Writing Prompt Generator

What the writing prompt generator does

You are looking at a blank page and the blank page is winning.

Press the button and it hands you a situation, a person, something going wrong, and somewhere for it to happen. Pull a batch and read down until one of them makes you want to argue with it.

What follows is about the blank page itself, and about the time a psychologist published one.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. If you are browsing rather than deciding, pull a big batch.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the whole lot with you.

The shortest paper ever published

In the autumn of 1974 the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis published a paper by Dennis Upper, of the Behavior Therapy Unit at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Brockton, Massachusetts.

It was called The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of "Writer's Block".

The paper is blank.

Not short. Not thin. Blank. There is a title, and there is an author, and there is an institutional address, and then there is a page with absolutely nothing on it, printed in a peer-reviewed journal, where it remains to this day with a DOI and a citation and everything else a real paper has.

It is generally recognised as the shortest academic article ever written.

There is one footnote, and the footnote is the best part. Academic papers carry a standard line at the bottom telling you where the work was first presented. Upper's says that portions of the paper were not presented at the 81st Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, in Montreal, on 30 August 1973.

He gives the date. He gives the city. He gives the convention number. And he did not present it there, because there was nothing to present, and he wants you to know precisely where and when the nothing did not happen.

There is a second line offering to send you reprints on request.

Then the journal did something better than publishing it. They published the peer review alongside it.

The reviewer reports that he examined the manuscript with great care, using lemon juice and X-rays, and could find no flaw in either the design or the writing style. He recommends publication without revision. He notes that it is the most concise manuscript he has ever seen, while still containing enough detail for other researchers to replicate Dr Upper's failure. He adds that compared to the other manuscripts he is usually sent, with all their complicated detail, this one was a pleasure to examine.

A journal editor read that, agreed, and printed both.

And then people replicated it

This is where it stops being a joke and becomes something closer to a tradition.

In 1983 Geoffrey Molloy, in Australia, published a replication in Perceptual and Motor Skills. It worked. He got the same result.

In 1984 Bruce Hermann published, in the same journal, a partial failure to replicate.

Read that title twice. A partial failure to replicate a blank page. Somebody wrote something. He got most of the way to nothing and then produced a bit of text, and reported it, in a journal, as a partial failure, which is exactly what it was.

In 2007 the original journal published a multisite cross-cultural replication, with six authors across several countries, confirming Upper's finding held internationally. In 2016 somebody replicated it in medical education. Somebody else replicated it in science education. There is a review. There is a meta-analysis.

The original has been cited more than a hundred times.

Somebody eventually went and checked what all those citations were for, and found that about a quarter of them were people making a joke about nothing, several were plainly errors by people who had never opened it, and at least one was citing the reviewer rather than Upper. That paper concluded, quite seriously, that citation counts are not a reliable measure of scientific impact, and it proved it using a blank page.

So why has this run for fifty years?

Because it is not really a joke. It is the only completely honest description of writer's block anybody has ever published.

Every other account has to describe the thing in words, which means the writer was, at that moment, not blocked. The description contradicts itself in the act of existing. Upper is the only person who ever solved that, and he solved it by handing in the condition itself, at actual size, and letting you look at it.

The page is not empty because he had nothing to say about writer's block. The page is what writer's block is.

What a prompt is actually for

Which brings us round to why a machine that hands you sentences helps at all.

The blank page is not a shortage. That is the thing everybody gets backwards. You do not sit there with no ideas. You sit there with every idea, all of them available, none of them chosen, and the not-choosing is the paralysis. The page is not empty. It is full of everything.

A prompt does not give you an idea. A prompt takes options away, and that is the entire service.

The moment somebody tells you the character is a woman in her sixties on a lonely moor and somebody is being impersonated, several million other stories are gone, and you are left with a small enough space to actually move in. The constraint is not a limitation on your creativity. The constraint is the thing that lets it start.

Which leads to the one piece of advice worth giving.

You are allowed to disobey it. The most useful thing a prompt can do is be slightly wrong. You read it, something in you says no, not a moor, and she is not sixty, and you have just made two decisions you could not make five seconds ago, because arguing is easier than inventing. The prompt was never the story. It was something to push against.

Take the bits you want and drop the rest. Nobody is checking.

Where these come from

The prompts are built from a set of situations, characters, conflicts and settings our team wrote and curated by hand, assembled into full scenarios. Your browser puts them together at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Questions people ask

Is the Upper paper real, or is this a story people tell?

Entirely real, and you can go and look at it. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, volume 7, issue 3, page 497, autumn 1974. It has a DOI. It is indexed on PubMed. It is archived in PubMed Central along with the rest of the journal, and it is blank there too.

Is writer's block a real condition or an excuse?

It is real enough that people have studied it, treated it and published on it for decades, which is why Upper's joke landed in a clinical journal rather than a magazine. What it is not is a shortage of ability, which is what it feels like from inside, and that gap between what it is and what it feels like is most of the problem.

Can I publish something I wrote from one of these?

Yes. A prompt is a starting point, not a claim on anything. The words you write are yours. This is the same arrangement writers have always had with the person in the pub who says "you should write about a lighthouse keeper".

Some of these are very detailed. Is that not doing the work for me?

It is doing a specific and quite small piece of the work, which is the part where you eliminate everything you are not writing. Where it goes after that is not in the prompt, and no prompt has ever supplied it. A situation is not a story. What the character does about it is the story, and that has to come from you.

What if I read fifty and none of them help?

Then the problem is not supply, and no number of prompts will fix it. Upper's paper is worth remembering here: he did not solve his block either, and he published anyway, and fifty years later people are still citing it. Turning something in beats waiting to feel ready.

Can the same prompt come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. Upper, D. (1974). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block". Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 7(3), 497. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1974.7-497a
2. Molloy, G. N. (1983). The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block": A replication. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 57(2), 566. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1983.57.2.566
3. Hermann, B. P. (1984). Unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of "writer's block": A partial failure to replicate. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 58(2), 350. https://doi.org/10.2466/pms.1984.58.2.350
4. Didden, R., Sigafoos, J., O'Reilly, M. F., Lancioni, G. E., Sturmey, P. and LeBlanc, L. (2007). A multisite cross-cultural replication of Upper's (1974) unsuccessful self-treatment of writer's block. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40(4), 773. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2007.773
5. Artino, A. R. (2016). The unsuccessful treatment of a case of "writer's block": A replication in medical education. Medical Education, 50(12), 1262 to 1263. https://doi.org/10.1111/medu.13003