Prompts and Prose

Creativity Starter: Learning from Leonardo.

There’s nothing worse than having a great idea and sitting down only to face a cripplingly blank screen. If you’re a writer, no matter how good you are, you have experienced this.

It’s the fear that grips and cripples us. We want every word to be great for a great idea and staring at a blank page is a constant threat of writing something that isn’t good enough.

But there is a method to get through this. I learned it during a class in college called Thinking Like Leonardo DaVinci. The challenge was to put your pen to paper and start writing without stopping or even pausing for about twenty minutes. This technique is traditionally called Stream-of-Consciousness writing. The teacher released us for the day with this as our assignment and I reluctantly grabbed my pen and went to a quiet corner of the building. I thought it was a waste of time. I wanted to focus on other things I was working on at the time and the assignment seemed more like a distraction than anything else.

I finished the assignment, quietly and frantically writing for twenty minutes (which was surprisingly difficult). And, after a few minutes, I started to read through the gibberish I had scribbled down. Still sighing with frustration as each of my sentences progressed to borderline illiteracy, one sentence stopped me in my tracks. It was one simple sentence but it stated I was ashamed that I had let my writing take a backseat to some other things in my life that weren’t really that important. It was something I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself, but there was my subconscious mind telling me what I didn’t want to hear.

In all of the pointless ramblings, there was one sentence that cut me deep and stood out as sort of a revelation to me.

Since then, I taught this as a course to high school students a few times and asked them to share with peers afterwards. Many of the students had similar experiences each time.

Free-Writing as Exploration

The blank page is a scary thing to stare at. The key is to be okay with writing something bad.

We spend so much of our time trying to write the best version on the first try that we think it isn’t okay to write something bad… ever. This challenge focuses on the idea that’s it’s okay to write something bad in order to clear your mind so you can get to the good stuff. In a way, this technique can help you break through the noise. It can unlock the threat of the blank page by writing out everything, the good and the bad.

After taking this class, I use this method as word sprints or free-writing to let all my thoughts out onto paper about a story idea, character, theme analysis, scenes I was thinking about, or to flesh out dialogue between characters.

Once I had unlocked my mind, unburdened it with the idea that it’s okay to write something that isn’t good, the ideas came our more freely.

Writing Prompt to Fill the Blank Page

Using this method, throw all the words on the page, look back through and pull out the good to expand on. Sometimes, even simply starting to write will break the blank page syndrome. And even if your first sentence isn’t a great achievement, you can always go back and try out more options once the rest of the words in your story have been written.

• Write in stream of consciousness fashion for about twenty minutes while listening to ambient music. Don’t even pause.
• Write out all the ideas, the bad, the mediocre, the unnecessary, and the good. Unlock and unburden your mind by writing it all down knowing you can come back and clean things up later.
• Read what you wrote to yourself and look for any nuggets that stand out.
• Think of how this technique can help in your day-to-day writing, from exploring new ideas and hammering through writer’s block.

Get a piece of paper and pen or open up a blank page. Start the following video somewhere isolated so you can concentrate. Once you hit play, start writing and don’t stop!