Your Writing Starts Here: January Prompts
We launch ourselves into a new writing year
It helps me enormously if you drop a heart on this newsletter, forward it to a friend, or share it on social media. Or subscribe to get me in your inbox! I love hearing from you, so you can hit reply and email me any time. Or comment—I adore comments! Writing these newsletters is part of how I make a living as a writer, so I welcome paid subscriptions, too.
It’s prompt time!
Amazing how that keeps happening. The wheel of life turns and turns again, friends, and our job is to just keep on writing.
I started sending these out monthly in August, and I hope you find this regular series helpful. There’s a prompt for every day in January listed here and paid subscribers, you get a PDF you can download, print and keep in your journal. Or by your computer if that’s how you roll.
In my August prompt post, I did a whole thing on how to use them, best practices, yadda, yadda, yadda. To save me from writing it all out again, you can read that as a reminder here. (It’s also in the PDF for paid subscribers.) Two basic things to remember: prompts are a suggestion, not a directive. Let your pen go where it will and don’t worry about sticking with the subject. And, when a prompts says “you” that can mean writing directly from your life, or writing as your character.
Feel free to drop some of your results into the comments or just let me know how they worked for you.
The Prompts
1.
Everything was bright and shiny and new.
2.
Her head pounded so loud she thought somebody was knocking on the door.
3.
The champagne had gone flat and the balloons had deflated.
4.
Over there, way down the road past the barn lies….
5.
Splat.
6.
Incomparable luxuries.
7.
Tedious poverty.
8.
Write about an ordinary day in your life (or the life of your character).
9.
I love you most when you….
10.
Honestly, I hate it so much when….
11.
The first thing you think about when waking up.
12.
They say everyone has a doppelganger. Where does yours live and what does
he do?
13.
Your childhood bedroom. Write every detail you remember.
14.
The first time you flew on an airplane.
15.
The one who didn’t get away.
16.
The thing you wanted to lose but just can’t.
17.
Yes, please.
18.
The best gift of the previous year.
19.
Nights in white satin.
20.
The best month of the year.
21.
Hearts afire.
22.
I never promised you a rose garden.
23.
Shake, rattle, and roll.
24.
But I did promise you that…
25.
If ever I would leave you…
26.
Let’s review what happened that night.
27.
Just the facts, ma’am.
28.
Excitement mounted and the crowd grew rowdy.
29.
Birds rose from the field in a flutter.
30.
And you thought that was a good idea why?
31.
You could have told me.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Wordstrumpet to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.