This week’s edition of Blogging Insights, a series of blogging Q&A’s that Dr. Tanya, over at Salted Caramel, started about a year ago, is all about prompts. She asks us:

What is the value of running writing prompts to your writing in general, and your blog in particular?

I pretty much answered this question a couple of months ago in an earlier Blogging Insights edition. But I suppose it bears repeating.

When I first started this blog in May 2017, I never had any intention of hosting any writing prompts. But one of the things I really liked doing on my blog was honing my flash fiction writing chops by posting short tales in response to the WordPress Daily Post one-word prompts.

But then the folks at WordPress decided to stop posting the daily prompt at the end of May 2018 and I knew I was going to miss those daily writing challenges. I thought that other bloggers might also miss them, so I decided to start my own daily Fandango’s One-Word Challenge, aka “FOWC with Fandango.”

FOWC with Fandango was very well received. And over time, I added other regular writing prompts:

• Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge — a weekly prompt on Mondays where I post a photo and challenge bloggers to create their own posts based upon the photo I selected.
• Fandango’s Provocative Question — a weekly prompt on Wednesdays where I pose what I hope is a provocative question that will get bloggers to think, to be creative, and to response.
• Fandango’s Friday Flashback — a weekly prompt on Fridays where I reach back into my archives and repost something I posted on the same date in a previous year and encourage other bloggers to do the same in order to expose their newer readers to some of their earlier posts that those newer readers might never have seen, or to remind their longer term readers of posts that they might not remember.
• Fandango’s Who Won the Week — a weekly prompt on Sundays where I encourage bloggers to look back at the week that just ended and to select who (or what) they think “won” that week and to write their own posts about who/what they chose and why.

What is the value of hosting these prompts? Well, almost overnight after starting FOWC with Fandango, I doubled the traffic to my blog and got a bunch of new followers. And it’s heartening to have people respond to my prompts on their own blogs. I really enjoy the creative, imaginative, ingenious, witty, and even poetic posts bloggers have published in response to my prompts.

So for my blog and for me personally, hosting writing prompts has been a very positive, very rewarding endeavor. And I hope others have enjoyed participating in these prompts.