Writing Prompts

Or a way to get started

How do you get started? Where do you’re ideas come from? You know what you should write about is…

Today, I want to talk about my love for writing prompts and why I think they’re often helpful for writers of all experience levels. Writing prompts are more than just fodder for asynchronous writing classes/workshops and for live writing sprints or the classroom setting. Prompts, triggers, photos are a path into the besieged mind of the would-be writer and the grizzled veteran alike because our minds are filled with the everyday junk and joy of living. Most of us need something to focus on, something to stimulate the brain in the direction of putting words on the page. Otherwise, the mind wanders, and our hands pick up our phones for the 50th time a day, content to scroll through the carousel of social media. Even if prompts were mere practice (They can lead to some unopened doors of the unexpected) they get us into the writing chair, and the more we visit the writing chair, the more comfortable we get with putting words on the page. Words on the page are our stock, our physical manifestation of the time’s worth of writing. And we all value our time.

I’ll admit that I think writing flash is the ideal length and form to use prompts to their full advantage. The pressure of the word count and the pressure of the prompt tend to work well together, helping writers to create things they might not have when left purely to their own imaginations.

Pamela Painter, in her essays in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction,

I soon realized that there was nothing artificial about an exercise—except the origin of the prompt. What you write in response to that prompt becomes organically you own with the first words that you write after taking in the instructions. Exercises teach you how to hear the outside world as a sea of prompts, a sea of exercises for potential stories.

My question then is does it really matter where the writing originates from? As long as it’s from some amalgamation of what’s in your mind? We treat the triggering of a story as if it’s the event itself, but it’s the writing, and then hopefully finally the reading, that makes the work whole, worthwhile, art.

Highlighted Flash

The key to this flash is a thrilling sense of urgency. Characters acting before the story even starts! We’ll take a look at “WE SING WITH OUR MOUTHS CLOSED” by Jad Josey published in Passages North.

We started digging for bones in the winter, long before the ground thawed. We used spoons and forks at first, then rusty trowels and the broken handle of a rake. We dug until the blisters on our hands tore, palms scrawled with red half-moons. Sometimes there were three of us. Sometimes five. Always at least two, because it wasn’t safe to dig alone.

I love how this story gives us all of the pieces I would expect in an opening: point of view, character, setting, and an idea of the conflict. It also does more than that by creating a sense of urgency for these characters. Here are characters that don’t have time to waste. They can’t wait for the ground to thaw, they can’t find appropriate tools, and they’re doing something out of necessity, knowing that it’s not safe. I can’t wait to find out what happens to them, how they got here, and what their future might look like. These are the three guiding principles of any story. The way that context is built and sustained!

We collected the bones in a burlap sack that once contained coffee beans from somewhere south of here. Neither of those things mattered anymore: the south or the beans.

Josey knows how to create causation out of backstory/backfill and to do it with depth, but with quickness as well. This is a piece of exposition, but it also adds context that creates an escalation of the danger we’re already inferring! So hard to build a story where every new piece of information is an escalation, but it’s done wonderfully in this one!

Prompt: Start with an opening that gives us an idea of character, point of view, setting, and the initial conflict. Make it something that the characters are doing urgently, and out of necessity. Take away their normal tools, and replace them with objects we would only use out of last resort. Give them dire physical or emotional choices, filtered through details through this desperate point of view. Try to escalate the stakes of the story in each new sentence. What are they trying to survive?

What I’m reading:

K-Ming Chang is a maestro of making the unfamiliar familiar. Her stories sting with the bite of a sharpened needle and hold you close in the arms of a lullaby, experiencing both pain and release in equal measures. You can find Bone House at Bull City Press!

Try At Home:

Make a hero out of your enemy. That person that you hate, the one that refuses to wear a mask, who takes up two parking spots, who refuses to allocate money to a great cause. The loud, brash, the meek, the unknowable people who drive us nuts. In a new story, take on their point of view. Make them sympathetic, make our empathy weep for them, make them interesting in the context of their selfishness.

My Flash:

A new micro in my Faith (name of the character) series is live at Emerge Journal! One of the things I’m trying differently in this series is using an omniscient point of view in a micro form, which can be too distancing for some readers, but it fits how I perceive this character.

There’s a follow-up interview as well as I’m the featured writer for this issue!

Thank you for reading! If you haven’t already subscribed, I’d love for you to join me on this flash fiction writing journey!