Prompts can be a blogger’s best friend. When you’ve found yourself with a monster case of writer’s block and it seems as though there is simply nothing worth saying, doing a quick search for some prompts can save your blog’s posting schedule. But it doesn’t have to just be about answering a question that another blogger has asked, or finishing a scene that someone else started; you can make a prompt personal.
Today’s assignment is to publish a post based on your own, personalized take on today’s Daily Prompt.
The Daily Post has prompts every day to keep us writing (thanks guys!), and while many of them could easily be answered with a simple sentence, or else a completely fictional response, most of them can also be used as a way to get personal and share something about yourself that your readers may not have known.
Now, as you know, I tend to schedule posts in advance, and as such “Today’s Daily Prompt” on The Daily Post was actually the prompt from a couple of weeks ago. But bear with me as I show the concept of personalizing a prompt with an old one.
The prompt: Today is Summer Solstice, the longer day of the year (in the Northern hemisphere). How are you taking advantage of the extra hours of sunlight this time of year? Do you like it, or do you already miss earlier sunsets?
The response: I kinda hate this time of year. Don’t get me wrong, I love the summer, the warm weather, and the sunshine, but longer days are a curse for me. Why? Well for one thing I spent all winter convincing my daughter that she had to go to bed because the sun was asleep, so now she suddenly has an argument for staying awake several hours later. For another thing, summer in the Albertan oil sands is maddening because the sun practically never sets. When I get up at 3 am it is as bright out as midday, and when I’m trying to sleep at night it’s just as bright. At the worst, the sun is actually only completely down for about an hour (around midnight). It might sound lovely to someone who loves the sun, but when you’re dead tired from a 12-hour shift and you can’t get to sleep because even the slightest crack in your curtains is like a spotlight in your room, you learn to hate the sun pretty quickly.
The conclusion: See what I did there? I could have responded to that prompt with cold hard facts, stating that I don’t have any plans and am not a fan of long days, but instead I used the opportunity to reveal a couple of little tidbits about my life. Keep this in mind when writing a post based on a prompt; a few personal details can really make the post pop!
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