Category: Prompts

  • Write Your Story. Prompt #436

    An article in the Mail Tribune, Medford, Oregon, September 14, 2006 described how Betty Henshaw wrote about her childhood in the Oklahoma hills and her family’s move to California. 

    Author Sandra Scofield read a collection of Betty’s work and said her history needed to be in the hands of a university press. Texas Tech University Press published her story and Betty did a book tour in 2006.

    Here’s an excerpt from that newspaper article.

    “The family hired an auctioneer and sold their cows, horses, pigs, chickens, farm tools, the potatoes in the barn and the home-canned fruits and vegetables. Mama kept her sewing machine.

    The next morning I helped herd the younger children into the truck before first light.

    Daddy and Robert had placed a feather mattress on the pickup bed. The babies crawled to the back, grabbed a pillow each, and rolled up in quilts.

    Sadness washed over me when we drove past the high school that morning.

    There’s an old tradition that Okies were supposed to sing and holler when they came over the 3,793 foot Tehachapi Pass near the south end of the Sierra Nevada.

    Mama said we were too tired to holler.

    It was a hardscrabble life. Laundry was done with a washboard after heating water in a kettle, and hung on an electric fence to dry. Sunday dinners might be beans and cornbread and fried green tomatoes. My sisters and I wore dresses Mama made of flour sacks on her Grandma Bristol’s old Singer sewing machine.

    Mama and my grandmother picked cotton to buy that machine.

    Today the machine sits in a place of honor in my living room, a piece of the past contrasting with the computer on the desk at the other end of the room.

    “It was hard,” Betty says, of leaving Oklahoma, “I left behind a part of myself.”

    Prompt: Write about your history, either fact or what you imagine could have happened. Or write about a something you inherited.

    Marlene C

  • Write what is hard to admit. Prompt #435

    “You don’t grow up missing what you never had, but throughout life there is hovering over you an inescapable longing for something you never had.” — Susan Sontag, excerpted from The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper.

    Anderson Cooper continues:

    “As a child, you generally aren’t aware that your family is different from any other. You have no frame of reference.”  

    The following is excerpted from What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg.

    “I am thinking of how right he was when he said that people want to be deceived. I have learned the truth of that notion over and over; but I never admitted to its obvious presence in my own life. After all, I claimed I did not need my mother. I said I had replaced her.”

    Prompt: Write about something you have been unwilling to admit or something you have been deceiving yourself about.

    Note: No one has to see your writing unless you share it. You can write and destroy your writing if it feels too personal to leave on paper, or delete on computer.

    Write Spot blog posts to help when writing on a difficult topic:

    How to Write Without Adding Trauma

    Why Write Your Story 

     

    Marlene C

    ,

  • Flashbacks . . . Prompt #433

    A flashback is a scene set in a time earlier than the main story.

    Sometimes when you are telling a story, or writing a story, you need to backtrack and tell what happened previously.

    A flashback is a shift in a narrative to an earlier event that interrupts the normal chronological development of a story.

    From Make a Scene by Jordan Rosenfeld: “With flashback, you want to focus on action, information, and character interactions.”

    Flashback can also be thought of as backstory.  

    Use flashbacks to explain, enlighten, and inform.

    An example is What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg. The story takes place during a woman’s travels to meet her sister and mother. We learn what happened thirty-five years prior through flashbacks while the woman travels in space.

    Other examples of using flashback to tell a story:

    To Kill a Mockingbird: The whole story is a flashback told by Scout a few years after the scenes take place. The first sentence of the book indicates the timeframe. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”

    Saving Private Ryan: The movie starts out with an elderly man walking in a cemetery in Normandy. He then has a flashback of WWII.

    Titanic is told from an elderly lady’s point of view. We move from present time of her telling the story and the resurrection of the ship to what happened years previously.

    Think for a moment about a movie or story you have read where flashbacks are used to tell a story.

    How to incorporate flashbacks into your writing: Use past tense. “She revealed . . .”     “We had just gone to . . .”

    Prompt: What is the most fearless thing you have done?  But . . . here’s the twist. . . start your story in the present time period. Then, go back in time to tell what happened.

    For example: Today, I’m afraid of spiders because of the time . . . 

    OR:

    I know I can accomplish such and such because when I was . . .  

    Go for it! Just write!

    Marlene C

  • Ouch. Prompt #434

    Write about someone in your life who is consistently critical of you or what you do, and this could be yourself.

    I recently read a Facebook post by Prince Ea about the four letter word that ends all arguments: Ouch.

