Prompts

What Got Taken Away From You?   Prompt #335

The following is from I Could Do Anything If I only knew what it was, by Barbara Sher. Once someone I cared for deeply did something very unethical, so I tried to totally revise my feelings about him. “He’s not a good person,” I said. “I don’t know how to love him anymore.” And a very wise woman told me, “Your love belongs to you. You mustn’t let anyone touch it, not even him. You can keep away from him, but don’t try to destroy your love. That love is yours. Keep it.” It won’t really break your heart to remember something that got snatched away from you, even though it may feel that way. Prompt:  What got taken away from you? New York Times Best Seller author Barbara Sher believes we each have a genius inside us, our Original Vision, and we’ve had it since birth. Our culture tends…

Prompts

Revive Your Past . . . Prompt #334

Revive Your Past Something inside you is too loyal to permit you to turn your back on everything you loved and simply walk away. No matter how many times people tell you to let the past go, it’s never possible. You’ll never move wholeheartedly into the future unless you take your beloved past with you.  And that’s exactly as it should be. There’s no reason to turn your back on a happy past. Sometimes we try to turn away from the past because we feel it somehow betrayed us. It’s as though we loved our past, but our past didn’t love us. So we go on strike and pretend we don’t care, as if to punish fate for being unkind. Fate never cares, of course, so we only hurt ourselves. Prompt:  What do you . . . or what does your character pretend to not care about? Today’s prompt is…

Prompts

Praise Your Past . . . Prompt #333

You can use these prompts to write about something that happened to you or something that happened to someone you know. You can also use these prompts to develop your fictional characters. Prompt: Praise your past. Write a few sentences about the best time in your life. What did you love about that time?  What did your work, or life, at that time, look like, smell like, taste like? Could be a big thing or small things. Letting yourself describe every lovely detail will give you back something you lost, a precious time you put out of your mind. When you remember that time by praising it, you’ll have rescued it. You’ll have pulled it out of the corner where you threw it a long time ago. Prompt: What did you, or the character you have created, throw into the corner? Inspired from I Could Do Anything If I Only…

Places to submit

Conjunctions Magazine-unique literary journal

“The sheer size of Conjunctions—book length at nearly 400 pages per issue—is unique in the literary journal landscape. The scope allows editors to take chances on different voices, perspectives, styles and genres that relate to the central theme, and to publish more longform work— such as novellas—that might quite literally not fit in other journals.” —Writer’s Digest, October 2016 About Conjunctions “Conjunctions is an award-wining journal of provocative, innovative fiction, poetry and narrative nonfiction; a living notebook where contemporary masters and astonishing new voices publish their risk-taking, immaculately crafted work.” — Micaela, Morrissette, managing editor   Submitting to Conjunctions All submissions from writers in the US should be directed by mail to the editorial office: Bradford Morrow, Editor Conjunctions 21 East 10th St., #3E New York, NY 10003 In order to receive a response, you must enclose a self-addressed envelope stamped with sufficient postage for our reply and for return…

Guest Bloggers

Trust your intuition for creative writing.

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray inspires our writing to flow from a dream-like state of consciousness and to trust our intuition. Suzanne writes:  How Do We Allow Creativity to Flow? When we get lost in a good book it’s because the writer got lost in letting the story come through as they wrote. I remember the first time when I got on a roll with my writing, where I knew I was writing something good. I stopped and looked around the room to see where it was coming from because I knew it wasn’t coming from my everyday self. Since then I have come to understand writing comes from a dream-like state of consciousness of allowing what wants to be written to unfold. It doesn’t involve thinking or trying to figure it out but rather feeling and sensing what wants to be born and following that golden thread. All creativity comes…