.

This is obviously a good approach if you want to practice writing first chapters, but more broadly, it’s helpful for practicing the specific things that show up in first chapters, like character introductions, narrative hooks, and foreshadowing. These are tricky maneuvers that can show up anywhere in a book, and it behooves all of us to put in some practice on them from time to time.

Now, you don’t have to have a whole novel idea in your head to treat a prompt like a first chapter. It’s more about going into the exercise with the mindset of setting something up. You don’t need to know how exactly a certain detail might reappear later to know that it could. Scenes with a structure that boils down to a character meeting someone or discovering something work well here.

I like this method because, again, it feels very low pressure. I don’t have to resolve or explain anything, or tie anything off. I can create as many loose ends as I want, because weaving them together later is only going to be my problem if I get to the end of this and decide I want it to be. For now, I’m just generating ideas and slapping them on the page, holding them up for the reader and going, “Hey, isn’t this neat?” To me, this happens to be the most fun part of writing. If you’re in the mood to just riff on an idea without worrying about what it’s going to mean or how it’s going to end, the mindset of practicing your first chapter skills might help you get more value out of the prompts you work on.

Use it in combination with other prompts

Sometimes, one prompt just isn’t enough. You look at it up, down, and backwards, and you still can’t quite turn it into anything. When that happens, grab another random prompt, or the next one on whatever list you’re pulling from, or pick a random object you can see and use that. Now, the prompt isn’t Thing A, but rather the challenge of finding a way to craft a situation that brings Thing A and Thing B together in a meaningful, realistic way that avoids feeling contrived.

Where the last exercise was great for practicing beginnings, this is actually an ideal approach for practicing endings. Endings are fundamentally about tying things together – often things that don’t necessarily feel like they should tie together. How many times have you gotten to the end of a first draft, looked at your leftover loose ends, and thought, “Well, how the hell am I supposed to make this make sense?” If that sounds familiar, this approach might be for you.

The trick is not to think too hard ahead of time about the things you’re combining. Don’t be too deliberate in your choice of multiple prompts – just grab whatever you’ve got and make it work. Bringing disparate ideas together into a thoughtful, logical resolution is very much a learned skill, and in order to give yourself the chance to actually learn it, you’ll need to work on prompt combinations that weren’t necessarily designed to go together. Deciding to combine “what if the sun was alive” and “what if the moon was also alive” isn’t going to help you much. But “what if the sun was alive” and “I wonder where I put my old trigonometry textbook”? As an old boss of mine used to say, now we’re cookin’ with gas.

Use it as plot twist practice

There’s a specific type of writing prompt that is extremely straightforward and brief: single words, short phrases, or lines of dialogue designed to conjure up specific, concrete, widely recognizable images or emotions in your head. There tends to be kind of an obvious direction in which to take this kind of prompt. The fun starts when you find a way to go in the complete opposite direction instead.

For an exaggerated example, consider the word “chair,” which I have never seen used as a writing prompt, but hey, anything could happen. Most people would probably write something about an actual chair. Maybe it’s a special chair that belonged to Grandma, or a magical chair that does something weird to people who sit in it, or it’s an electric chair because you’ve been listening to too many true crime podcasts.

But what else could the word chair mean? How about the chair of a committee or an executive board? Power struggles are always fun to write about, so there’s lots of material there. You could also slacken up a little on the exactness of the meaning, and instead riff off of related words like “sit” or “stand.” Another trick is to think beyond adjectives when you’re considering what a literal chair could be. Yes, it could be special or magical or deadly, but it could also be a future pile of kindling, a murder weapon, or a symbol of revolution. Don’t think about a chair – think about objects in general, what they can be made of, and what they can stand for in our heads. Then take that and apply it to a chair.

In this instance, the value of completing the prompt isn’t in the actual writing, it’s in the brainstorming. It’s about training yourself to think outside the box – to take something perfectly straightforward and turn it into something unexpected. Something shocking, yet perfectly believable once you dwell on it for a minute. We have a word for that, too: it’s called a plot twist.

If you’re trying to work on your skills at writing surprising twists, start approaching your prompt exercises as opportunities to practice taking something obvious in an unexpected direction. Go out of your way to subvert the obvious meaning of the prompt. Bonus points if you execute this subversion toward the end of your story, making this plot twist the entire point of what you’re writing. But even if you don’t treat it as a twist, thinking about prompts from this angle trains you to think in a very specific way that will make you better at plot twists down the line.

Do you have to know what you’re doing, though?

No, absolutely not. What would be the fun of that?

Goals are nice and all, and I do tend to use writing prompts to work on developing specific skills, but there is absolutely no reason to restrict yourself to having a purpose when you do them. Writing prompts are very rarely about what actually ends up on the page – they’re about sparking new ideas, and the joy of creating something in a context where freedom and inspiration are the main priorities. The goal of this post wasn’t to tell you you’re doing writing prompts wrong – more to give those of us who benefit from a little more structure a leg up in this area so we can get in on the fun too. If that’s not you, I give you permission to enjoy your writing prompts in peace. You’re still getting just as much value out of them, and probably stressing yourself out a lot less than I am to boot.

Happy writing!