One Spark, Many Fires

One Spark, Many Fires: Get the most out of the prompt

Grab this free writing resource here.

For a little while now, I've been experimenting with how to get the most out of writing prompts. If you're anything like me, you love writing prompts, and you probably follow dozens of writing prompt profiles on social media. Earlier this year, I shared a workbook called Write a story that... which aimed at sort of gamifying the writing prompt process by providing you with a range of different elements that you could randomly put together to create a prompt. The idea was that with 660 prompts, you could generate thousands of unique prompt combinations and never run out!

Well, way before Write a story that..., I was working on another kind of writing prompt workbook that featured another kind of approach. Today, I'm finally sharing it with you! It's called One Spark, Many Fires, and the whole idea behind it is to teach writers to look at one prompt and find a range of different stories and approaches, and even writing techniques, that they can use for that prompt. In essence, it's teaching you as a writer to use a single writing prompt as a study and create a range of different and engaging stories based on that one writing prompt. 

 You can do that in a variety of ways - by considering context, character, plot, genre, audience, and so on - and for each writing prompt the idea is that you could potentially come up with dozens of stories related to that one prompt. In this way, you can get the most out of a single prompt, and you can also use a prompt that you like to create a range of different stories that are distinct in tone, mood, writing style, content, and more.

I actually created this mini workbook a couple of years ago, but due to a sequence of unfortunate events, I never shared it. I'm sure there's some refining that needs to be done, especially since I've refined the idea in my mind a lot more since then (and hopefully those first two pages clarify a little more, as I've just recently added those), but I hope that the gist of the idea gets through to my fellow writers. 

On another note, this particular workbook that I am sharing focuses on one specific approach, which is how to consider writing stories of different genres based on a single prompt. I'm not the biggest fan of how I set each of the genre pages up, and hopefully that's something I can redesign soon, but for now, it'll likely do just fine. 

Grab the One Spark, Many Fires free writing resource here.

As always, if you have any Qs, suggestions, or comments, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

I hope this resources helps you in your fiction writing craft.