War or peace - which would you prefer and why?
The WordPress post-a-day challenge , sooner or later, hits on the point that any blogger experiences the writer’s equivalent of the pain barrier.
Today, I reached that point. How, I mused, do I sit down and write when I can’t think of anything to write about?
It’s not exactly a block, just a temporary ( I hope!) lack of inspiration.
Those who have written epic novels must have had days when they’ve thought – sod it, I’m going back to bed. But if they had all succumbed to this weakness we’d all be reading short stories and novellas.
Most wise words from writing coaches advise you to steel your heart (and sharpen your imaginary pencil) and get something/anything down anyway.
When you have a blank page/screen you haven’t got anything to work on. If you put down some words, however trivial and however far from getting what you are really feeling in that moment they may be, you are at least giving yourself something to edit and expand upon.
This seems to be the principle behind all those prompting websites that are springing up . It occurs to me that these often have topics that are not so dissimilar from some of the independent TOEFL writing tasks that I set my students.
This, for example, is number 34 of the 501 writing prompts to be found over at Scribd.com : “Some people prefer to live in the quiet of the country; others prefer the hustle and bustle of the city. Which do you think is the better choice? State your position and support it with specific reasons and examples”.
This is identical to the type of compare and contrast assignment used to evaluate the writing skills of language learners. It is ironic that the same type of topics are being used to stimulate budding writers and get the creative juices flowing.
Of course, language teachers marking the work of their students are not concerned with originality but are grading the writing according to grammatical accuracy and structural awareness.
In giving these prompts to native speakers, the expectations are higher.
Correctness and range of vocabulary should be a given, so it all falls down to bringing something new to the table.
You should, for instance, be able to say more imaginative than : ‘If I had the choice I would live in the country because it is cleaner and safer’.
The topic may for instance, bring back good or bad memories of a childhood in open or crowded spaces. This might in turn trigger a recollection of a forgotten place or time. From such buried treasure comes connections and, so the theory goes, you are off and running again. In other words, the prompt is like a starter’s gun to get you into the race.
