Do You Consider Writing Prompts a Crutch or a Useful Tool?

 

Do you consider writing prompts a crutch or a useful tool? Right now, I want that crutch. Stretching my creative brain cells has been challenging. I don’t mean I have writer’s block. Quite the opposite. I’ve started getting pieces, flashes of a story. I created a writing folder and went back to retrieve all of my old writing (published stories, four book outlines, one completed novel, etc.). I broke the cardinal rule. There was no backup... and the hard drive seems to be kaput. Man, talk about a punch in the gut. Heartbroken doesn’t seem to be adequate. Yes, I’ll take it to a specialist, but hope is not high.

So back to picking up the pieces, wiping off, & moving on. Luckily, the flashes of a story are all new (and not part of the outlined trilogy I lost). Moving on seems a bit harder than expected. Let’s try this again. Back to flashes (I like to think of them as “flashes of brilliance,” in my head, anyway). 

It started while staring out at my park-like backyard, watching my favorite tree, a black willow, and it seemed to whisper with each graceful sway of its branches. A line here, an image there. Just enough. Enough to prod me into research and rabbit holes (below is an AI creation of a "Noma", a cryptid in my notes).

And then came another storm. This one unexpected. In July. My beautiful tree didn’t survive. I lost the desire to continue. Momentarily. Going back over my notes, they were about witches and weather (when you’re from Moore, OK, you know weather; below is what was left of the home I grew up in), and horrific monsters that dwell in our national forests. 

Gotta love cryptids!

So now I’ll go back to that WIP… let’s see what happens next!