1 June 2022

Challenge: Quarter-Hour of Writing

Over at Weird & Wonderful Worlds, a five minute creative challenge was issued some three years ago, where you have just five minutes to jot down ideas as they come into your head. I like that. Sometimes it's nice to just write something down, post it and move on, rather than to keep rethinking and rewriting the perfect post.

However, I don't do so good with a completely free-form "Have an idea, now!", so I'd rather have a prompt to start the associations somewhere. And I will give myself 15 minutes, because I want to end up with something intelligible and publishable, and I write way too slow to sort my thoughts out in only 5 minutes. Yeah, that's not really the same challenge, is it?

Anyway, if someone would be interested in such a challenge, here are the rough rules:

  1. Make yourself a nice cup of tea to get the brain juices flowing. This step is mandatory.
  2. Use the generator below to get your prompt. You don't have to stick to it, it's here just for inspiration. Get more than one and combine them, if you'd like.
  3. Have a sip of your tea. Think.
  4. Start the timer and write for 15 minutes. It doesn't matter what you write - A monster stat block? Bullet points of concepts? A micro story or a poem? A stream of consciousness? - but stop when the timer runs out (or as soon as you can, stopping in the middle of a sentence would drive me crazy).
  5. Post the result! The very point of this challenge is to have a post ready in one short sitting.


I will try to go for thirty prompts in thirty days and you are more than welcome to join me. If you decide to do this challenge, please let me know. I would love to read your creations.

Any new prompts or improvements to the challenge are also very much welcome.
 

 



4 comments:

  1. I decided to do this challenge. It actually turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. I prefer to really meditate on my ideas, so to try and come up with something on the fly like that was something that I found difficult.

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    1. Yeah, I also usually keep thinking and rethinking my ideas, so I started this to force myself to change pace. :) But there's a reason for the tea clause - to give myself at least a cup worth of thinking time. :D

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  2. 15 minutes and calmly sipping tea is probably the better way to do it but I had a lot going on back then lol. Anyway, glad to see someone picking this up. A little surreal given the time and place when I did that, and where we are now.

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    1. Everything about the last few years (it's actually already a few years!) is a bit surreal.

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