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Writing Prompts, Poetry Forms, News and Book Reviews
We don’t always get what we want but perhaps we do get what we deserve:
Write a poem in which you did this and, damn, did you ever. Or write a short story that’s story arc can summed up by this.
Good luck reaping what you sowed, but, hey, you got a story or a poem out of it. Good enough.
I fell in love with these amazing photos by Shaylin Wallace. If only I could have my head replaced with flowers so that I could feed on light and my entire face could open up for my lover.
For the first prompt, write a monologue from one of these four portraits.
For the second prompt, write a conversation by the four of them. Or describe the language they share. Does it hum like bees or the ruffling of small wings? What does it mean when one of them opens up? Do the others listen? Do bees and other pollinators carry their words to one another?
For a third prompt, choose the one that represents you and explain why. If none of them resonate with you, check out the artist’s website, which include titles for these portraits. And here is where you can get reprints.
Here is the website in case the links don’t work: https://www.smwvisuals.com/photo-manipulations
What if inside each of us is a little girl wandering through a forest, an old woman waiting, a woodcutter sharpening an ax, the forest itself growing and dying and growing, a big bad wolf seeking to eat the young and tender and the aged and wise, and an ax swinging.
Write a poem or short story about what grows inside of you or another, remaining hidden and trapped, and what else cuts its way out into the world.
As you probably noticed, it has been weeks since I posted anything. Partly this is due stressing myself out because I promised to promote friends’ work—I often perform best when I care the least. Mostly though, I am not writing or even reading. I simply did not have any creativity or motivation. These days feel as if I am eating Saltines in the Sahara—dry, very dry.
Last night’s virtual reading helped—thank you, Eric Morago for Shout—I once again experienced the shiver from hearing a powerful poem. I even managed to write a (bad) poem this morning. This coming week, I will being posting regularly again. But baby steps. So here is a stolen Twitter prompt:
Write a poem or short story using the generator.
You will of course want to expand the poem and give credit to the generator if you wish to publish what you’ve written.
Below is a bonus ekphrastic prompt:
Unlike me, many of you probably completed the 30 poems in a 30 days challenge. That is awesome! Now for even more fun: editing those poems! Below is a Twitter discussion that I found really intriguing. The original conversation began as quirky ways people approach reaching poems and novels, but then poet Julia Beach explained why she first reads The last three words of the fourth line from the bottom in other people’s poems and in her own as the poem’s key.
Take one of the poems you’ve written recently, or perhaps one that has never really come together, and try seeing if this “map” helps you cut and expand the rest of the poem to fit that vision.
Here is the prompt: use this same reading process of using the last three words of the fourth line from the bottom of a poem and use them as your opening line and build a poem from there. See where you end up. You can then choose to erase those three words so that they function as a ghostline or you can keep them, using italics or quotation marks. Either way, be sure to give the poet credit.
Bonus prompt: what does this tree remind you of? A key, a warning, the devil’s spork? Write a poem or story about coming across this tree in an abruptly silent forest. What does it mean?
For this prompt, choose one of the following as your haven during this pandemic. Make even the house’s drawback a benefit—the bedbugs sing lullabies to you at night, the ghosts help you find your phone and your slippers, the ass is an excellent cook, and you enjoy freedom from news and animal requests.
Bonus prompt: Make one of the quarantine houses your setting for a short story. Create characters (between 3-5) and have them interact under stress.
We have all been there looking at a photo and mistaking a cat for a crow or a bunny for a raven (such tricksters) or arguing about the color of a striped dress. We’ve looked at a rusty cardoor and seen an ocean but mistook an ocean for a door. We often cannot find the exits in this complex life or follow the storyline. We have been there when the denouement occurs: the love interest has been the villain all along, or we were playing detective but found ourselves both the body and the butler holding the murder weapon in our bloody hands. We do it to ourselves…with help from others.
The animal is a raven (appropriately named Mischief), not a rabbit, petted by his trainer, but the pic but was captioned with “Rabbits love getting stroked on their nose.” Check out the BBC article for other optical illusions and context.
