Writing Prompt Self-Challenge

I said the other day that I hate writing from prompts and that I never produce quality work from it or even snippets of work that I could salvage and use later. The closest I came at Goddard was in Reiko Rizzuto's wonderful workshops on troubleshooting one's writing, in which she urged us to channel our characters, freewrite about their wants and needs, and to manipulate scenes to unblock ourselves.

The best writing I do is spontaneous or, more likely, germinates in my subconscious until I decide to put it on the page, and then it goes through a lot of editing.

So, I came up with an idea to challenge myself. I took an old prompt piece that I didn't hate but thought was meh, and I'm going to revise it into a publishable flash story. Success=published, and not in some vanity magazine either.

Since I'm putting this out there, let's call failure "the inability to become published within eight months." Why eight? First because it might need a couple rounds of revision, even if it is a flash story. Second because lit mags take a long time to respond, so even targeting faster markets, I'm going to have to be aggressive about sending it out.

If I can get it into a form I like, I'll pick another prompt piece; I have a bunch, but this one, a flash fiction from 1920s Rome, seems a likely candidate.

If you want to do the same, I've love to hear about it. This is 'competing against yourself' at its finest, so we all win if we're writing, revising, and submitting. ​Happy writing!