Hey everybody! So, writing prompts. We know them, we love them. For us as the writers that many of us are, prompts can be the dumbbell repetitions, car battery cables or engine itself to our writing craft. Practice exercise, jump start, idea generator, technique learning exercise…prompts serve many, many purposes. So, considering this is a writing conference, there will be prompts offered here on the blog. Have a prompt to offer? A comment on a prompt offered? Want to share your writing? Well let us know! There’s a handy dandy comment box below for you, or you can write to me, Rocket-Blog-Monkey, at depazjr@gmail.com. That said, onto the prompt! Cheers!
From Rip the Page by Karen Benke (a book, by the by, bought by yours truly at Charis Books’ table at the Fall WW conf.)
“What Can You Write With” (Note: This is the first prompt in this book of prompts, and what got me to buy it, honestly. Simple enough of a prompt, but the focus here, as it is in creative writing in general, is to expand the boundaries of your mind. We, like monkeys and robots, as members and participants of this society, are programed to think and associate in very specific ways. You eat a banana, you drive a car, a dog barks, a sky is that space above our heads up high. This makes sense: it facilitates the proper functioning of society. However, this programming makes for pretty boring writing sometimes. As a bonus, expanding your mind like this also makes for pretty entertaining day to day. The sky can be the space between people, or you; love can be the outbreath of a sleeping child; an apple can be eternity; etc. Right?)
“Forget the usual suspects: pencils, pens, pain, chalk, Sharpie markers, purple crayons…What if you could write with anything today? What if you could wedge between the fingers of your left or right hand, a memory? Your infinite imagination? The power of creativity? A spinning planet? The state of forgiveness? A tree trunk, or a ray of sunlight? Well, guess what? In the realm of creative writing, you can. There are trillions of possibilities, and they keep on expanding into endless whirling patterns. What can you add to the things you can write with today?
[her example...]What I Write With
I can write with the tainted light of tattered forgiveness
I can write with the smallest stars of the almost-not-seen
I can write with the long sticky threads of sacred spider-webs
I can write with the spinning planets of darkness and danger
I can write with my unseen, dazzling trick-up-my-sleeve schemes
This one isn’t doing it for me. Can I suggest a prompt? I wanted to do a workshop on “my first women’s festival” or concert, art exhibit, etc. That would create possible memoirs for the herstory project, and would be interesting to hear.
Absolutely! Suggest away-I’ll post it as a guest blogpost.
A new prompt: Women’s Music (or Art, or Poetry) – Recall an experience at a festival, an art exhibit, a poetry reading, etc., that moved you or changed your life in some way. Remember it vividly and write about the memory