For the first prompt, remember a time when an enemy seemed like a friend, a predator pretending to be prey animal. When did you first suspect the talons, see a hint of fang behind the smiling lips? How did you escape? Or did you? How much innocence, time, flesh did you lose?
For the next prompt, write a poem about losing a long-held assumption. For a poem, try to create a modified or traditional sonnet with the reveal as the form’s turn. For fiction, emulate O’Henry or Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” so that the reveal occurs at the very end. Or for a challenge, begin with the reveal and work from there. Discover where it leads you.
For the final prompt, write a poem or short story in which you are both perpetrator and victim? When did you realize that it was you all along? Did you get away with the crime? Did you ever forgive yourself? Will you?
We have all been there—sitting awkwardly with relatives or a dinner party when a monstrosity is brought out: the inevitable meat-suspended-in-gelatin dish of our nightmares and/or the Jello-Cool Whip-Mayo “fruit salad” from your now-least-favorite aunt. For the next prompt, write a sonnet describing this dish. Let the sonnet’s turn be either your decision to try it or your survival after the mandatory taste test.
For inspiration, see the following picture:
And because I just had to know more and assume you might too:
For the next prompt, reimagine the universe as a Jello ring. Write a narrative poem or a short story as an explorer—whether astronaut, cosmonaut (Russian), yuhangyuan (Chinese), or of some other nationality. What equipment allows for breath? How do you navigate through tuna? Are the cucumber chunks a relief? Describe the flora and fauna.
And here is one more for your amusement, terror, an emotion not yet named by anyone other than the Germans….
Good luck!
A Rube Goldberg machine (named after the cartoonist) is the creation of a complex (usually messy and often destructive) chain-of-events to perform the simplest task.
Just look up Rube Goldberg on YouTube and enjoy the obsessively ordered chaos. And of course here is Ok Go’s Rube Goldberg video (thanks, Steve, for the new obsession).
The first prompt is inspired by David Guzman’s “Instructions for Building My Rube Goldberg Machine” in McSweeney’s. Write a poem in which you create a Rube Goldberg machine of revenge, knocking down naysayers like dominoes and launching belittlers into the blue beyond.
For the rest of the essay, click this link.
For the next prompt, again write a Rube Goldberg machine for creating a new life. Perhaps write a poem or story in which you rewire your neural pathways into a glowing smiley face, construct a system of mental pulleys to unload leftover regrets and needless doubts, or build a feedback loop of positive reinforcements in your morning routine. Or maybe you want to describe creating an alter to a dark god out of Legos that takes up a city block and steal your enemies’ shoes (thanks, Twitter, for the best curse I’ve ever heard).
And finally create a poem as if it were a Rube Goldberg machine. Perhaps it is. What is your ending? How do you set up the first line and the subsequent stanzas to get us there?
Blame the Ugly Mug, particularly Steve Ramirez, for my newest obsession: Ok Go. Yes, yes, I am behind the times, out of step, calendar deficient, day unplanner, and time deficient.
For the next prompt, I want you to use the the following line from Ok Go’s song “Upside Down & Inside Out” as a ghostline: “Yeah when you met the new you, did someone die inside?”
Think about all of those former selves or even the phases you went through during your teen years and various periods of your life. Did you have to kill a former to become the current version of yourself? If so, did you feel pity for that self as you murdered it? Was it a violent destruction? A mercy killing?
Or do all of those former selves follow you like a shadow, longer with each passing year as if you are moving through the late afternoon of your own consciousness? Does the weight of all that self history sink you lower to the ground? Is it hard to keep your head up when it is so full of echoes?
Or use one of the other lines from the song as a ghostline:
“Gravity’s just a habit that you’re pretty sure you can break”
“So when you met the new you / Were you scared, were you cold, were you kind?”
“Don’t know where your eyes are but they’re not doing what you said”
For the next prompt, write a conversation among your former and present selves and maybe add a future self too. Will it be an argument, an interrogation or accusation, an explanation, an apology, or advice? What do you wish your former self could tell you? What do you wish you remembered? What advice would you give a past self? Would the knowledge erase your current self as if un-birthing your present consciousness ? Would you share that advice anyway? Or would that death be your intended purpose?
