promptapalooza

some prompts for your pleasure

Should you be experiencing some fizzy joy as I have been, cherished reader, that has ideas jostling each other in your head and your wrist aching from transcribing missives from the grooviest muse, you can skip this post. Otherwise, I’ve added some delightful prompts to shake free your fruitful work from the tree.

http://Lauriestone.Substack.com/p/the-happiness-of-bats

See the always brilliant Laurie Stone’s newest blog from whence I sourced this amazing prompt. I have a poet’s sensibility but a novelist’s long wind and this prompt reminded me of what I love about short form. Making the words crystalline. The attention corkscrewing down into each word, each sentence, and the breathing between the words when read out loud. Enjoy and visit Laurie (and subscribe— it’s so worth it!) at the link, above.

400 Words by Laurie Stone

Maybe try this: take a chapter or a story you are working on that has begun to feel leggy and dead to you as you read it. Pick the most dramatic moment that still has some blood in it. It will probably have blood because the narrator is looking out at something and that moment has produced a reaction or a memory or a moment of philosophical contemplation for the narrator.

That moment will have some crisp descriptive elements that do the work of “show” rather than “tell” (summary and analysis), and the chunk will also use language in surprising ways. It will be free of cliches and truisms. Anyway, that’s what you’re looking for in your work.

Take your happy chunk and try writing it as a 400-word piece. Ask yourself if there is a more imagistic word you can exchange for a word that came quickly to mind. Try to make your chunk into a baby story all by itself without resolving anything or teaching anything or coming to conclusions based on a conversion model—I used to be, and now I’m not. Try to make the baby story into an element that would make YOU want to read what comes next.

This chunk, once you love the sound of it, is the new beginning of your chapter or story. The fact that it’s out of order chronologically, in terms of your earlier goes at the material, is a GOOD thing. Most of the stuff writers feel they must tell the reader they actually don’t need to tell the reader (IMHO). The reader wants the excitement of wondering not only what will happen next in the piece but what they may make of the things they are being told. — Laurie Stone

“Orson Welles has a quote which circulates sometimes (and gets chopped up and attributed to others — or, very possibly, it doesn’t really originate with Welles):

“We come into the world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship is the nearest thing that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone.”

The above words were wrenched rather forcibly from an essay on Medium from Jonathan Lethem a writer I adore. https://medium.com/@jonathan.lethem/be-kind-be-kind-be-kind-

Love and other drugs – a prompt

That quote put me in mind of a prompt one might attempt. Write about a person who is alone and in love. Then have a friendship with the same person that’s falling apart because of the new love. And then make the whole thing an illusion— the love, the friendship, or both.

I stumbled on this passage from the Aspen Ideas Festival from a Toni Morrison interview. Dost thou also think twould make a capital prompt?

Kurt Andersen: Since this is the Aspen Ideas Festival, I thought I would start with the question, do your novels tend to start with an image, a fragment of dialogue, a scene, or an idea?

Toni Morrison: Maybe “fragment” is the best word, because it is not a full-fledged idea. It is not a character, it is not a period. It is always a question that I have about something: “What if?” “What does it mean to…?” “Who survives under these circumstances, and who collapses?”And then I move from there.” -Toni Morrison

Read the rest of the interview here: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/toni-morrisons-ideas-for-writers-and-readers/

Finally, a prompt I wrote some months back I quite like in the form of a manipulated photo of a tree stump I morphed into a heart. There are also several prompts included in the image. Feel free to take what you need and leave the rest.
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Special thanks to Laurie Stone!
Heart Prompt – Patty Tomsky