Writing Prompt-ly

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” – Sylvia Plath

Flashback! Go back to your school days – Recall the essay writing classes and competitions. The first step of these activities was the “topic.” Cut back to the present day. As a writer, you must be aware of the concept of writing prompts. Simply stated, writing prompts are topics on which you focus to create various forms of literary output – blogs, stories, nano-tales, poems, essays, novellas – the list is endless.

Writing prompts occur in many forms – a single word, a phrase, a situation, a foreign word, an image, an opening sentence, a first and/or last word or phrase, three terms that must be used somewhere in the passage, words that should be used for inspiration but not actually used in the piece of writing, a popular song, a word whose antonym or synonym should be used, or a character/situation sketch. Prompts may be genre-specific, example, horror, fantasy, romance, science-fiction, and so on.

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Second Childhood

Runaway Dreams

Forever and Now

Truth and Dare

Yesterday, Indian social media was abuzz with two events involving journalists. One was about a senior editor being phished into believing she had been appointed as an assistant professor of journalism at Harvard. She apparently shared crucial personal information with the cyber criminals and actually flaunted the not-yet-acquired job position title since the past 3-4 months to get speaking and writing engagements. The latter act majorly divided social media opinion on her intentions and reduced the sympathy and seriousness related to the phishing act that made her quit her cushy job at a leading newsroom in India.

The other more revealing news came in the form of hundreds of pages of WhatsApp chat leaks of a leading journalist in a national news channel. Not only was this bad publicity for WhatsApp that is paying for large advertorials claiming our chats are safe on their platform, it was an absolute riot for Indian social media users, who enjoyed every bit of juicy stuff highlighted in the chat transcripts. The said journalist is believed to be unscrupulous in his means, loud, arrogant, angry, and condescending. At the same time, he has a large fan following of those who condone his nationalist stand and rowdy debates on Prime Time. But this weekend, the Nation wants to know this journalist and his brand of journalism better by consuming the reams of WhatsApp chat in faint Courier New font.

An interesting weekend indeed with the promise of excitement, controversy, gossip, reveals, debates – all delivered directly to your favourite social media account. Needless, to say, it prompted me to pen a verse.