I’m not one for writing prompts in their most traditional sense. Personally, I never found it worthwhile for me to spend any amount of time writing on my character being in some situation beyond the reality I’ve constructed for them. I have never sent my heroine into a coffee shop only to discover she’d lost her wallet on the bus because there isn’t anything I can learn about my character participating in a scenario that exists entirely outside of her world. Making a list of penetrating questions and developing a solid dossier always seemed far more productive.

While writing prompts have never appealed to me, I have a respect for and understanding of the necessity to build agility, impact, and overall skillfulness regarding literary devices. My difficulty has always been finding exercises that develop these strengths without dragging my out-of-the-ordinary characters through everyday mediocrity as part of their practice.

Like all writers, I presume, I tend to experience what I refer to as drips: standalone sentences, two-minute long dialogue exchanges, and simple statements that spill out of my brain and onto paper. Sometimes they are junk, but other times they are brilliant and not to be ignored. After all, just because I’m not writing a larger piece that would include a particular sentence doesn’t mean the sentence itself is not worth being shared.

As writers, we take those random thoughts and squirrel them away, leaving them in piles of other scrapes, a treasure trove of future inspiration or a pile of garbage we only peruse when we are drunk and feeling the pressure of writer’s block and its accompanying self-pity. But what if we could use them as building blocks with which we can develop the aforementioned skillset?

Much the way a visual artist might doodle as a means of playing with ideas and practicing techniques, creating parameters in which to manage these drips gives us the chance to develop our skills. It is a realization that I had while rock climbing, of all things. In climbing, I am learning that by limiting options along the route, I am forced to see my situation with a greater sense of creativity, to take bigger risks, and to balance style with learned technique. Why not manage these writing drips in the same way?

Thus, I have designed for myself a limitation… Use exactly 19 words to make a single statement with as much skill and impact as I can conjure. Why 19? Because 18 didn’t seem like enough, and 20 was overkill. What an odd number, 19. It never gets any play.

Over the next several months, I will be posting to Instagram and Twitter hashtags that use this 19 word format. The first to be rolled out is #19wordstomakeyousweat, and it focuses on the erotic. Writing, much like speaking and reading, about sex is something that many enjoy but few share. (My, what would so many be reading if not for those of us willing to put the words together and let others read them?) My hope is that others will join in and use the hashtag to share their 19 words… both in this introductory exercise and in those still forthcoming. I’ll be posting my own collections here on the blog, and sharing some of them via Instagram and Twitter. If you’d like to play along, please feel free to post in the comments on my blog, or to use the hashtag across social media.

Enjoy. Have fun. Let go. As artists, our best work is the product we get when we combine both our creativity and our courage. Take the chain off and run with it.