Writing Prompts

I woke up from sleep, the room still dark, and had a thought about writing prompts. Recently, I enrolled in a writing course advertised on Facebook that also had a course of writing prompts. This may be the missing piece that will help me get started as a novelist. The course I am taking right now is a series of exercises where I copy passages from famous novels curated by the teacher. Following the experience of writers like Hunter Thompson,  started his career as a writer by copying Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. This anecdote is frequently shared on the web.

I have done about seven lessons so far out of a total of twelve lessons email to me. This is an effective way to study the work of these authors, as well as get into a 'writing' habit by typing the work of the greats. The 'teacher' also places his comments on sections of these works to highlight the author's technique. While doing these lessons on a regular basis, you get the understand not only the work you are copying but also get the feel of typing a novel daily. So this is how a writer works by getting in front of the computer or typewriter and banging out a novel.

I have also been reading Peter Elbow's book 'Writing Without Teachers', and I thought this was a method to also use to start a daily writing habit. To make the effort more fruitful, writing prompts would be useful to get the juices going instead of waiting for the mind to have a rhythm of consistent ideas relevant to the plot at hand. I do have a rough draft of a plot of a novel that I am working on that I started to us a tool called Sudowrite, which is an AI-based tool that tries to help would-be authors. At best, the tool is a writing assistant rather than a tool to do the writing for you.

So these have been my attempts to start my writing career with the use of AI tools, but one does not become a writer by having a machine do the work for you. Instead, AI tools can provide writing prompts, perhaps critique the draft and offer suggestions, but not do the actual writing, which AI tools like Sudowrite attempt to do. This seems to be the dilemma of writers at the cusp of the unrelenting wave of artificial intelligence. Other experiments would be to use Gemini, ChatGPT, and tools like Notebok NLM to augment the writing craft of today's writers.;

During my early morning usings in the dark, several ideas for a novel also came up aside from my current idea of hiking with a French colleague:

• driving cross-country with my son from the South to the West Coast to begin his Army tour
• migration for work from Asia to the United States
• Further stories of my French colleagues with their families and animals

During these reveries, I thought about buying a motorcycle so I could roam the local countryside to rest from my writing labors. I used to have a Honda Ruckus and regretted having sold it when the scooter would not start. So my daydreaming started with thoughts about how to better organize my garage so that the new motorcycle would fit in; perhaps by raising the rack to place my 3 bicycles above the ground to make way for the Royal Enfield motorcycle that I planned to buy. As I get into my writing rhythm, churning out novels, motorbiking on the weekends, working on my garden, and having my sons and friends critique my drafts, using writing prompts and live the life of a productive novelist.

Soon I heard my wife's alarm sound, and I had to get up and prepare to work from home. I went to the bathroom to meditate, and I sat on the toilet, listening to binaural beats and the vibrating headpiece around my forehead, and when I finished, I did Tai-Chi to prepare for my day as I watched the thoughts swirl in my head of all the writing progress I would achieve with writing prompts. Now is the time when the actual hard work begins. As a start, I need to organize my work area on my computer and continue my experiments with AI, and create a model to help me with prompts