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Y’all probably have heard of “writing prompt” exercises. If not, it’s easy enough to google up. In the context of creative writing, it’s basically meant to get around the problem of writer’s block by offering up an idea to start your pen flowing (or keyboard clacking, or however you like to get your hopefully eventually copyrightable material into fixed form). For instance I’ll pluck one out of the search I myself just did:
3. Misheard Lyrics. Think of some of the song lyrics you have misheard throughout the years. Pick your favorite, and use these misheard lyrics as the title of a new creative writing piece. Write a story, scene, or poem based on this title.
So almost immediately, the song “Purple Haze” as performed by Jimi Hendrix pops into my head with its infamously misheard lyric: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky!
Or as many throughout the decades have thought: ‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy!
Maybe in honor of Pride Month we can just imagine that wasn’t misheard at all, but in any case now I have something to potentially build a story around. Of course, this exercise does ignore the whole maxim that “ideas are easy”… because then again, sometimes they’re not, right? “Where do you get your ideas?” asks the stereotypical audience member, craving the wisdom a writer often has no satisfying answer for, or should perhaps probably come up with something better than “a 10-second Google search.”
Anyhow, sometimes I get them from games. Playtime. It’s definitely not unheard of for this to occur, but then there’s the gulf between “wow, that would make a good story” and actually making a good story inspired by it. Or any story at all, really.
How about just recounting it in a way that makes someone else entertained? That’s a story, right? Doesn’t have to be a novel. You don’t have to fire up Photoshop and use your very limited skills to…
*record scratch*
Okay let me backtrack. So I recently started playing this video game called Stellaris which is sort of like Civilization on a galactic scale. You guide your alien empire on a quest for supremacy but unless you’re a fanatical xenophobe, devouring swarm or similarly anti-social collective, you may very well end up with several different species populating your various worlds. There’s a good deal of randomness involved in what alien species might be present in a given game and how everyone feels about each other, etc. etc., and you’re guiding your empire across a period of centuries as leaders live and die and today’s deadly rival might be your staunchest ally fifty years down the road and nevermind that little misunderstanding during First Contact where an entire ship crew got vivisected, right?
But I digress. Your planets have jobs, and one of the jobs is basically the “police” which is more generally termed by the game as Enforcer and as things progressed one of my migrants randomly ended up being The Law upon my tundra-world colony of Alpha Lyncis Prime, but said migrant happened to be a member of a species that looks like a cross between a sea-slug and a blob fish. Not precisely Judge Dredd material, but now that’s the kind of thing dreams are made of. Or writing prompts, at least.
