The Prompt-O-Matic: #41

A little something to get you writing.

Sperry Rand UNISCOPE 300 Visual Communication Terminal interfaced to a UNIVAC 494 Real-Time system (1969)

Readers,

During my eight years as the editorial director of a wonderful storytelling non-profit called TMI Project, I often had to come up with writing prompts for workshops I led. I had a knack for consistently coming up with a varied assortment that jogged people’s brains, eliciting productive writing (something I’d first developed as a New York Times bestselling ghostwriter of memoirs), and leading the executive director to nickname me “The Prompt-O-Matic.” I thought I’d repurpose that knack over here, in The Lit Lab, offering weekly prompts for paid subscribers. This is the forty-first installment.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Your mind can latch onto a prompt very literally, or lead you toward something altogether different from the suggestion at hand. I’ve also found there are some writers for whom, no matter how they’re prompted, the same story emerges—a story that stubbornly won’t go away until it gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes it’s the story you need to write; other times, it’s the story you need to get out of your way before anything else can come through. Either way, being prompted helps move the writer forward.

I love a good prompt. It can awaken your brain to all kinds of possibilities, some that had already been lingering right under the surface of your consciousness, just waiting for a nudge, others seemingly out of the blue.

Writing prompts can also help dissolve writers’ block, especially when you respond to them while racing against a timer. I know from experience; when I started at TMI Project, I myself had been blocked for some time. To encourage workshop participants, I figured I’d “take the workshop with them,” doing twenty-minute free-writes alongside them, using my own prompts. It instantly unblocked me, freeing me to write story after story.

Below the paywall is the forty-first prompt in this series. Use it however you’d like to spark new writing, ***but please don’t share it with anyone else. I hope to someday publish a book of these. And I use them in my teaching.

My writing prompts are offered as a perk for those who pay to support my work. Thank you for your support! 🙏

I invite those taking part in this to leave, in the comments, up to a paragraph of the writing the prompt has generated.

Here goes…