    Suggestion: As you write on this prompt, think of what words and actions hurt and add “ouch” to your writing. Frame your situation as experiences that had an “ouch” factor.

    Next, write what you wish you had said, or could have said, to lessen the hurt.

    Next, write a love letter to yourself. List your strengths, your qualities, your capabilities that make you uniquely you. Be generous with yourself. You deserve it.

    Marlene C

  • Imaginary Gift . . . Prompt #432

    Give yourself an imaginary gift.

    Fantasize for a moment.

    If money were no object. And time and place were non-issues. . .

    What gift would you give yourself?

    Marlene C

  • Five minute writing exercises . . . Prompt #431

    Susan Bono writes.
    Photo by Laurie MacMillan, Sunfield Design

    ~ Write for 5 minutes about something difficult, challenging, or painful.

    It’s only five minutes. Go ahead. Do it now. We’ll wait.

    Humming in the background while writing gets done.

    Quiet while writing gets done.

    Are you still reading?  Write!  Just write. For five minutes.

    After five minutes . . .

    ~ Write for 5 minutes about something comforting, happy, or joyous.

    Yes, you. Now. Just write. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

    Waiting. Waiting. Patiently waiting. I’ll write, too.

    After five minutes . . .

    ~ Write for 5 minutes about images of nature, the natural world.

    Hmm . . . what will you choose from nature to write about?

    Feathers, rocks, trees, birds, rocks, dirt, peach blossoms, river, waterfall, penguins, geese.

    Write whatever comes up for you about nature.

    Shhh. . . Writers are working here. Doing what we do.

    Writing. Just writing. Keep on writing. For five minutes.

    Next . . .

    ~ Spend 15 minutes to write a poem, using words and images from each of the previous writing.

    Can use repetition.

    Doesn’t have to make sense.

    Have fun with this.

    Play with words.

    Marlene C

    ,

  • An object that “speaks” to you. Prompt #430

    Picture the house or apartment you grew up in. If there was more than one house or apartment, choose one to focus on for this writing.

    Imagine standing outside, looking at the door you usually entered. Stand outside for a moment.

    Walk in and wander until you see a piece of furniture that speaks to you.

    Describe the object.

    Write about the memories and feelings it brings up for you.

    Write until you feel done with this object.

    Another time write about another object from your childhood or adolescence.

    Marlene C

    ,

  • Secret Anniversary. . . Prompt #429

    From Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ban Breathnach

    From the June 15 page:

    “The Secret Anniversaries of the Heart”

    The holiest of all holidays are those

    Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,

    The secret anniversaries of the heart  . .

     —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

    This is the traditional month for orange blossoms, lace, and rice, but wedding anniversaries aren’t on my mind. Today I am thinking of singular rites of passage, the secret anniversaries of the heart. These are the anniversaries we never talk about, kept in silence and apart. You might remember a first kiss, while I can’t forget the last time I held my father’s hand.

    I was speaking to a good friend this morning on the telephone. She was enjoying the preparation of a special dinner for a marvelous new man in her life. Last year her marriage of twenty years ended and she says she’s grateful her husband told her he was leaving in late summer, when everything was withering on the vine. She says that she never would have gotten over it if he had left during the holidays. I think I know what she means, but I pray I never find out for sure. As she reminds me, it’s the “feel” of the year that can trigger a secret anniversary of the heart. Another friend recalls the ritual of her mother braiding her hair whenever she walks out into her backyard in the spring and the first lilacs are in bloom. There was always a bouquet of lilacs on her mother’s dressing table.

    Secret anniversaries of the heart are not restricted by the passage of the years.  . . . I need to share what I’ve held in my hart for so many decades but have never expressed. It took a secret anniversary of the heart to remind me that there is always time enough to remember. But there is never time enough to commemorate what we cherish, unless we pause to observe, when they occur, the holiest of all holidays.

    Prompt: Write about a secret anniversary. 

    You can write about your personal experience, someone else’s

     experience, or respond as your fictional character would respond.

    Marlene C

  • Shhhh . . . Prompt #428

    Today’s writing prompt:

    Opening line from Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts:

    “You must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I’m about to tell you.”

    Or: You must not tell anyone . . .

    Or: My mother said . . .

    Marlene C

    , , ,

  • When I was a teenager . . . Prompt # 427

    Today’s writing prompt:  When I was a teenager, I especially loved to . . .

    Or: When I was a teenager, I hated to . . .

    Or, simply: When I was a teenager. . .

    Just start writing and see where it takes you.

    Marlene C