Your Prompts and Tips
Some free resources to help you write better and achieve the success you deserve
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Prompts:
1. Write a few pages about a character who is isolated from others in a refreshing way. For example, they could be in a one-person spaceship or be solo backpacking through the mountains of Peru. Do they stay connected via a phone or other means or do they cut off the outside world altogether?
2. Write a few pages about a character who is the size of the BFG (Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant).
3. A lot of people enjoy a large meal on holidays such as Easter. Write a few pages in which a dinner get-together goes awry for the host. Did he or she burn the ham? Do two of the attendees really not get along? The choice is yours!
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Tips:
1. From if a character will have a happy ending to how a romantic interest will play out, we all make predictions while we are reading, often without even realizing. Read a story and pay attention to the guesses you make along the way. Once you finish reading, compare your predictions with what actually happened. Did you find it too predictable? Or, would you have never guessed how it would turn out?
2. Toss Perfectionism. Or, as Voltaire candidly quoted in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1770: "Il meglio e l'inimico del bene": the great is the enemy of the good. Excessive self-editing sabotages creativity and completion. Free yourself up on your first draft. Revision is your ally!
3. Literature is a mirror into the author's mind, but also into the reader’s. Every story is open to interpretation: yours, mine and theirs. When discussing a story with others, focus on how the work elicits your interpretation, and be specific. Don't be dismissive of other people's interpretations. Instead, ask how they came to it.
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PRIVATE JOURNAL:
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TRACKING:
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TO DO LIST:
Add tasks to your sortable list, then revel in checking them off.
SCRATCHPAD:
Cache your gems as they fall in this always accessible place.
PRIVATE JOURNAL:
Reflect on your process — good, bad and ugly — in your dated diary.
TRACKING:
Measure your progress with key writing metrics, automatically,
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