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Prompts: An iPhone App For Hopeful Writers

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Writing is easy. The challenge is figuring out what to write about. Actually, that is not quite true. For example, I know I’m not going to write about ancient history or current fashions. I know I am going to write about people, what they do, how they do it, why they do it or something else related to the social or people aspects of my reality. That’s what interests me, so it wouldn’t make much sense to write about anything else.

Within the boundaries of my interests, settling on one focus for writing can be tough. To help with that, I discovered an app for my iPhone. It’s called Prompts. Apparently, it is like a pump primer for writers. The idea is that the app will give me a writing prompt. Since I installed the app only a few minutes ago, how well it does at starting the writing juices flowing remains to be seen. For ninety-nine cents, I figure it’s worth a try.

The first thing I notice about the Prompts app is that it’s pretty simple. Click around for a couple of minutes and quickly conclude that it’s main thing really is its main thing. It gives me a short prompt to start the first sentence followed by an otherwise empty note area. The app can keep some statistics and provide reminders to write but the only thing to do is to pick up on the prompt and write something. I suspect I can get a new prompt every time I come back to the app but beyond that, there is nothing else to do or to get frustrated with. Now just how cool is that? …