When writing every single day from prompts you sometimes run into an obstacle called inspiration, or more precisely the lack thereof. At least I do sometimes. A prompt alone can help with creating a story so you don’t have to start completely from scratch but it cannot always guide you in your inspiration for said piece you want to write. What format do you want to use, how long or how cryptic do you want the story to be? What emotions do I want it to convey? I do struggle with these notions sometimes. Luckily for me I do find it rather easy to create my own inspiration when there is none of it flowing around in my brain. But what is my secret or the golden nugget that works for me?

Before I get into explaining my writing process I want to look back at why I started Letters to September in the first place. Years ago a friend of mine started a project on her YouTube channel where she used this format. Every day for a month (I do believe it was September she chose to use) she uploaded a very short video where she read a letter to said month. She did use this format more tightly than I do now, every letter in the series was indeed a letter, always starting with “Dear September” and ending with greetings from her. Once in a while she would even put a little P.S. at the end of the letter if that particular one needed it. As for me, I use the “Letters to …” format pretty loosely. It’s looking more like “A prompt a day” kind of deal. But I like the idea that what I write during the whole month of September is bound together as if I actually meant to send them to an invisible entity. Truth be told, nowadays we don’t really write letters anymore, in most communications – especially with friend – we don’t start with salutations anymore, let alone that we say our greetings when wrapping up. The whole “Letters to September” format that I use is simply writing a piece of flash fiction, poetry or short story that I would send to a friend without explanation. Just as a way of communication emotions or troubles of that day. None of them directly pointing to certain events but of September was my true friend, an explanation wouldn’t even be needed.

So to actually get into my writing process that I use for pretty much every letter that I’ve written so far is as follows. I have my prompt for the day ready in advance so when the day comes I go throughout the day thinking “what can I write about this prompt, do I have a certain emotion that I can use for this or that ties in perfectly, what would be one sentence that I want to use”. Most of the day nothing comes up but there is always an emotion I can connect with the prompt. And if I’m lucky a story can unfold from a single sentence. In the most basic of ways I go from a single prompt to thinking about it to just simply opening an empty document and start typing away. Some days it comes easier than other but every day so far it has been that simple. And even if inspiration is leaving me hanging I just start freewriting or changing the sentence structure of some lines until I’ve created something worth posting. From the moment I sit down to write to actually post that day’s letter takes me between 20 minutes and 2 hours. It all depends on the amount of inspiration I have for that day.

If you want more tips on how you can post daily or on a tight schedule I highly recommend the post I Am Always Ready To Create A Blog Post posted on Renard’s World. An amazing blogpost where Renard takes a deep-dive into making writing and posting a real effort which you can also achieve by following a few simple tips and tricks. My pieces of flash fiction, poetry, and short stories are basically all created through freewriting. I give myself one sentence and just let the story flow from my fingertips, with or without inspiration. If I need to, I create my own inspiration. And I do believe that writing every single day has trained my brain to come up with stories and elaborate descriptions by simply staring at a blank page.

Take care and keep on writing!

-Merel