“There is no such thing as writer’s block,” William Stafford explains, “for writers
whose standards are low enough,” to which you might retort: “But I want to write good shit, not shit.” Fine. But even the best writers admit to writing crap to get to their good stuff and even say it’s the crap, sometimes, that inspires the good stuff. I know there is no shortage of writing prompts in the world already but if you found your way to this page, maybe you wouldn’t mind using a few more.
Here are a few I had some fun thinking up:
1) Imagine you are a guitar string that wants to vibrate in A, not G.
Convince the person playing you to move his finger up two frets. And
be musical about it!
2) Imagine the rain didn’t fall; it jumped. Explain why it jumped.
3) Imagine you are a belief system that doesn’t believe in itself. Why do
you have such low self-esteem?
4) Imagine you are a waffle shirt. Why can’t you make a decision?
5) Imagine Rimbaud didn’t find the still point of the earth; you did. Write a
memoir detailing how you came across it.
May the verbal diarrhea come spewing out!
The Minnesota Review 