Challenge Yourself

Recently I've been re-Tweeting the Daily Challenges from the Milwaukee Writers Workshop (www.twitter.com/mkeworkshop if you want to follow or just @mkeworkshop).

I think that little challenges like this - writing prompts if you want - are very useful when you're stuck and don't know what to write on a particular story. It helps because it forces you to write something new and different and, who knows?, it may produce something you enjoy.

I also think that prompts are a good way to practice particular aspects of writing that you may feel you lack in. Not good with characters? Try today's challenge to write their history in one paragraph per year. Not good with dialog? Their first one was a conversation between room mates trying to kick the other out of the apartment. The challenges help writers get over humps and produce something that either gets the bug out of their head or purge some bad writing in order to get back to the good stuff.