The Prompt-O-Matic: #45
A little something to get you writing.
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-fifth 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-fifth 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…
Here’s the prompt:
A passage in a novel I read on vacation last week sparked a memory of a very happy moment in a terrible old romance. It made me reflect on that relationship and what had kept me in it for too long: that brief, blissful time, and the notion that if it happened once, it could surely happen again.
Never mind that the happy moment, and a few other sweet times we had, constituted about 5% of our entire time together. But when I was in it, that 5% got magnified to the point that it nearly occluded the other 95% of our bad dynamic.
This week, write about a blissful interaction you had with someone—an experience you return to in your mind, or used to. Just a very happy moment in your life, with another person. It doesn’t have to mirror the experience I mention here—it can be with someone with whom you’ve had a perfectly fine relationship. It doesn’t have to be a romantic partner.
I mean, there really are no rules, I’m just providing fodder to awaken memories and ideas in your mind. Write about whatever this brings up for you that you feel is worth pursuing. (This applies to all my prompts, by the way.)
As always, bring this to life with scenes and dialogue, and a balance of showing and telling.
If you’d like, you can leave up to a paragraph of your response in the comments.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving. I hope it’s drama-free! PPS I’m grateful to all of my subscribers. I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you!!! 🙏 💝
***Please remember that this is for paid subscribers only, and not to be shared.
Thanks!
-Sari