In the lean months of 2024, when I was unemployed and companies declined to acknowledge my existence, I couldn’t concentrate on writing. I wanted to. I tried. I even made some occasional progress on my novel Often at the neighborhood pool with a cup of iced coffee. Dark days, indeed….
✦ The Art of Procrastination ✦
I felt obliged to practice for job interviews, but hated the idea of practicing for job interviews Leetcode questions are a corporate anti-pattern and you shouldn’t work for people that ask them, if you can help it. I’m guilty of being this person long ago, but I swear I’m better now.. If I couldn’t write fiction, then I figured I would craft a piece of software for my fiction-writing self. It turned out to be a Django API without a front end that would return a collection words or phrases in a JSON payload. Any time I wanted to do a writing exercise, I’d spin up Docker and hit the API in a browser.
✦ A Gift to Myself ✦
Writing prompts are often overly-specific to the point of sterility (Sidenote: A tornado is about to strike a farmhouse and the owner just received a letter from their estranged mother. Write what happens next!). I prefer a combinatorial approach that places categories of random words in association with each other nycmidnight.com does this well. They have wonderfully evocative word banks.. This way, the prompt isn’t prescribing a scenario, but allowing for the random association to evoke a scenario via an emotion or an image. It’s unpredictable and the number of combinations allows for way more possible prompts than I could write by crafting them one at a time.
I decided to beef up that time-waster of an app and make it freely available to any creative soul that could use a little inspiration. Forever will it be a work in progress, but hey, aren’t we all?