I’m writing this post today in celebration of being featured today in Rattle Magazine’s tribute to prompt poems.
And while I’m not a fan of bragging, I can’t help being delighted to be published in such a reputable magazine that I like so much–makes it worth all the hours of submission/rejection drudgery.
One of my writing groups calls me The Submission Queen because I spend so much time trying to get my work out there and encouraging others to submit, as well. But I’d prefer to think of myself as The Prompt Queen. Truly, I don’t know where I would be in my writing life without prompts.
I’d written all through high school and in college (as an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing) and slogged my way through a couple of drafts of a novel, but I didn’t feel like I’d even begun to find my voice until my late 20s, when I took my first workshop with the late but immortal Pat Schneider of Amherst Writers & Artists. Choose an object, Pat would say as she’d lay out a bouquet of ordinary things on the coffee table: an egg beater, a hand-crocheted doily, a jar of French’s mustard, a hammer with nicks on the handle. And if you don’t know why you’re choosing it, that’s a good thing. Then write whatever this object inspires you to write.
There was something about the freedom granted, the atmosphere in the room to say anything (or nothing–no one ever had to share their writing) that unlocked a gate in me, and in nearly everyone that took part in this process, whether we wrote about childhood memories this object evoked or sauntered off on some surrealistic language adventure where the object had, at most, a cameo role.
Pat would usually follow up her object exercise with pictures, or lines from poems, or a collection of things to smell or touch, or a meditation to bring back a memory or dream scene. It didn’t really matter what she offered. Following the prompt bypassed my inner critic’s need to write something “good.” I could simply pick up my pen and play, and with that playfulness came surprising turns of language and metaphors and scenes from my subconscious I would have never conjured up with my mind on more active patrol. So, I’ve continued to seek prompts wherever I can find them: in writing groups, in online subscriptions, or in my own collections of poems and pictures.
This doesn’t mean that all prompts work for me or that whatever I write comes out perfect and polished. I still file away a lot of this writing in the dead zone in my computer marked “Inactive.” But often I’m able to take what I wrote in a prompt and wrestle it into a poem, or flash fiction piece, or develop it further into an essay or short-story. Occasionally I’ve used prompts to enhance scenes in my novels or longer creative non-fiction projects.
And whether what I write turns into something finished or not, I have fun! And I often get to vicariously release whatever useless stressful thoughts are gnawing at me in a creative and playful way. In these dark times, there’s a lot to be said for the value of playing.
Revital Salomon, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
So, if you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy my Rattle poem (while I enjoy my 15 minutes of fame). And here’s a link to the poem (prompt) that inspired it. And a picture of the moon, because that also could have been a prompt that inspired this poem.
And to jumpstart your own prompt process, I highly recommend Pat Schneider’s book, Writing Alone and With Others.
I highly recommend writing dates with friends (either in-person or on Zoom) as a way of getting going. In addition to enjoying a brief visit before writing, I couldn’t just tweak a poem or two and then get up to succumb to the call of the unpaid bills or the weedy garden, because at the end of the session I knew we’d be reporting to each other on what we’d done and possibly sharing some of our work. Even as I flitted from poem to poem and took several breaks for Wordle and its Dordle and Quordle variants, not to mention checking email and social media, I kept coming back–until I could look at a poem and remember why I wrote it and why it might still matter. And that helped me finally make the shift back to my creative center.
Taking any creative risk is like driving through fog. We may not see the entire landscape of where we’re going in front of us; perhaps we can only see the vaguest contours, or a few inches of the road’s white line and a pair of headlights coming at us from the opposite direction, but we plod on ahead, focused only on what we can see, with the faith that if we keep going, the tops of the trees will slowly come into view.
In fact,