The creative project I returned to — and what AI had to do with it 🐾

Four prompts that got me unstuck, helped me learn something new, gave me useful feedback, and helped me see what I was actually trying to make. All four are here.

After the intensity of last week — health, caregiving, medical preparation — I wanted this week to feel lighter. More joyful. Like something you choose to do rather than something you have to.

So this week is about creative life. Hobbies, projects, making things. The part of your life that exists purely for the pleasure of it.

And I’m starting with a confession: I had a creative project sitting in the corner of my office for four months. Something I’d started with genuine excitement and then stalled on. And I finally returned to it — and AI had something to do with that return.

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What stopped me

The project is a piece of writing — a personal essay about something that happened in my family years ago. I’d gotten about a third of the way through, and then I hit a structural problem I didn’t know how to solve. Not a writer’s block in the emotional sense — more of an architectural problem. I couldn’t figure out how to organize the middle of the story. So I stopped. And four months went by.

What I did

I used the Getting Unstuck prompt from Sunday’s video. I described the essay, what I’d written so far, and specifically the architectural problem I was stuck on. And I asked AI for three or four different directions I could take the structure — ranging from safe to unexpected. Not to tell me which one to choose. Just to expand my menu.

One of the suggestions was something I’d never considered and immediately recognized as exactly right. I went back to the essay that same afternoon. The structural problem is solved. The essay isn’t finished yet, but it’s moving again. And it still feels entirely mine.

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Here’s what I want to know from you: what creative project do you have sitting in a corner? A half-finished quilt, an unstrung guitar, a story that stalled, a garden journal you meant to keep, a recipe you invented and never wrote down. Hit reply and tell me about it. The most interesting creative corners will show up in Wednesday’s post. 🐾

🎬 Watch Sunday’s video: All four creative prompts on screen — getting unstuck, learning something new, getting useful feedback, and the Creative Visioning conversation.

👉 Sunday video link

— Debbie
AI Puppy Playbook