As I write, Flash Fic Daily goes live tomorrow morning; a website I’ve been planning and building over the past few months that publishes daily flash fiction story prompts. To understand what I believe is the true value of this site, let me first explain how it all got started.
The Problem With Precious Ideas
I’ve thought about this a lot: sometimes it is hard to start writing. Sometimes you have ideas and you think that they are very precious things. And the better the idea, the harder it is to start working on it, because the minute you start, it stops being this perfect thing in your head and becomes this ugly, messy thing on the page.
To get around this, I came up with an elaborate plan to start live streaming myself writing short stories. Only they wouldn’t be my ideas, not ideas I’d come up with late at night and scribbled into a notebook and couldn’t wait to get going with. They would be prompts that I’d somehow generate. I had hoped that would make them feel more disposable. I can’t be too precious over something I didn’t pull from the ether.
I made a very lightweight program that used the Wikipedia random page function and pulled little sparks of sentences from here and there. They were generated randomly, and then I would write the story. Honestly, that worked quite well. I was able to just kind of write and not really think about it, not worry about it.
The issue, of course, is that once you write something and you’re kind of happy with it, you start rewriting it, and all of a sudden you’re working on a lot of different random things at once. I was doing this once a week and it ended up taking up a lot of my time. It wasn’t really sustainable.
Falling in Love With the Process
But I really liked it. I really liked the idea that you would have this prompt appear in front of you, alien to you, and then that would inspire creative work.
So in my own time, when the live stream thing got abandoned, I started writing flash fiction based on randomly generated prompts. And all of a sudden, this was a different ask. Flash fiction can be anywhere from a hundred words to a thousand (I never went more than that, and I never edited them). It was never my intention to publish them. But when I was struggling for that creative burst, they were incredibly useful.
It became a practice I was doing over and over. I came up with new ways to find prompts, and then I started actually enjoying the process of finding them. I abandoned the Wikipedia thing eventually and started writing a bunch of prompts down whenever I thought of one — and just the act of having the prompts themselves would spark a load of ideas. It became it’s own creative process.
Building the Website
At some point early this year, I thought: I’m enjoying writing these prompts so much that I kind of want to share them with people. It wouldn’t be too much trouble to put together a fairly lightweight website. What if it delivered one prompt a day? What if people could receive a daily email, read the prompt, be inspired, and submit a story?
Then once a week I choose one of those stories that I think is really cool, and it goes on the site as a featured story and gets sent out to the mailing list. There’s nothing else really on the site. It’s just that.
And so that’s what I did. It’s live now and it’s called flashficaily.com. I’m really proud of it, and I really hope it brings people the kind of creative energy it brought me.
What Makes a Great Prompt
I’ve written over a hundred prompts at this point (probably closer to 200) and I’ve had a lot of time to think about what makes a really good one.
A great prompt teases something. It doesn’t go too much into detail. A lot of my prompts are images, little trails of thought, some kind of interesting dichotomy or turn. They leave things wide open, but they’re intended just to spark a bit of intrigue or a bit of mystery. You look at it and go, “Huh, I wonder what that could be.” And that is the invocation to start writing.
I like prompts that are a bit weird, a bit strange, a bit off-the-wall, that maybe don’t make sense according to our rational view of the universe. I like the freedom that brings, and I like the connections that forces the imagination to make.
But I think the other reason great prompts are so powerful is constraint. You’re not faced with a blank page, that scariest of things, where you could go anywhere, do anything, with the whole world and everything in it and outside of it in front of you. A prompt narrows that down. It forces your focus into something. You can’t write about anything; you have to write about this.
Why It’s Become Part of My Ritual
I think why I specifically love this particular incarnation (the daily prompt, the ritual of it) is because it forces you into a creative mode. I think about it a bit like going on a long drive, and this little exercise is just starting the engine.
I’ll usually find myself starting with this before a decent-sized writing session. It gets the juices flowing. It gets me energised, excited, and focused. It has just become such a huge part of my ritual.
If that sounds like something that would interest you, I invite you to check out. There’s an option to put your email in and get the daily prompt sent to your inbox, but you don’t have to. You can just go on, take the prompt for yourself, sign up for the RSS feed, whatever you want. I just really want people to enjoy it. My dream is that it becomes a genuinely cool creative tool.
And if you have any prompt ideas (I have to write at least another 300 over the next 12 months) head over to the video version of this blog and drop them in the comments. They might just make the list.