Here is Ok Go’s video for “Upside Down & Inside Out.” Write a poem about being in zero gravity. Try to narrate the video as a sonnet or pantoum. Or write from the perspective of one of the piñatas. Write. Discover what happens.
I know I spend too much of my life retracing steps and looking into the rearview mirror. If I wore cologne, it would be named regret and smell of a struck match, rubbing alcohol and old, water-stained bills.
But the poem “Rewinding an Overdose On a Projector” is achingly beautiful in its attempt to reverse disaster. Thanks to Victoria Chang for sharing it.
For the first prompt, reverse a catastrophe or a mistake. Perhaps describe the bride and groom each sliding the wedding bands off fingers, the bride walking backwards up the aisle, and ushers emptying the church one by one.
For the second prompt, writing a poem using the following verbs from Shearer’s poem: “floats,” “twitch,” “wakes,” “seals,” “pushes,” “fluffs,” “shrinks,” “grows,” “grows,” “rains,” “spill,” and “remains.”
For the next prompt, notice how the lines reverse not only the time sequence, but also the agency: “The wet cotton lifts” and “The water pours into a plastic bottle.” Experiment with changing the receiver and the doer of an action in a poem. What effects does the change create?
For the fourth prompt, use the line “The heart wakes like a handcar pumping faster and faster on its greased tracks” as a ghostline. Remember to use that line to jump off from and then erase it from your poem. Still give credit to the poet though.
What changes if the viewer is looking down rather than up? Write a poem or short story in which directions are reversed, and the reader is kept in suspense until the end or is never certain.
For the last prompt, notice the delicacy of the mold. Describe the un-blooming of this mold and resurrect the fallen tree upon which the mold sprouts. Which is more sacred: the life of the consumed or the consumer? Try to cast the metaphysical in scientific terms. See what the dichotomy creates.
Lately all of my poems have been serious (depressing), and the novel is just a no-go right now, so let’s be silly.
For the first prompt, take the old meme shown below and change the nouns and verbs. This is your chance to be as ridiculous as you have always wanted to.
For the second prompt, choose any poem and mad lib it. Use the antonyms for nouns, adjectives and verbs. See what happens. If you use another poet’s work, make sure you have truly created something of your own if you plan to submit it for publication. This is probably best used for an excercise to jumpstart a workshop or personal writing session.
For the next prompt, personify and write a conversation between the burnt branch and the twig. Are they two selves of the same individual, a parent and child, or master and protege? What happens next in your story?
Or write a poem and use the burnt tree and the new twig to represent the past and the future, outcomes and expectation, 2008 vs 2019, or perhaps again two selves of the same person.
For the first prompt, write a poem about the end of time using the format of a mathematical word problem. Bonus points if you provide the solution. Or offer a suggestion on who could.
For the next prompt, write a story about the queen’s attempted theft of the amethyst carnation using the pacing and storyline of Ocean’s 8.
For the next prompt, write a poem or short story about this world of libraries. Be sure to explain how the Dewey Decimal System has been applied to the nature and the animal kingdom. Are the oceans kinder under such a classification? How does the platypus fit in a stacked world?
And, finally, write a poem or story from the psychiatrist’s perspective. What would you tell this star (now that the best pun has been taken)?
This month has not been productive. Obviously not here but certainly not on the novel. Leaking pipes and dripping ceilings aside, the lack of progress is all self-(un)directed. So if you are working on the challenge, how is it going? Let me know!
For this month, I will focus on fiction prompts (although it’s always a bonus if a poem comes out too). For this prompt, I am borrowing Alan Cheuse’s writing exercise from Naming the World. Cheuse recommends pastiche—or imitating other writers—to help newer writers improve their techniques. He assigns students a famous story such as Checkhov’s “The Lady with the Pet Dog” and has the student write from the viewpoint of Anna’s husband or another character.
Alan Cheuse
Bonus prompt: Write from the perspective of this lion. WTH did you do to make him look at you like that.
So the other day I went to the dentist and asked her what kind of workplace nightmares she has—you know, the normal conversations you have with someone you have drooled on for 30 minutes (and apologized for, repeatedly).
“Blood. Lots of Blood,” she replied.
