Escapril, and Why I Love Daily Writing Prompts

It’s getting close to that time of year! Mark up your calendars, count down the days, and prep your prompt lists!
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For those who are unfamiliar, Escapril is a yearly poetry/writing challenge put together by poet and author Savannah Brown (link her site here). The challenge is technically for poetry, but it can be used for any other form of writing or art that you’d like! In practice, it functions similarly to the art challenge Inktober (in which you do an art piece with ink, every day in October). 

Every year at the start of March, a list of prompts is released, for anyone who likes to prepare or plan (you can find the official account and the prompts here: official Escapril account  2022 Escapril prompts ). 

I prefer challenges like this to other writing challenges like NaNoWriMo. As a humanities and social sciences student, I already have a lot of writing that I do for school, with creative writing being my side hobby. Writing to a set word count goal tends to be difficult for me since it personally takes most of the fun out of writing and gives me another deadline to worry about. 

(Of course, this is not to say that NaNoWriMo is bad or difficult for everyone – it all comes down to personal preference). 

I haven’t been able to do much writing outside of classes or assignments in the past year, so I’m looking forward to this year’s challenge. I’ve only completed it once, in 2019 (by “completed” I mean having written something for every day’s prompt). I’m trying to challenge myself to write at least one thing every single day in April, even if it’s only one sentence. 

For the past few years, I’ve had to do daily writing prompts for my classes, and I’ve found it’s incredibly helpful. Even if 95% of what I wrote during that time was pure garbage, the 5% of it that was salvageable ended up being the seedlings of some of my favorite projects. Writing is like exercising any muscle, creative or otherwise. Warm-ups are essential to productivity, even if you just set an alarm for ten minutes and force yourself to write whatever you can. I like to write with prompts. I have a few kinds of writing prompts that I tend to enjoy: 

• One word/phrase that you can interpret in any way (such as the prompts used in yearly Escapril challenges).
• Situational prompts (giving a situation to place two characters in, for example).
• Quotes/sentence starters (one sentence, typically of dialogue, to start the story off with)
• Image prompts (pretty self-explanatory)
• Music prompts (once again, self-explanatory – though it can be made even more interesting by writing about music with no lyrics). 
• Title prompts (one of my personal favorites from a creative writing class last year. You start with a title – either one of a book you haven’t read or one that’s randomly generated – and write something that you feel would fit that title). 

Ultimately, the whole point of using a writing prompt is to get your brain fired up and ready to work. When you clear away any pressure of perfection and dedicate just a few minutes of your time to fun nonsense, it improves your writing craft exponentially. 

​Nate Fahmi

​is a young writer from Ottawa, Canada. When he isn’t in school, he enjoys reading, writing, crochet, and playing with his two cats. Their favorite genres are horror and fantasy, and they enjoy all things strange. You can find him on Instagram at @nate_fahmi

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