Christmas and Hanukkah are almost here. The presents are wrapped under the tree (nope). Holiday cards have all been sent (oops). The stockings are stuffed (with lint). You may sense a theme.... The Internet is a blessing though and allows slackers like me to borrow ideas from industrious souls. Check out these creative writing prompts for both poetry and fiction at LitBridge.
Three Lists, Three Elements, Good Things Come in Threes
Yes, I know I promised to provide prompts for short stories too. I admit I am a slacker. I do have a prompt (a borrowed one) that will work for either short stories or for poetry. Behold, the Power of Three: three categories, three elements, three spinning rings of hell, however you wish to think of it. I “borrowed” this idea from two places, Steve Ramirez and the website Creative Writing Now.
Poetry workshops with Steve Ramirez usually involve two or even three categories of five items: i.e. five mythological beasts, five mundane tasks and five embarrassing secrets. Mix and match until you get friction. Perhaps you decide Medusa likes to sing Disney songs in the shower as she washes her snakes. Which song does she like best? Describe her voice. Do the snakes provide backup?
Now for the short story prompt Three Elements: Choose a set of three elements and write a story that contains all three of them.
- A stolen ring, fear of spiders, and a sinister stranger.
- A campfire, a scream, and a small lie that gets bigger and bigger.
- A broken wristwatch, peppermints, and a hug that goes too far.
Somehow the “hug that goes too far” draws me in. Check out the full list of three element sets as well as other short story ideas.
The story “Cat Person” has generated a lot of attention on Twitter. I think Red Vines, movie theater, and bad sex would be its three-element prompt if I were to attempt to reverse engineer the story.
The CDC’s 7 Forbidden Words—Another Word List Prompt
As you may have read, the Trump Administration is prohibiting officials at the CDC from using seven words/phrases in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
The list of forbidden words:
- Evidence-based
- science-based
- vulnerable
- entitlement
- diversity
- transgender
- fetus.
Several poets have suggested using these seven words in a poem. I first read of the prompt from Cathy Park Hong on Twitter, but several others posted the idea on Facebook.
Here is an opportunity you might like: Sarah Freligh and Amy Lemmon invited poets to submit poems in any form but using all seven words (preferably in repetition) to CDCpoetry@gmail.com for publication on their blog. Check their blog out for updates, more prompts and poems.
IKEA Instructions for a Pantoum
Yes, I have covered the pantoum form before, but sometimes step-by-step instructions are necessary or at least helpful in writing a new form. The awesome Rachel McKibbens provides such instructions on her blog. Please jump to Writing Exercise #89 on her blog.
There is absolutely no reason for this photo other than I like it.
Rachel provides an amazing sample poem on her blog, but if you want to read the poem I created using her prompt, check it out here. It was posted on the blog of Denise Wueve, editor of the temporarily closed Wherewithal, which I truly hope will return soon.
Faerie Tales Revisited—A Prompt from Two Idiots Peddling Poetry
From my last post, you know how much the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry reading series means to me. Along with providing amazing features, supporting local poets and providing a welcome home for zombie and Star Trek poems, co-host Steve Ramirez posts prompts every day for April’s 30/30 challenge.
Here is a prompt from Steve posted way back in 2013. He even provides sample poems, bless his heart.
Btw, Steve began his own blog. Check it out.
Because I am personally focusing on poetry right now, I have neglected all other forms of writing. I will try to do better in the future, but Steve’s prompt lends itself equally to fiction, whether flash or longer pieces. Check out Jan Stinchcomb’s story published at Rose Red Review.
To read more of Jan’s amazing fiction, visit her website with its links to her other published stories. And buy her book. ;-)
Monuments
What monuments do you build to your loved ones? A tower on a mountainside, a mausoleum of marble regret, a pyramid among shifting sands, paper hearts or paper cranes, a cairn of stones? Will your monument endure after your loved one is gone? Or was the beauty in its transience?
What does your choice of media say about your love or about your loved one. Stone hearts or paper hearts?
The Temple of Your Body
If your body is a temple, whom do you welcome inside? Do you keep the doors open, or is there an iron padlock, a bar across your doors, a moat with drawbridge and alligators? Is your temple guarded by fire-breathing dragon or yipping chihuahuas or cooing doves?
If your body is a temple, what hymns are sung inside? Is the hymn book from your childhood? If not hymns, what music or rhythms move your body—jazz, pop, waltz, dirge? What instruments play inside you? Pipe organ, piano, harp, trombone, flute, bagpipe? Or is all the music of your body percussion—the beating of drums and the clanging of cymbals? Or is the only sound inside that of a small fountain or the surrounding waves?
