Creative Writing Prompts: Replacing The Muses of Ancient Greeks Creative Writing

Creative writing prompts are available in several writers’ websites. These prompts serve as mind exercises employed by writers when they start to run out of their creative juices. Creative writing is enjoyable but it can also reach a point of frustration for some writers. Much as they want to finish a story, poetry or write a composition about a particular subject, nothing worth writing or useful will come to their minds. Hence, the use of creative writing prompts could probably do the trick.      

Creative writing prompts are actually words that lead on to the wealth of ideas running in your mind. There will be instances that your ideas seem too flimsy you couldn’t even fill up more than three paragraphs to write about a particular subject matter. As you get to exercise your mind with creative writing prompts, the wheels of your mind will now start rolling. Once the creative writing prompt achieves its goal of prompting you into thinking about ideas, your next concern would be to edit what you have written because the number of words you used has now exceeded the requirement.  

Other writers would rather tackle their writing tasks in a much more poetic way. If you are familiar with the term writer’s muse, this has the same significance as that of creative writing prompts. Old school writers believe that every writer has his own muse. This stemmed from the Greek’s ancient art of creative writing where the so called Muses gave the Greek writers the inspiration to write creatively about heroism, love, history, tragedy, comedy, sacred songs, dance, and lyric poetry. 

Unless any one of these Muses serves as their inspiration, the aspiring Greek writer will find it hard to come up with desirable poetry that could tell of likely stories. Hence, if you ever encountered poetic lines such as “my muse has deserted me” it means the writer is badly in need of what we now call in modern days as creative writing prompts.          

Actually, it is said that the God Zeus took the form of a shepherd and consorted with Mnemosyne or Muse, the goddess of memory who lived in the hills of Eleuther. Their union produced the muses who were later called upon by Greek writers to provide them inspirations. These are Calliope, Clio, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, Erato, Euterpe, and Urania. All tales thereafter narrated that there was no one who can compete with these muses for knowledge and creativity especially with poetry. 

Greek writers then despaired whenever they tend to lack creative ideas and called upon the muses, leaving them for days in moments of despair and exhaustion (depression?).  

Plato had his opinion about the beliefs about muses and in fact he considered it as madness. In time, the beliefs about muses were slowly eradica

For more useful information, please visit our website: THE KNOWLEDGE BASE, and look for the CULTURE & SOCIETY section.