I bet you are wondering how I come up with the daily prompt for this writing challenge. Come on, it’s been keeping you up at night, hasn’t it? Well, sometimes I’ll be inspired by what is happening in the day around me. I’m pretty sure I was having a rather wonderful day when I gave Day 11’s prompt of DELIGHTFUL. And I probably wasn’t so happy on day 6 when I gave GRUMBLE. But most days I take a more removed, semi-scientific approach to finding a prompt.
I grab whatever reading material is closest to me (the newspaper, a book…) and open it randomly. I count down the number of full lines on the page days of the challenge (today I went down 24 lines) and count over 15 words (for 2015). Then I find the closest “promptable” word.
Some words just will not make a very good prompt. Conjunctions, for example, kinda suck as promptable material. So do pronouns and proper names. Verbs are good, as are adjectives, adverbs and some nouns.
So for today I randomly opened The Annotated Emma by Jane Austen (Annotates and Edited by David M. Shapard, published by Anchor Books) to page 142. Following the formula I get to the word “my” a pretty lame prompt. So looking around that word I’ve got “coachman” nice prompt, but kind of limited and dated and “foot-path.” Yeah, “foot-path” can take me it a couple of different ways I think I walk that way.
So today’s creative prompt is…
Foot-path
Leave a Reply