If your body is a temple, what incense is burned? Frankincense and myrrh, sandalwood, lavender, patchouli? Or do you burn sage to drive out negative spirits? Why do you need to? Or do you fill yourself with the scents of vanilla and cinnamon to make yourself a sweet warmth for your congregation? Or do you spray Febreze to cover the odors you cannot drive out? If so, describe those odors. What creatures do they attract?
Who are your temple’s worshipers? How many? Are all your pews filled? Standing room only or barren?
Is your temple domed or turreted or simply a covered courtyard? Is a breeze allowed in? Does sun shine through stained-glass windows? If so, what colors? Red only through your panes? Or is your temple in darkness, shrouded? Can your worshippers see cracks in the walls, crumbling tile, debris on the floor? Or is your temple draped in velvet, lit with crystal chandeliers, and gilded to welcome only the worthy? Is the pulpit polished mahoghany or stainless steel or tarnished brass? Who stands there? Who speaks your message? What are the words?
Show Your Answers—the Questionnaire Prompt
Questionnaires are dry and clinical even when the subject matter is anything but impersonal. Use a form or questionnaire as the jumping off point. Answer the questions with essential truths—the metaphorical truth—rather than a list of symptoms. Let the family tree bear fruit. Show the worms and the rot and the sweetness. Or take an insurance form, as dry as a cracker in the desert, and make it bloom. If you need a sample questionnaire, refer to this form, which includes general medical questions along with a checklist of occupational and environmental exposures plus questions specific to the asbestos program. Good times.
For inspiration and/or intimidation, see Oliver De La Paz’s powerful answers to an autism screening questionnaire for his son in the poem “Autism Screening Questionnaire—Speech and Language Delay” on the Poetry Foundation’s site. Listen to the poet read his poem. So beautiful.
Or be dazzled by Nicole Sealey’s “Medical History” published at The Account. How she takes standard medical questions and transforms them into a wonder—I am awed.
Ghost Line—Prompt from Rachel McKibbens
Alas, the time for ghosts and goblins is past, but I was too busy procrastinating to post in October. Nonetheless, let’s talk about ghost lines. A ghost line is a line from a poem or novel or really anywhere that is the jumping off point for your own poem. It is the first line of your poem written in invisible ink. You omit it once you are finished. If you feel the line is necessary, make sure you indicate the line is not yours and attribute it to the author. You could make the line an epigraph if you wish. Even after omitting the line, many poets will acknowledge the poem’s inspiration by adding “after Tarfia Faizullah” or whoever provided that first step.
Because my habitual procrastination has continued into the next month (and probably until my last, put-off breath) but mostly since I enjoy fangirling fantastic poets, I would like you to jump to the site of the amazing Rachel McKibbens for her ghost line prompt.
Thanksgiving Part II—What You Ate
Thanksgiving is a holiday for spending time with family and friends, ignoring the problematic parts of American history, avoiding politics and overeating. Ultimately, the overeating tends to linger longer in my case...as my pants can readily affirm.
Now is your chance to write an ode to stuffing (or over-stuffing), a sonnet to green bean casserole or that villanelle to repeating heartburn.
Or if you wish to write a truly depressing poem, research nutmeg and never eat pumpkin pie with a clean conscience again. The politics of the dinner table can be as brutal as those discussed around it, but I prefer not to sob over my dessert on a day off, so my prompt is the cheerful and/or creepy instruction to address a poem to a Thanksgiving dish—traditional, take-out, main course, side or just dessert—anything you ate yesterday. And no judgment from the rest of us. Perhaps you can even zombify it. Maybe it will eat you back—from the inside out.
Check out Bruce Guersey’s “Yam” on the Poetry Foundation website .
Thanksgiving—What You Gave
For this Thanksgiving, let’s focus on the giving rather than expressing gratitude for our gifts. Write a poem about what you gave. Use anaphora (repetition of the first word or phrase at the beginning of the line) to tie the poem together. Put a bow on it. This is your present.
Begin each line or, if you prefer, each stanza with I gave.
These gifts may have been unwanted—perhaps they were curses—or maybe they were all that you could give, but you gave them nonetheless. Who accepted them, and who turned away? What did your gift make?
You can read and listen to Alberto Ríos recite his lovely poem “When Giving Is All We Have” at poets.org.
Sand Fortress
You build a sand fort with feather pennants, a moat and a tunnel entrance. Who would you invite to live with you in your fragile fortress? Who would stay with you as safety crumbles?
Erasure: Cutting Down to a Poem
Erasure (along with its cousin “blackout poetry”) is the technique of omitting parts of an existing text (whether poem, article, reprint of a speech, a novel or an excerpt) to create a poem. With blackout poetry, the text is left as is with the omitted words, phrases and sentences marked out. Part of its appeal is its dramatic presentation. Erasure typically reorganizes the remaining text perhaps into stanzas.
