Lost the Plot? 500 Writing Prompts and How to Use them by Adam Maxwell

Final Rating: 4/5 Stars

Pages: 80

Edition: PDF File

Time Read: 11.28.14 - 11.28.14

Summary:
"Almost every writer has a pathological predisposition to procrastination and often believe there is a magical answer to the question ‘where do you get your ideas?’.

Well now, whether you write Twitfic, Microfiction, Flash Fiction, Short Short Stories, Short Stories, Novelettes, Novellas, Novels or Scripts you can tell everyone that you get your ideas here.

This is a prompts book. Oh yes. But it's a prompts book with a BIG difference. The prompts in this book aren't the usual, run-of-the-mill, mind numbingly boring prompts you usually get.

Oh, no. Not here.

And this is not the sort of book that's just going to give you a prompt and expect you to know what to do with it. No matter what form your writing takes, this book will show you an easy way to get the ideas out of your brain and transformed into stories."

Review:
If you are an aspiring writer, or just want some tips on how to be better at it, I recommend this book.

I couldn't give this book 5 stars because of the grammatical errors here and there, plus I wasn't a huge fan of the authors writing style, but the content itself is solid.

The book starts off with an introduction of why it was created, then goes into the various forms that you can choose when writing. They range from six word stories to novels and the author does a good job describing what each form is and how they are different from one another.

He then went on to explain how to build a story from your mind using a specific structure and creating from there. I found this part to be the most interesting and actually took notes from it.

After that there are examples using the prompts and the structure he stated before.

Finally we get to the prompts! They are very unique compared to prompts I've seen in the past. Not only that, but there really are 500 unique prompts I have yet to see. Here's a few examples:

"297. The sleepwalking had never been a problem for her until now."
"441. He countermanded a direct order, sir. We must take action immediately or goldfish all over the world could suffer the same fate."
"87. You'll never guess who's on my toilet."

There's 497 more where those came from. While some of them are a little too obscure for me to pull an idea from (#441 for example), #87 and #297 really draw me in as something I'd like to write.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with having this book. If I ever feel the desire to write again (I haven't in a while), you bet this will be the first place I go for ideas.