My App: Writing Prompts

I’ve been a little bit obsessed with writing prompts the last few years. There’s a popular subreddit dedicated entirely to writing prompts, and I think it’s a fun place to hangout. I’m consistently impressed by how clever and imaginative the people who post prompts are. I’m also just generally impressed with anything related to creative writing. It’s a skill I want to grow, but I’m terrified of it at the same time, so it’s a challenge to sit in that space long enough for me to actually improve.

Scared or not, I think everybody has at least one book in them waiting to be written. Maybe hanging out on the outskirts of a writing prompts community is something that will help me unearth my own book someday.

Last year I made a little Twitter bot that posts new writing prompts every hour. It reads from a CSV file that I loaded with prompts, picks a random one, makes sure it hasn’t posted it already, and then shares it. It was a fun little project. All the prompts came from Reddit, and I built the CSV file using Reddit’s API.

I want my first iOS app to extend my Twitter bot. It’ll be a simple client for browsing the r/WritingPrompts subreddit.

Here are some crappy sketches:

The app will have two primary tabs:

New prompts. Whatever’s been shared on Reddit recently. You’ll be able to sort by hot, top, and new, which are common Reddit sort modes.
Favorite prompts. Anything you favorite in the new prompts tab will show up in a list here so you can easily reference it later.

I like this idea for a lot of reasons. It’s simple. The scope is contained. There’s only a single data source I have to interact with. The data is free to access. The Reddit community is huge, so there will be tons of content generated on a daily basis that my app can consume and share to keep things interesting. All functionality can easily exist on the client (your phone), so I won’t have to write, maintain, or pay for any server-side stuff.

It’s not a totally original idea. There are other writing prompts apps out there, and there are tons of Reddit clients that exist already, but this idea still excites me. It’s something I would use myself, and it’s something I think I’ll be able to carry all the way to the finish line. For me, right now, finishing something is what matters.

Let’s make it happen!