What Prompts You to Write?

The first Monday evening every month, I go to a little get-together at the local library with fellow writers. There are no critiques, no pages from works in progress to share, and no shop talk. As memory serves, I haven’t met anyone there who has published anything or even submitted a work for publication.

I am currently writing book number thirty while editing books for four authors who have published at least one other work. I don’t think that makes me a better writer than the other people in the group, just a busier one. If I were a good writer, I’d have gotten to the action by now.

The group’s name is Write Now, and that’s just what we do. We say hello, introduce ourselves, and write for forty-five minutes on one of five or six random prompts provided by the moderator. When I first heard of the group, I thought, Why should I go? Don’t I have enough writing to do already? The answer seems obvious. I turn out four books a year, and that’s since I slowed down.

I was surprised to find that taking a break from everything I was working on and spending some time writing on something completely unplanned actually stimulated my desire to write and gave the act of writing a booster shot of fun. As an added blessing, it gave me several 600-700 word long starts for short stories. I’ve expanded on some already, others I will get to soon, and they will become a short story collection for publication. Who knows, one of those stories may grow up to be a novel someday.

If you’re serious about it, writing is work; never let anyone tell you otherwise. Yet, it is work that the writer loves. It needs to be rekindled from time to time to recapture the joy it brings. To remember that we may need a little prompting at times.

Jack LaFountain

Author of the Red River series.