Writing Prompts

A random compendium of prompts/exercises to jump-start writing (in no logical sequence):

• Pick on that co-worker who drives you absolutely crazy (remember, nobody has to see your work or know what a devious mind you possess).  If your nature is to rant, try to be funny instead; if your nature is to turn everything into a joke, get serious and try and dig within this person and find out what is at the root of his/her behavior.

• Write about a place with which you had only a temorary relationship.  Perhaps this is the town you went to college in, that job you took for a year while you were trying to get your life right, the summer you lived with your strange aunt....  Filter the larger place though one element of it that best conveys your emotional experience there.  Maybe it's the deli you had lunch in everyday for seven months, the courner store, the stage where you won and then lost your first part, the dreary office building you arrived at faithfully each morning, the field you visited to find fresh air....  Concentrate on using the details of the specific place to capture both its essence and your emotion without commenting on that emotion.

• Read a bad book.  Struggling to start your writing day?  Feeling you can only produce words that need to be scraped out of the tread of your shoe?  Start a writing day by reading a book you know is terribly written.  But then, rather than feeling smug, really analyze what is so badly done.  Get specific.  How has the writing failed?  Why?  Then try not to make the same mistakes as you return to writing.

• Finish the sentence:  "It was the worst possible time to tell someone that.."

• (Best for fiction) Go to a local hangout where you can work unnoticed, ideally a coffee shop or diner where the real people hang out.  Even more ideal is a place with high booth backs and waitresses in uniform.  Eavesdrop.  Specifically, eavesdrop on a nearby conversation where, unnoticed, you can first concentrate on writing down verbatim what your victims are saying.  Concentrate on simply getting the voices accurate.  This forces you to see how voice becomes translated on the page.  When your subject leaves (or you've had enough), you supply the dialogue but stay in character and remain authentic both in voice and in character consistency.

• (For fiction) Focus on a real memory, the more distant, the better.  Get specific.  Think of a dramatic or traumatic events that helped shape the person you've become.  Now recall the other people present during the event.  Describe the scene from one of those other people's point of view rather than your own.

• Take a character you are working with and set his/her house/abode/apartment/spaceship/etc. on fire.  Your character has to get out to save his/her life.  He/she has time to grab one object.  What does he/she take?  Why?  What does it reveal about him/her?

• Pick a stranger, ideally one you have some irregular contact with--the guy who is often in the same subway car, the woman at the flower stand you pass every lunch hour, the girl in the back row of your writing class--and try on that other person's skin.  Write in 1st person from the stranger's point of view.  Concentrate just on finding the voice.  Get the voice right and then you will begin to get the thought process right, you will see a past, you will find a individuality of vision.  The writer must be able to climb inside other people or the work will be lost.  Conduct this exercise regularly with different people.  You will find stories, and you will see the world anew.

• Keep a journal or notebook beside your bed at night.  If you wake up from a dream or wake in the morning remembering one, write down as many details as you possibly can WHILE still in bed.  A lot of what you get will be whatinthehellisthatcallmytherapistIthinksomethingisseriouslywrongwithme, there may very well be a seed idea or some core images that can become something with sustained work.  If you do try to write from such materials later, I advise not taking any of your notes or memories too literally.

• Choose one detail from a draft you are currently working on, identify one "revealing specific" and answer all the questions about it that apply.  For example, on page one of a new manuscript, I describe a character as wearing a dress that is torn and muddy.  It is raining in the scene and she is walking outside, so the mud doesn't need exploration.  But why she is walking certainly does.  As does how her desk was torn.  Who tore it?  Why?  When did that happen?  Does the damage to the dress bear relevance for why she is now out walking?  What type of dress is it?  Why did she choose it over all the other items in her wardrobe?  Ask the questions and then pursue their answers in writing.

• Embrace synchronicity...from your writing morning, copy one random line from a poetry collection nearest your writing space; jot down a 3 -5 word phrase the morning news, write down a phrase that got under your skin uttered by someone to you or near you from within the last 24 hours.  Tomorrow, look at these three random items, find their connection (however slight) and start a new writing day.

• Interview your protagonist.  Create an entire scene in which an interview scenario is realistic: a police investigator, an on-air interview, a psychoanalyst....  Take the interview to heart.  Make your character answer the questions and don't play softball. Dig deep.  Make the character reveal what he or she does not want to reveal.

• Place two characters in kitchen, office, or racquetball court.  One character has the clearly superior position over the other (boss, parent, coach, etc.), but the inferior mind.  The "inferior" not only knows more about their topic of conversation but is a person who always handles things with diplomacy and ethics.  This person is, however, being pushed to the limits by the other.  Write their dialogue.

• Think of an absurd song from your childhood.  Maybe it's a children's song, something involving ducks or sheep.  Maybe it's a musical, like the one your mother made you watch once a month when she was feeling blue.  Maybe you were an early bloomer and you remember your first make-out song instead...Got it?  Write down two or three lines and close your eyes.  Where does memory take you?  Picture the moment..see the room or the interior of the car, the tent, the movie theater...Are you there?  Okay.  Write whatever comes to mind.

• Write an example that defines "irony."  Here's mine from this week:  I know a guy in my tiny, largely crime-less western Wyoming town who, as a matter of habit, leaves his wallet and his keys in his car...but who has security cameras mounted on his house (which may or may not be functional).

• Listening for rhythm:  Narrate a simple action sequence, either fictional or something you witnessed or participated in, with your primary focus on learning to allow the language, syntax, and rhythm to match the action described.  For example: a featherweight boxing match would be all speed and staccato, up-on-the-toes flashes, whereas the first dance for a married couple might be dreamy and languid where we hear the shuffle of the bride's stockinged feet.

• Missing Scene:  Choose one of your favorite novels of all time.  Find an event that is spoken of but never provided directly--a missing scene, if you will.  Write it.  Focus on mirroring the author's style and rhythm; explore that particularized cadence, that created landscape and mind-scape.  Be true to it and to their characters and to the flow of events.  Follow that writer closely enough and you will find yourself within.

• Life Change:  Think of the very first memory that comes to mind when I say "life changing moment."  An accident?  A decision?  A realization?  Free-write about that moment from the point of view of SOMEONE else present in the memory or directly involved.

• First Lines:  Write from the line:  "When I was thirteen, I used to believe..."  (Matters not if you find yourself writing fiction or nonfiction.)

• Poetry to Fiction:  Grab a volume of your favorite poet's work or pick up a poetry anthology from the library.  Choose three poem titles where the language climbs in your ear and won't let you go.  Do three timed free-writings where you develop  scene, an image, or a setting, each sparked by a meditation on the corresponding chosen poem title.  Just focus on the title, not the poem.  Then spend a writing day focused on what the three free-writings share in common or where you see linkages.

• A Found Poem:  Go to your local library.  Walk blindly down the stacks.  Literally close your eyes (try not to trip or bump into anyone).  Randomly pick a book from the shelf and write down the title.  Do this eleven more times.  Sit for twenty minutes and using the language of the titles, mixing it up however you see fit, striving for the magical mystery of linked language and metaphor, build a poem.  Tomorrow morning, work through the raw material and the drafted poem again.  Find the strings, the links, the line.

• Character and Tension:  Place two characters who don't like each other or, at minimum, feel awkward with one another because of some past history, in a closed space for a finite time.  Think elevator, or a car, a taxi ride.  They MUST talk to one another.  At some point, interrupt the two with a third party (taxi driver, new elevator passenger, etc.) who allows your two characters to form a unilateral front (say because they know the taxi driver is trying to rip them off).