Harnessing Social Media for Inspiration
In ‘Midpoint & Momentum’ I mentioned that my poetry pipeline was almost empty. That I had no draft poems to work on. I said that I’d be looking to ‘prompts’ to inspire me and get the creativity flowing.
Fortunately, there are a large number of social media accounts and hashtags that provide daily prompts - usually single words - that you take inspiration from and build on.
The idea of these accounts is that they provide a prompt and you respond with a WIP that uses the prompt word, but I (mostly) ignore that. I look through them and see if there are any that light even the dimmest glow, and I write them down on a page in my reMarkable notebook. These are my ‘ideas’; the seeds - some of which will grow into drafts and then, maybe, into poems.
The more ideas I have, the more potential there is for me, sitting down to create, to actually create. Yes I have a blank page, but I have these prompts that I can use to get me going.
You may recognise the diagram, above, as being akin to a sales pipeline funnel, and this is deliberate. In the same way that you ‘lose’ sales along the process of acquiring leads through to invoicing the customer, not all ideas will make it to draft and not all drafts will end up as published poems. But in both cases, the more you put into the left-hand-side, the more you’re going to get out of the right-hand-side. (It is, of course, more complicated than that.)
I don’t have a regular schedule for checking them; I tend to look for prompts when there’s nothing in my ideas pot that leaps out at me.
Here’s a (non exhaustive) list of social media hashtags and accounts that I dip in and out of to re-fill my funnel. These are prevalent on both Mastodon and BlueSky. I imagine they are also worth checking on other platforms, if you happen to be on them.
#WIPSnips (See also the @wipsnips.bsky.social account on BlueSky)
#WritingPrompts
#MicroPrompt
#MastoPrompt
#VSS365
#VSSPoem
#DailyHaikuPrompt (See also the @DailyHaikuPrompt account on Mastodon and BlueSky)
#WSS366 (see also Wandering Shop Stories)
#Prompt
Do you use similar accounts or hashtags? Let me know the ones you keep going back to in the comments.