Hello!

Today’s post is a difficult one to categorise as it’s not a book review or really a book recommendation. I guess you could describe this as an inspirational activity book but that sounds pretentious, so I’m just going to talk about it and hope for the best!

I saw this collection of books in Waterstones – there’s 642 things to write about (the one I purchased), there’s a drawing one, a photography one, there’s one for young people, there’s smaller ones, bigger ones, personal ones; it’s a big range. It’s a little like ‘Wreck My Journal’ in that it gives you creative things to do on each page, however this series (or at least, the book I bought) isn’t exactly the same as WMJ (unlike some YouTube rip off books… I said nothing…). This book focuses entirely on writing – it gives you short prompts for writing creatively, it gives you prompts for writing about experiences that have happened to you or in a more non-fiction style and at most it gives you a page of lines to write it on.

Some pages are split into halves, some into quarters. Some of the prompts are only a few words long whilst others are a few lines longer and are more specific than any prompt book or website I’ve ever looked at before.

Writing has been a bit of a wall for me recently – two years ago I was at a point where I was writing fanfiction short stories every night and finishing 4 or 5 to publish online, a couple of years before that, you couldn’t stop me writing my own original stories if you tried. But it’s all kind of dried up and fizzled away and I miss it! I always say I don’t have time and I (somewhat) stand by that, as having time to fully invest in characters and setting and a story that you’ve created is difficult – I really want to rewrite my book but not only is it difficult to face this big world that I’ve not touched for three years but there’s the emotional connection of who I was when I wrote it and who I was friends with when I wrote it and it’s almost painful.

But this little book of things to write about has got me writing again – fitting with the little rant I just had, I’m obviously not ready to go back into writing my book again yet, but this book is inspiring me to write again in a way I haven’t in the past year or too.

So I recommend this inspirational activity book, even if you’re not a writer – I find it therapeutic to let myself be absorbed by creating and writing, just to get away from everything else for a bit.

I don’t often follow through with books like ‘Wreck My Journal’ and memory books and things but right now, I’m writing about what I’ve been doing every day in my Sprinkle of Glitter diary (the A5-ish page is split into 6 – I get about three sentences tops but it’s a good little memory bank) and I’m writing a lot in my ‘642 Things To Write About’ book and thoroughly enjoying it.

I realise I got way more into this recommendation than I thought I would but on a serious note – I really do recommend at least looking into this book if not getting it. Some of the little sections I’ve written about so far are ‘what can happen in a second’, ‘write a scene where the only spoken dialogue is “uh-huh,” “umm,” “urrrr,” “mm-mm.” and ‘pick a small object to be given one day to your great-grandchild. Write a letter to that child explaining why you have chosen this object’. It’s a massive mixture of stuff.

I might make a couple of blog posts throughout the year writing a few of these exercises (I don’t know what else to call them?) out. It’ll be interesting!

If any of you are interested in reading more about the book or buying it, I recommend Amazon over Waterstones because it’s cheaper! 

‘642 Things To Write About’

Thank you for reading and I hope you’re having a wonderful day!

Sophie xx




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