Pick Three Things

Weekly writing prompt #13, and my response to #12

This year I have a personal goal to do more writing “play,” so I’m creating weekly prompts for myself and sharing online, in case you’d like to join me too. I hope you will! Teachers, you’re welcome to use these with your students. I’ll be posting these every Wednesday on my website, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Substack.¹

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You might be thinking I must really love writing prompts if I assigned myself a challenge like this. I don’t actually, although I wouldn’t say I hate them either. I suppose I’m fairly neutral. What I do love is being creative and using my imagination. And sometimes, when I’m working on a book that I know is going to be published, or one that I really hope will be published, I think the part of me that loves being creative and using my imagination sometimes gets overshadowed by the part of me that gets nervous about attention. And the part of me that wants to please people. And the part of me that wants to do good work.

My thinking was maybe this prompt challenge would help my creative, imaginative part be the loudest one in the room again. Maybe making up these prompts and responding to them, letting myself play with words with no pressure beyond “spend 10 minutes writing about this,” will make those other parts take a step back or maybe even leave the room.

“I’m not listening to you right now,” I tell those worrying, bossy thoughts as I scribble in my journal.

I thought maybe if I did that often enough, and those worrying, bossy parts stopped coming around when I was writing just-for-fun, maybe they’d stop coming around when I’m writing the other stuff too.

And you know what? It’s been working.

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My Response to Writing Prompt #12

Here is last week’s prompt:

And here is what I wrote. Can you guess which character I wrote about?