Then she described the true horror: “You know when you are eating watermelon and spitting out the seeds. My nightmares involve spitting out teeth. More and more teeth.”
Yep, her workplace dreams sure beat my forgot-to-wear-pants-hope-the-students-don’t-notice nightmares. Or the recent one in which I brought only a pillow and a notebook to a knife fight. Even in my dreams I am unprepared…
So for your prompt, write a poem or short story about the last nightmare you had. Fill in the gaps where necessary. Color in the blanks. Make them red and dripping, or surreal and disturbing as that cooing baby sun from the Teletubbies.
For added difficulty, create a turn in the story; for the poem, make it a sonnet with the shift coming either at the 9th line (Petrarchan) or at the 13th (Shakespearean).
Good luck!
Bonus prompt: This is your head; now tell us your memories from inside the jar.
Sorry for the hiatus, my iPad was out of commission and then my discipline was… I will post another Halloween-themed prompt tomorrow, but I wanted to discuss NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month challenge) because it starts this Friday.
The NaNoWriMo challenge is writing 50,000 words of a novel in one month. Recently, the challenge has been expanded to include collections of poems, short stories, memoirs and other genres. Technically, the project is supposed to be a new novel or all new stories/poems/writing, but of course just getting people to write is the point. I have tried twice and once completed the challenge a few years ago. I decided to do it again this year because I need to shift from poetry to fiction for a while.
One of the things I really enjoyed about NaNoWriMo was the community support. The NaNoWriMo site offers tips, tools, online writing buddies, and group writing events. For more information about the challenge and to sign up, go to organization’s website nanowrimo.org
Join me in the all-night slogs and, I hope, the eventual celebration.. Let me know if you plan to register at the NaNoWriMo site, so that we can be buddies.
Barren Magazine’s Issue 13 is open for submissions of poetry, flash fiction, creative nonfiction and photography. The prompts are suggested themes but not restricted to them. For more information on guidelines, click here.
Good luck!
For the first prompt, use the picture of the ovarian teratoma to write a poem or short story from the perspective of a tissue that has grown teeth and sentience inside another’s body. Does your narrator feel safe and content within the other, or does the narrator want to chew its way out of its prison? How much does the narrator understand of its world and its own limitations?
For more information on this dermoid cysts and teratomas and its possible relation to the myth of vagina dentata, click here.
For the second prompt, write a variation of a vagina dentata poem. Think of the movie Teeth but with less assault and more bite (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun). For inspiration, here is a poem by the amazing Arminé Iknadossian.
Btw, this poem was published in Moon Tide Press’s Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror. Come out to Goldenest Diner (13030 Goldenwest, Westminster) on October 17th at 7 p.m. to hear more poems from this anthology. Don’t forget to wear your dark side on the outside to compete in the costume contest!
For the final prompt—muhhahahahahaha—make a list of five iconic objects/image of a famous horror or suspense movie and write from that object’s or image’s perspective. What does Freddy’s blade-embedded glove help him keep track of? To-do lists, to-kill lists, multiplication tables? What does the elevator want to carry in its belly in The Shining? Does the elevator see itself as a protector or a villain?
Even though this is not horror-themed, I wanted to post this competition for all you flash fiction writers. Here is the link to the publication and submission form.
For October all of my prompts will be weird and creepy. Also, I am trying to write more horror poems to jumpstart next month’s NaNoWriMo challenge (National Novel Writing Month).
For the first prompt, write what the turkeys are chanting as they circle a dead cat in the road. Is it a dirge, an elegy, an ode, or maybe a limerick? Perhaps it is the nine-line, countdown poem, the nonet?
For a video of the circling turkeys, click here.
For the next prompt, write a poem on the theme of a countdown to the apocalypse, armageddon, the Rapture, a Nickelback revival, or similar event of wholesale terror and bloodshed using the form nonet—a nine-line poem in which the first line has nine syllables, the second has eight, and so on until the last line with only one syllable. For more information and a sample poem, check out Robert Lee Brewer’s explanation on the Writer’s Digest site.
For the last prompt, write a short story or poem based on the photo below. What came through the vortex and why? What happened next?
Good luck!
