Dropped $45 on a beat-up copy of The Artist's Way at a used bookstore, and now my prompt journal actually gets filled

Nancy Nelson · 2026-09-18T04:15:05.237694+00:00

I always had a problem with prompts where I would stare at a blank page and come up with nothing, then close the notebook and not touch it again for a week. About 4 months ago I was at this used bookstore in Boise and saw a beat up copy of The Artist's Way for $45. It was full of someone else's notes in the margins, which I almost didn't buy because of that. But the morning pages thing in there broke my brain a little, in a good way. I started writing 3 pages by hand every morning before I do anything else, and it greases the wheels for the actual prompts later in the day. Last Tuesday I wrote a page and a half about a bus stop bench before I even had coffee, which never would have happened before. The weird part is the prompts I like best are the dumb ones, like describe your kitchen table to a stranger. So what is the cheapest weird thing that actually got you writing? A book, a cheap notebook, a timer, whatever it was.

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Dropped $45 on a beat-up copy of The Artist's Way at a used bookstore, and now my prompt journal actually gets filled | Creative Writing Prompts - Talk Freely