Make a list of issues and experiences, important and trivial, in your life right now. What frustrated you in the past month? What made you laugh or cry? What made you lose your temper? What was the worst thing that happened? The best? The most disturbing and weird? Write: Choose one thing from your list and write about it. Write whatever comes to mind. Write what you would really like to say to the other people involved. Write what happened from your point of view. Prompt inspired from, “On Writing Personal Essays,” by Barbra Abercrombie, The Writer magazine, January 2003 Barbara Abercrombie teaches creative writing in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, and a master class in memoir and personal essays via Zoom and Canvas. “We write the book we need to read and The Language of Loss is the book I needed when my husband died six years ago. It’s an…
Tag: Writing freely. Just write. Writing Prompts. The Write Spot Blog.
Color Play
By Cheryl Moore I had been looking forward to the beginning of 2021; 2020 had been such a sad year, then January 6th happened. Chaos and uncertainty filled me. Since the trouble at the nation’s capital, I’ve made an abrupt change in my paintings. Instead of the landscapes and fanciful trees from a nearby park, my usual work, I’ve been painting abstracts to capture the oddity life has taken. I start by drawing straight lines across a canvas then I add curves. I step back and study these charcoal marks and try to find some pattern, some way of organizing the geometric spaces I have created. It may take a day of looking. My color palette is usually blue, blue-violet, and purple with accents of peachy orange and pink. The contrast of light and dark pattern is important. I am not interested in making great art; I don’t expect to…
An Appropriate House
By Kristin Cikowski I suppose that if you are going to have a house, it should be a small enough house so that you can hear everyone at the same time. This is why I love my house My bedroom sits just across the hall from the kitchen, which, at night, is a passageway for the light that comes from the lamp that sits on the table next to my dad’s arm chair in the family room. The family room is where the TV is located, and is not to be confused with the living room, which does not have a TV, and instead, has the teapot with the crane that is flying over the blue water and creamer that goes with it. They sit next to the wooden fisherman with his delicate fishing pole and line, and the sofas that we cannot jump on even though they have an…
Sycamore Review
Sycamore Review is Purdue University’s internationally acclaimed literary journal, affiliated with Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts and the Department of English. Sycamore Review is looking for original poetry, fiction, non-fiction and art. POETRY manuscripts should be typed single-spaced, one poem to a page, up to five poems. FICTION & NONFICTION should be typed double-spaced, with numbered pages and the author’s name and title of the work easily visible on each page. There is not have a specific word count limit, suggest less than 6,000 words. NONFICTION should be literary memoir or creative personal essay, interested in originality, brevity, significance, strong dialogue, and vivid detail. There is no maximum page count, the longer the piece is, the more compelling each page must be. ART Sycamore Review is currently seeking artists for both the magazine’s cover and features artwork inside the issue. Interested artists should follow the instructions under the Art category on Submittable. You may attach 10-15 images or simply…
Healing. Prompt #565
Write about a time you experienced a healing—physically, spiritually, or emotionally. Or, if you are in the process of pursuing healing . . . write about what you are doing. Or, what healing methods do you want to pursue? Let me count the ways . . . Aromatherapy, autogenic relaxation, art, biofeedback, deep breathing, exercise, Feldenkrais, guided imagery, hydrotherapy massage, meditation, music, prayer, progressive muscle relaxation, qi gong, tai chi, tapping, visualization, yoga. There are a number of resources listed in The Write Spot: Writing as a Path to Healing, especially ideas about how to write about difficult events without adding trauma. Available at Amazon, print ($15) and ebook ($3.49).
A place you have visited. Prompt #564
Sit back. Get comfortable and relaxed in your chair. Think about a place you have visited. It doesn’t matter where. It could be the downtown area in your city. It could be the city where you were born. Could be a vacation. Take a few minutes to scroll through your mind and choose a place you have visited. Let your mind drift back to your visit or time you spent at this location. If you are working on fiction, how would one of your characters respond to the prompts below. Prompt #1: What is the first picture, or scene, that appears? Prompt #2: I can still hear . . . Prompt #3: I can smell . . . Prompt #4: This place is important to me because . . . Prompt #5: I wish I could . . .
Increscent Moon
Increscent Moon By Su Shafer Starless, Starless Night I gaze up, surprised to see The moon looking down Not at me, she is watching Something far over the horizon, Her face radiant with golden pleasure. Maybe she is looking at tomorrow, The baby day, still pink and new, Gently urging it forward as it crawls along dragging its giant blanket of light behind it. Her smile is serene and comforts me, Standing alone in the night, The quiet space between today and tomorrow. I feel oddly hopeful as I go back inside. If the moon is beaming, Tomorrow must be a better day. Su Shafer is a creative writer and fledgling poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest, where flannel shirts are acceptable as formal wear and strong coffee is a way of life. There, in a small Baba Yaga house perched near the entrance to The Hidden Forest, odd characters are…
Shoes . . . Prompt #363
Write about shoes. Your shoes, a baby’s shoes, or a grandmother’s slippers. A pair of shoes hanging by the laces on a high wire. A favorite pair of hiking boots. Ballet shoes. Sandals worn on vacation. Shoes.
Perseverance . . . Prompt #562
Today’s prompt is inspired from the Perseverance Rover landing on Mars. What do you think about the Mars landing? Is this as impactful as man’s first walk on the moon? OR: Where were you on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the moon? OR: Write about perseverance. About the parachute that helped land Perseverance: The parachute that helped NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars unfurled to reveal a seemingly random pattern of colors in video clips of the rover’s landing. NASA officials said it contained a hidden message written in binary computer code. The red and white pattern spelled out “Dare Mighty Things” in concentric rings. The saying is the Perseverance team’s motto, and it is also emblazoned on the walls of Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion. “The Verge”
If you knew . . . Prompt #561
If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently?