To prompt or not to prompt? Is a piece of writing any less yours because it came from a prompt? Should a true artist even need to be prompted? Save these questions for the café or bar, after you have done your day’s writing—with or without prompts. Auden said, “It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.” Some prompts narrow your field of vision (inward or outward) so you can point your nose at something you might not otherwise have noticed, remembered, or invented. Other prompts may be warm-ups for the real (or surreal) writing–which may (or may not) evolve from a prompt. No writer ever stops learning to write, and the best way to learn to write is by writing (and reading): ergo, if a prompt gets you writing, then you are learning. Here are 14 “lessons.” Ignore or modify any instructions that interfere with your creative flow.
1) I’m Trying, I'm Trying
In a small group discussion on education, I asked a writer I admire a question about something that troubled me. He paused, frowning, and responded deliberately, “I don’t know, but I’m trying to write about it.” That was a writer talking, and I was more impressed than if he had already written about it and poured out a bottled answer. (I love the sound of “I’m trying to write about it.” It can be a convenient answer to many questions, from “How are you?” to “What’s Finnegan’s Wake all about?”)
Make an ongoing list poem (perhaps in a notebook) with each line starting “I’m trying to write about . . .” (“I’m trying to write about Paris in the snow” / “I’m trying to write about my grandmother's closet” / I'm trying to write about that night in Cleveland when I first got the inkling that our relationship was doomed.") Refer to this list from time to time until you have tried to write about everything on it.
Start a new list.
2) Silent Film
Write a prose narrative for a short film (three minutes or less) with no dialogue. Write it so that the camera operator could film directly from your piece; everything should be visual and external. There are no limits on budget. The film can be realistic or surrealistic. It can have a narrative or associative structure. Use the present tense.
3) Righteous Plagiarism
In his Paris Diary, Ned Rorem makes an interesting point about plagiarism: “It is a conscious plagiarism that demonstrates invention: we are so taken with what someone else did that we set out to do likewise. Yet prospects of shameful exposure are such that we disguise to a point of opposition; then the song becomes ours. No one suspects. It’s unconscious stealing that’s dangerous.”
Select a piece of writing you admire, and consciously plagiarize it. The catch is that you have to disguise it and make it yours.
4) Literary Stalking
While on a bus or subway, in a café or on the street, select a person you don’t know who interests you in some way. “Sketch” a portrait of that person in words: clothes, expression, gait, a snippet of overheard conversation, etc. Be discreet. Later, with your imagination, “follow” the person somewhere and change his or her life, in a large or tiny but meaningful way.
5) Personal Effects
The term personal effects can refer to items a traveler brings “for use and comfort” or to possessions distributed to beneficiaries. Herbert Read writes, “Nothing is so expressive of a man as the fetishes he gathers round him—his pipe, his pens, his pocket knife—even the pattern of his suit.” Tim O’Brien’s powerful short story “The Things They Carried” contains lists of objects—required and elective—carried by American soldiers in Vietnam, including: P-38 can openers, heat tabs, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, sewing kits, a diary, an illustrated New Testament, comic books, dental floss.
Create two or three characters and make annotated lists of their personal effects (what the items look like, where they came from, etc.). Then, write a story with these characters, using as many of the items as possible.
6) Punctuation
Select a paragraph or two by someone who writes complex sentences (Henry James, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner). Read the excerpt a few times, focusing on the punctuation. Feel the rhythmic flow without paying much attention to the content, as if you were concentrating on the percussion channel of a jazz recording. Appreciate the commas and semicolons, just as you would drums and bass.
Copy just the punctuation. Insert your own words (any number you wish) between the marks.
Next, “write” a piece consisting exclusively of punctuation marks, lots of them, all kinds. Then add words.
7) Plucking Words
A simple loosening-up exercise. Open any book you have around. Pick an interesting word from the left page and one from the right page. Open another book and do the same. Write three or four paragraphs, each one containing all four words. (Here are four words I just plucked: polite, complaint, tower, mystery.)
