The downside of writer prompts

Occasionally, I'll give writer prompts a try. If you're not a writer, you may be unaware that just like muscle heads can find a thousand workouts-of-the-day on CrossFit fora all over the Internet, writers can find thousands and thousands of writer prompts. There are many purposes to a prompt. At the most innocuous, they're just there to get your juices flowing, as it were, to give you a reason to write something. Hopefully, the thinking goes, writing the prompt may trigger something creative you can use in your real writing. Some prompts are more like an etude in music, meant to develop a particular skill. For example, in order to strengthen your ability to write descriptively, you might get a prompt to describe a scene, only the point-of-view character is upside-down. That kind of thing.

I don't use prompts a lot, but occasionally I find them useful or fun. As the kind of person who craves approval, prompts trigger the person who overachieved on assignments in college. There is a job to do, so I do it. It makes it easier to write without questioning myself why I'm writing, because the answer is that someone told me to write.

On a very rare occasion, the prompt succeeds beyond all reasonable expectation, and I end up with something that goes right into a story. The only problem with this is that I feel like it then becomes obvious that I used a prompt, which would kind of destroy the suspension of doubt of the reader. No artist wants to leave traces of, well, tracing in the drawing they did. It's the same thing for a writer. I just had a breakthrough on a story I gave up on a year ago, but a prompt helped me get there, and that's weighing on me as I continue on with the rough draft.

Maybe I'll just go with it. An artist might playfully leave the tracing paper glued to the canvas. I could just make it clear that part of the story really did start with a prompt. Or is that too corny?

The only thing I'm sure of is that just like every good CrossFit bro must post photos of his workout, I must also post photos of myself writing my prompt.

Intense.