Is this a last minute writing prompt? Yes. But what’s wrong with last minute? As a society, we place so much value in productivity. Any activity that doesn’t contribute to productivity is thought of as time wasting.

These ideas are so pervasive I’m sure we’ve all felt guilt over spending an hour watching youtube, sleeping in late one morning, or checking Twitter. The idea seems to be that these activities are all fine, but only as long as you’re productive enough.

As a writer, how the hell do you measure productivity? I spent ten hours yesterday working on a future post but didn’t make much progress. Was I productive? Maybe sometimes we just need to take a deep breath and let ourselves do nothing for a bit. I’ve been practicing letting myself have a morning off every now and again this summer and it’s been really nice–if you have any flexibility in your life, I would recommend it. So please enjoy this last minute writing prompt.

Name of the game: Fire Starter.

The rules: Write the supplied sentence/sentence fragment at the top of your page, (computer, notebook, etc. Whatever you prefer) set a timer for 10 minutes and start writing whatever you think would follow that first sentence.

Today’s sentence fragment:

I can still picture it…

After you try this out, you can find what I wrote by clicking here (because comparing everyone’s different ideas is the best bit!). I fixed some of the punctuation and spelling to make it easier to read, but this is about fun, not editing.

Feel free to share what you wrote in the comments–games are always better with friends!

Much love.