Seeking Writing Inspiration? Go Prompt the Dwarves at Home.

The shortest people at home run around with a cookie jar of ideas

Struggling for good ideas to write on the Internet?

I am not going to fake it.

I do.

I struggle with it daily. Yes, daily. Part of the reason is me. I find myself boring.

I think about the same things. Daily. I place my morning coffee cup in the same 1 pm direction of the kitchen table placemat and only drink Nescafe Gold with 2 sprinkles of cocoa powder. Daily.

And so, I doubt myself.

How creative and how interesting can my writing be? I am bl00dy boring!

If that resonates with you, read on.

Creativity is curiosity run amok

This is my 2023 epiphany.

There are 2 types of curiosity.

• Innate — Why do I think the way I just did?
• Outwards — Why is THAT person doing that? What good does it bring?

Human beings are naturally curious.

We are because we want to figure things out. Sometimes, figuring people out.

And that can be an online writing superpower we never knew existed and have nested inside us.

Want to be promoted? Learn from the one who gets promoted year after year. Do I want to follow? Why? Why not? Is there something that makes me feel uncomfortable about his [or her] story?

I constantly find myself in a flurry of thoughts.

That is one way of saying I am drowning in self-generated questions.

But… am I alone?

Let’s see.

According to Writer Ralph B. Smith,

“Children ask roughly 125 questions per day and adults ask about six questions per day, so somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose 119 questions per day… The more questions they ask, the more they discover about the world around them.”

It seems like I am pretty much alone.

No matter.

Creative curiosity is not lost on us. It is buried deep within our psychology. All we need are the right conditions for it to flourish.

Once again.

Be a child. Ask simple, obvious, and eyeball-rolling annoying questions.

Questions open the mind.

Answers close it.

Children are fascinating creatures. I don’t have any. My closest cousin popped 3. They are currently in their run-around prime.

And man. They ask a truck of questions.

• Some questions reflect off-the-cuff thinking.
• Others are boredom-triggered.
• A few are rapid-fire types.

Let me give you some examples.

“Why is chili so nice to eat?”

That question came from a child of 7. His idol must be Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. He chomps on the red fruit non-stop even though his lips are swollen.

He will become a chilli-eating champion [read: monster] in 10 years.

He loves the flame-generating spice and wants to know why it is so finger-licking good.

“I don’t know, boy. Maybe because it is red.”

The young chili monster is curious.

I, the know-nothing adult, snuffed the curiosity flame.

The 6-year-old girl is tougher to deal with. To begin with, she is interested in me.

Oh God, if only the cutest girl in my Middle School was this curious about me.

Young She: “What are you reading?”

Old Me: “A book on finance.”

Young She: “What is 5-nance?”

Old Me: “It is about making money.”

Young She: “Why do we need money?”

Old Me: “To buy food.”

Young She: “But I just take from the table.”

I exploded in laughter. I nearly died.

But this young lass is [also] right.

Her world is different from mine, even though we live on the same planet.

She doesn’t think about food the way I do.

• She sees food as something she grabs from the table and throws into her mouth.
• I see food as something I buy with money… and earning money worries me.

Same family, different people.

Same last name, different thinking.

Same issue, different perspective and angle.

How to ask thought-provoking questions that expand our writing possibilities

Have a playlist of such questions to get yourself started.

No fret if you don’t have one.

Free free to use mine.

These are the questions I routinely ask others [and myself] to see the world through their lenses.

• Why?
• Why not?
• How do you know it is right?
• Why do you think this will not happen?
• Is this belief or fact?
• So what?
• Really?

Quite often, I pair these questions to stimulate further thinking.

For instance, I clump why and why not like twins.

“Why are we pitching our professional services separately from our software subscription? Why not bundle them?”

You get the responses to the why and the why not. It expands your views.

I use so what and really when I am editing my work.

“Okay, great. I wrote this wall of text the reader has to labor through. What do they get at the end? Where’s the so what factor?”

This is swiftly followed by,

“Really? That’s it? That is all the reader is walking away with after a 4-minute read? Let me take a second glance after a cup of coffee. The punch is not there.”

The close

Prompting questions allow me [us] to probe more and think deeper about the topic at hand.

According to this article published in TeachMagazine,

“When we ask questions that prompt critical thinking, students are invested in choosing strategies to find the answer. They inevitably start by examining what they already know to act as a foundation for deeper learning, then they do a close reading of the text to analyze particular lines.”

I concur.

Capturing and expanding my thoughts in conversation about writing inspiration with Matt | Financial Imagineer, Denis Gorbunov, and Sarina Chiu

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Oh, oh, you can buy me a cup of black too! Thank you!