Do you use writing prompts?

Q&A With Shay Each Sunday

I started thinking about writing prompts lately when I reread an old prose poetry piece I wrote many years ago that was inspired by a prompt, so I’ll talk about writing prompts this week—what they are, how I’ve used them, and even come up with a few of my own if you want to try one.

Q: Do you use writing prompts?

A: Not usually. Our professors in grad school, especially one of my professors, in my MFA program at Sarah Lawrence gave us a lot of prompts for weekly assignments. I guess it was a way to keep us producing each week, moreover something new each week, in addition to the bigger writing projects we were working on for ourselves. I think prompts are a great tool to use if you’re feeling stuck for new ideas or if you want to create something with less pressure. A prompt takes the pressure off in my opinion because if it doesn’t work out or the story doesn’t go anywhere you can just think of it as a good experiment that you tried. Unlike with an idea you have brewing in your mind for a long time, there are more expectations attached to that.

I have never used a prompt for any of my books, nor do I think I ever will. I tend to come up with ideas for those with no problem. I typically like prompts for shorter pieces of writing. Even for some of my longer short stories I haven’t used prompts. I actually tried to a couple years ago and I picked that story back up to see if I wanted to work on it more and it didn’t seem like something I would have come up with. That’s the tricky thing about prompts, you don’t want to lose your voice because you’re trying to conform to specific parameters.

Some prompts are a lot more specific than others, some are a vague idea of what to write about, and I’m sure a lot of people have come up with great writing out of prompts. They can be good for journaling as well, though I’ve never actually used them for journaling, I can imagine it would help to get feelings out about certain topics.

I enjoyed prompts a lot in grad school and I enjoyed the feeling of accomplishment for writing something that I thought would be a lot more challenging than it turned out to be. I like the sentiment of them, I just don’t personally use them much. I used one for a poem recently when I found the prompt on Instagram and I really like the poem I wrote because I was inspired as soon as I saw the prompt. So, I guess it’s also about knowing what you want to pursue and what you like writing.

So, now to talk about a few prompts specifically. The piece of prose poetry I referenced in the beginning was The Blue World. It was published in The Belleville Park Pages in 2014 after I wrote it for an assignment in my MFA. The prompt was to write a piece using 50 different words—any 50 words we chose ourselves, but the piece itself had to be 200 words total. It was a challenge of repetition. It sounded really hard when it was assigned, because in writing it kind of seems like repetition should be avoided, but maybe not so much for poetry, which mine sort of ended up being. And it flowed fairly easily when I was writing.

Another prompt that same professor gave us was to write a story (I can’t remember whether it was 250 words or 500 words) but he gave us a list of 20 different words we had to use in the story. This was how my published story Riven Soul came into creation. Though, I did end up changing it since the initial assignment and I think I got rid of a few of the required words, so that one was a little trickier, but the prompt itself still led me to a story.

The poem prompt I found on Instagram that I mentioned was called Things No One Tells You About Growing Up, and it could be any poem as long as it had that theme and title, so the guidelines for that one were a little looser.

We also had several loose prompts assigned in my humor writing class in my MFA—an exaggerated character sketch assignment (the inspiration for Jenna Styles Ponders College), a personal humor essay on an aspect of our own lives (the inspiration for Don’t Quiet Down Please). And there were many others throughout my time at Sarah Lawrence. We also were assigned a few in the one creative writing class I took at Tulane in undergrad, but I can’t remember what any of the prompts were. This could lead to a foray back into my old folders of writing (something that terrifies me).

I entered the yearly Dan’s Papers nonfiction contest one year too where the guideline was to write any story as long as it was about the east end of Long Island. I never thought of that as a prompt before now, but in a way it was because I never would have written The Red Creek if not for that.

Prompts definitely serve a purpose in my opinion and I think if writers are inspired by them and able to use them effectively while sticking to their voice that’s a great accomplishment. Plus, they are fun and freeing and I’m looking forward to trying the ones I came up with here.

So, here are three of my own prompts that I created for you to try if you’re interested. I’ll be trying them out myself at some point—they may be shared or they may be buried away in my files forever. Feel free to let me know how it goes or give me your own thoughts on prompts!

1. Write a short poem in the form of a business card.

2. Write a story where the characters can’t stop laughing, and when they try to, they start again.

3. Write a confession—fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. It can be to someone in particular or just a journal entry, as long as something secret is being confessed.

Have fun with the prompts! Have you ever had any success/published/or even started a book off a prompt?