The Dodge City Seance
“It’s a slow Monday twilight in Dodge City, and someone just turned the lights on at the séance.”
Let’s talk about writer’s block, this morning. Not about whether or not it exists; that’s a nitpicking issue for another day. The concept has a meaning we all understand. Something frustrates our creative flow – whether it’s stress or anxiety or gremlins – and we struggle to put any words down on the page. Every writer I’ve ever known has their own relationship with this sort of frustration, this blockage of inspiration or motivation. Whatever you choose to call it, however it happens to hit you in particular, writer’s block is an ageless phenomenon.
Now, back to that first sentence: “It’s a slow Monday twilight in Dodge City, and someone just turned the lights on at the séance…”
There’s a document on my phone full of lines like that. A lot of them have been typed out there for well over a year, and most of them have long lost connection with any context they originally had. Before it was on my phone, there was a small notepad full of those lines. They’re sentences or scenes that pop into my head as I’m drifting off to sleep, driving, or stepping into the shower – the three most creatively charged times of the day, as we all know. But once written down, they evolve and gain purpose. At that point, they become prompts, my personal favorite tools against writer’s block. One of the most useful aspects of prompts is that they’re portable. They’re bite-size bits of story that can be handed off to another writer in exchange for one with a different flavor. They’re even impersonal enough that they can be handed out to dozens or hundreds of people and even if every single one of them was inspired to create something from the same prompt, I’m willing to bet you would still end up with a dozen (or a hundred) different ideas.
Writing prompts are one of the most effective ways I’ve found for stirring myself creatively when things get stagnant. That’s how my brain works; unfortunately, it took years for me to learn it. One of my goals behind this blog is to talk about the things I’ve learned, the tools I use to trick my brain into being creative when it balks, and to discuss the ways other writers’ brains might work. I brought up writing prompts because they’re my favorite tool, and also because I happened to think that “Dodge City Séance” one was pretty good, I wanted to share it! If your brain happens to work the same as mine, and you like working from a prompt once in a while, please feel free to use that one. I would love to see what comes out of it for you, too!
And if your brain works in another way, I’d love to discuss that too. Learning about, talking about, and understanding these methods can only make us better creators, in the end. And I don’t know about you, but I’ll definitely take fewer nights staring at a blank page fighting those mental gremlins!