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Your job isn't to find ideas but to recognise them when they show up.”
― Stephen King
Homonyms are great words to use for writing prompts as they have so many possible meanings. While a single word prompt may spark a lot of activity in your mind, as Stephen King says above, it’s about understanding which can be genuine ideas for stories, rather than just situations and characters generated by the word that are not really going anywhere.
So how do you recognise that? Well, it's different for everyone and sometimes it can take a long while to know that the story you've edited umpteen times is actually going nowhere! I have many stories that I have worked on for months, sometimes years on and off, and they have ended up gathering dust in a file as something essential is missing. But it took me quite some time to realise that. Other times, I can write something from a prompt and know straight away that it's going nowhere and isn't something I'll come back to. What about you? Can you recognise that in your practice?
But every time we write we get better at writing and in the same way we exercise our bodies to make them stronger, I think there is much to be said for just writing in order to strengthen our writing and not having any plan for it beyond that.
In the craft book, Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says:
"Let go of everything when you write, and try at a simple beginning with simple words to express what you have inside. It won't begin smoothly. Allow yourself to be awkward. You are stripping yourself. You are exposing your life, not how your ego would like to see you represented, but how you are as a human being."
If we can live this in our writing as much as possible, then this is when we will create stories with real power and meaning that will touch us when we write them and others when they read them. Even when we do set out to write with a specific idea in mind. The final word from Natalie Goldberg on this:
"Yes, you can have topics you want to write about but come to it not with your mind and ideas but with your whole body — your heart and gut and arms. Begin to write in the dumb, awkward way an animal cries out in pain, and there you will find your intelligence, your words and your voice."