Some poets take full poetic license in erasure by changing the wording or the forms of words and even combining letters to create words not found in the original as long as the words/letters remain in the original sequence. I admit I truly enjoyed cutting the text of Mike Huckabee’s speech to have him seemingly admit to a torrid desire for a shirtless Vladimir Putin.
While my erasure of Huckabee’s speech was merely silly, erasure is a great technique to use for political snark and for knifepoint observations. A recent article in Fast Company noted the form’s skill in delivering harsh truth. The poet Isobel O’Hare recently applied erasure to the recent statements from celebrities accused of sexual harassment and posted these blackout poems to Instagram. For more examples, check out her website.
Full disclosure, I first came upon Isobel O’Hare’s poems on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog, and the next day my stepson sent me a link to her poetry.
I first tried erasure at Poetry Lab, the inspiring generative workshop run by Danielle Mitchell. This prompt is hers. She gave everyone this block of text from Virginia Wolf’s The Voyage Out and required that we cut it down to just twenty words.
Your prompt is to do the same. Cut this text down to just twenty words:
Chapter XIV
The sun of that same day going down, dusk was saluted as usual at the hotel by an instantaneous sparkle of electric lights. The hours between dinner and bedtime were always difficult enough to kill, and the night after the dance they were further tarnished by the peevishness of dissipation. Certainly, in the opinion of Hirst and Hewet, who lay back in long arm-chairs in the middle of the hall, with their coffee-cups beside them, and their cigarettes in their hands, the evening was unusually dull, the women unusually badly dressed, the men unusually fatuous. Moreover, when the mail had been distributed half an hour ago there were no letters for either of the two young men. As every other person, practically, had received two or three plump letters from England, which they were now engaged in reading, this seemed hard, and prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed. Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep. The intermittent sounds—now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation—were just, he declared, what you hear if you stand in the lion-house when the bones are being mauled. But these comparisons did not rouse Hewet, who, after a careless glance round the room, fixed his eyes upon a thicket of native spears which were so ingeniously arranged as to run their points at you whichever way you approached them. He was clearly oblivious of his surroundings; whereupon Hirst, perceiving that Hewet's mind was a complete blank, fixed his attention more closely upon his fellow-creatures. He was too far from them, however, to hear what they were saying, but it pleased him to construct little theories about them from their gestures and appearance.
Here is my rough process (scribbled, crumpled and torn):
Even though everyone began with the same text, the final results differed dramatically among the workshop’s participants.
Here is the final version of my erasure from the text:
Virgin Wolf:
Erasure of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out
Going down was saluted
by the kill.
Plump meat stimulated
by throat—
bones mauled
to rouse the thicket
of spears.
And here is the erasure poem created by another participant, Ben Trigg.
Erasure from The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
The dusk electric hours lay long in their hands.
The women of hard silence rouse spears to attention.
Little gestures.
Good luck!
Femme Fairy Tale Word List
Word lists, yes, word lists. While all of us remember having to write out vocabulary words, exercises using words from one poem or by a particular poet can propel some useful freewriting or even lead into a poem or short story. Just as a form can force our writing into a new direction by its restrictions, word lists and ghost lines can offer a starting point. Sometimes a box opens into a whole new room.
Below is a femme fairy tale word and phrase list from “Little Red”in Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy.
Choose eight and climb in. See where it carries you.
Gorged Kindling
Grainy Hearth
Swallowed Framed
Rib cage Rumbling
Papered Hidden
Shelved Pinned
Belly plump Vivisection
Gobbled Pink
Roast Fall
Cracking Inside
Nancy Reddy
Rather than reading the poem that originated the list, which may restrict your own originality, check out the fabulous "The Case of the Double Jinx" by Nancy Reddy.
Storm
Storm
Let the ocean squall. Accept the hurricane. Embrace the tornado. Pick a natural disaster. Don't look for meaning in it. Let it be both personal and overwhelming. Write a destruction poem.
This prompt is brought to you from the fabulous HanaLena Fennel. If you want more prompts and unicorn glitter from her, subscribe to her Patreon page.
Patricia Smith
Check out the amazing Patricia Smith reading her poem "Katrina" at the Poetry Foundation. "Katrina" appears in her amazing collection, the award-winning Blood Dazzler.
Along with wildfires burning across eight western states, the U.S. was slammed this year by hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. Puerto Rico in particular is still suffering. Please donate, or donate again, if you can. Here is Charity Navigator's list of highly rated charities specifically helping Puerto Rico and other areas harmed by Hurricane Maria.