8) Expand / Contract
Write a piece of any nature, approximately fifty words.
Expand it to about 100 words, adding text anywhere. You can flesh out existing sentences, start the piece earlier, end it later, and/or follow any leads in between.
Contract it back to fifty (by whatever means you wish).
Expand to 100.
Make it 75.
The next move is up to you.
9) The News
1) In Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again,the narrator quotes a short newspaper article: “An unidentified man fell or jumped yesterday at noon from the twelfth story of the Admiral Francis Drake Hotel…” For the next fifteen pages, Wolfe invents the story behind this tragic tidbit, concluding with: “That was the news. Now you’ve had the story.”
Scour some newspapers for similarly intriguing but incomplete news, and make up the story. (Here’s one from the archives: “Michigan’s homemaker of the year was bound over for trial in Shiawassee County Circuit Court on a murder charge . . . [She] is charged with shooting to death her husband . . . as he lay in bed in their Owosso home on November 15.”)
2) Reading The New York Times, I was taken by a feature about tough times in a small town. A 50-year-old man was back living with his mother and hoping to get a job at the new Walmart. “The wheel goes round. Sonny Boy came home,” he said, drinking coffee at the kitchen table.
That quote kept running through my mind, and I asked my current workshop to consider writing a piece incorporating “Sonny boy came home.” For the remainder of the term, the phrase occasionally turned up in stories we were critiquing, always coming as a surprise, each story different from the other.
Extract a compelling quote or phrase from a newspaper or magazine article and write a piece around it—in a totally different context.
10) Chord Changes
Think of words as having the same relationship to an image as musical notes have to a chord. Adding or changing one note in a chord can affect the mood of the sound (major to major seventh; minor to major).
Create a series of unrelated phrases, then alter the mood of each by changing, adding, or subtracting one or more words. For example: “a child prancing with a balloon” could become “a child with a pin prancing with a balloon” or “a child weeping with a balloon.”
11) Review
Alastair Reid writes of Borges: “He told me once that as a young man he had contemplated writing a long dynastic novel encompassing the history of Argentina since independence, until he realized that he could write, in the span of a few pages, a descriptive review of just such a work by an invented author, adding his reflections on the genre.” Borges did go on to invent authors, among them Mir Bahadur Ali (and review his equally nonexistent book The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim).
Invent an author (including a biographical note for the book jacket), and make up a critic (also with a biographical note). Write the critic’s review of the author’s book.
Then, if you wish, write an exchange of cranky letters between the author and the critic. See if a narrative emerges (maybe they were once in a workshop together).
12) Three Stories
Write a flash story comprising three sentences of any length (a beginning, a middle, and an end). Then write two additional three-sentence stories. The first sentence of story #2 should be an associative leap from the last sentence of #1, and the first sentence of story #3 should be an associative leap from the last sentence of story #2. (This is based on renga, a Japanese form of poetry.)
13) Layering
Compose by layering words like paint. First tell the bare bones of a story, as sparsely as possible. In each succeeding draft, add a layer (dialogue, setting, images, omniscient narrator’s interjections, exposition, etc.). Put each layer in a different typeface. See what happens if you separate the layers and present the story with the layers following one another, rather than being integrated into the narrative.
14) End of Season Piece
At the end of the day, several generations ago, some fountain pen manufacturers combined the leftover celluloid or plastic and swirled it together to create “end-of-day” pens. (This was also done by makers of other types of plastic and glass products.)
At the end of each season, gather your leftovers and fragments from poems, stories, shopping lists, letters, etc. and blend them into an end-of-season piece. Continuity (of any sort) is optional.
To prepare for this exercise, you must not throw anything out. Every time you cut from a piece or abandon a piece altogether, store the material in your end-of-season folder.
(Earlier versions of these prompts appeared in The Writing Workshop Note Book, published by Soft Skull/Counterpoint.)