“Cold, moist, young phlegmy winter now doth lie / In swaddling clouts, like new-born infancy,” writes Anne Bradstreet in the opening lines of her 1650 poem “Winter.” In her seasonal poem, Bradstreet traverses from the month of December to “cold, frozen January,” and finally to “moist snowy February,” cycling through the movements of the sun, the length of day, and the sensation of warmth or chill on the body. Though we often think of winter as one portion of the year’s seasons, how do the individual months of winter feel to you? Write a poem that tracks your personal memories from multiple Decembers, Januaries, and Februaries (or Junes, Julys, and Augusts in the Southern Hemisphere), perhaps thinking of these months as smaller, concentric or overlapping circles within a larger one.

The work of French novelist Édouard Louis concerns itself with capturing the past and its indelible effect on the present, as the author explores the facts of his life through novelistic means. In his first autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy (FSG, 2017), translated by Michael Lucey, Louis details the experience of growing up poor and gay in a homophobic, working-class French town; in History of Violence (FSG, 2018), translated by Lorin Stein, Louis endures a brutal attack and then overhears his sister telling her husband about the assault; and in A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (FSG, 2022), translated by Tash Aw, Louis tells the story of his mother’s moving to Paris to live a new life on her own terms. Inspired by Louis’s autobiographical novels, write an essay that considers a time in your life in which you felt the urge to change or become someone new. Try to capture the intricacies of the past—the difficulties, the hopes, the dreams—through a form that reflects the transformative urgency of that moment.

While a character’s backstory can often provide the engine to a plot, how much backstory is too much? In “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” published in the New Yorker in 2022, Parul Sehgal discusses the prevalence of the “trauma plot,” which relies on a character’s past trauma to move the story forward. Citing examples such as Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life (Doubleday, 2015), Jason Mott’s novel Hell of a Book (Dutton, 2021), and the television series Ted Lasso, Sehgal argues that the trauma plot “flattens, distorts, reduces character to symptom, and, in turn, instructs and insists upon its moral authority.” In contrast, Sehgal cites instances in which omitting backstory provides an effective air of mystery to a character, or what Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt calls “strategic opacity.” Taking inspiration from this critique, write a story in which the backstory of your character is kept from the reader. What happens when you resist explanation for a character’s choices? What tools other than backstory can you use to create a dynamic character?