Write an essay about something in your daily life that has quietly broken down but remains in use. Perhaps it’s a favorite chair with a wobbling leg, a jacket with a missing button, or a smartphone with a cracked screen. Begin with the object itself, describing its flaws in detail, then follow the thread outward: What does your continued reliance on it reveal about your habits, your history with broken things, and your relationship to loss? Consider how the imperfect object serves as a stand-in for resilience, denial, or attachment. Let the essay move between the object’s material reality and the emotional truths it props up.
Writing Prompts & Exercises
The Time Is Now
The Time Is Now offers three new and original writing prompts each week to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. We also curate a list of essential books on writing—both the newly published and the classics—that we recommend for guidance and inspiration. Whether you’re struggling with writer’s block, looking for a fresh topic, or just starting to write, our archive of writing prompts has what you need. Need a starter pack? Check out our Writing Prompts for Beginners.
Tuesdays: Poetry prompts
Wednesdays: Fiction prompts
Thursdays: Creative nonfiction prompts
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In her 1955 book The Edge of the Sea, marine biologist Rachel Carson explores the ecology of the Atlantic seashore. “When we go down to the low-tide line, we enter a world that is as old as the earth itself,” she writes, “the primeval meeting place of the elements of earth and water, a place of compromise and conflict and eternal change.” Write a short story that uses a shoreline as its setting. Consider the ways in which this meeting place of earth and water is a place where one might encounter change, conflict, and compromise. What sorts of sights specific to this merging of earth and water are observed, and how can you connect them to the major and minor conflicts in your narrative? Does your story conclude with the implication of further “eternal change,” or do you lead your characters to a seeming point of resolution?
“Life itself is kinship. We’re all a community of air,” says Mohammad Saud who operates a bird clinic in Delhi with his brother Nadeem Shehzad that predominantly treats the city’s omnipresent black kites and is the center of Shaunak Sen’s 2022 award-winning documentary, All That Breathes. The film is filled with footage not only of the raptors, but also of the many other creatures—including insects, reptiles, rats, and dogs—that have adapted to an urban environment teeming with pollution and sectarian violence, creating a sense of precarious, precious kinship between human civilization and nonhuman life. Write a poem that draws on observation of all the things that breathe around you. What lives in your local “community of air?”
In an essay in the New York Review of Architecture, Elvia Wilk writes about light pollution and the extensive effects and detriments of artificial lighting. “Everyone suffers, from bats—which are essential pollinators, predators, and fertilizers—to birds, to coral reefs, to orchids. The disruption occurs not only on the scale of the day, but on the scale of the season,” writes Wilk. “In cities, trees positioned next to streetlamps wait to shed their fall leaves for three weeks longer than trees unlit by lamps.” Write a personal essay that reflects on your own relationship to the various types of lighting around you, both artificial and natural. Describe the way sunlight affects you throughout the seasons and explore how lamps, overhead lighting, and streetlights shape your days and nights.
A career criminal, a florist owner, an aquarium tour guide, and a prison drama teacher. The characters in the 2022 French comedic heist movie The Innocent hold an array of colorful jobs, which provide intriguing imagery and set pieces, and assist in placing the characters in specific circumstances with rippling effects. This week write a short story that makes use of multiple unconventional jobs, as you define them. Choose a few that seem wildly different from what you know and are evocative to you personally. How do the tasks of these odd jobs circumscribe your characters’ actions and ways of problem-solving? Incorporate elements of comedy and action into your narrative to create a funny, fast-paced story.
In a recent New York Times article, architecture critic Michael Kimmelman visits various DIY concrete ramps in front of New York City bodegas with photographer Tom Wilson, who sees the ramps as “urban geology,” creative workarounds to make the shop doors accessible for hand trucks, strollers, and wheelchairs. Kimmelman describes the bodega ramps as a Rorschach test as they bring to mind glaciers, tongues, clamshells, ziggurats, and even “ladles of pancake batter spreading on a griddle.” Compose a poem dedicated to an overlooked feature of your locale, whether something in an urban environment that parallels natural formations or something in a more rural environment that reminds you of urban structures. You might play with features of concrete poetry, photographs, or illustrations to accompany your piece.
In I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, translated from the Chinese by Jack Hargreaves and forthcoming in October from Astra House, Hu Anyan collects essays he began writing while feeling stuck and unfulfilled in the many short-term jobs he moved through as a young man. Turning to reading and writing for solace, he began sharing his stories and connecting with readers. “Supposing work is something we are compelled to do, a concession of our personal will,” writes Hu, “then the other parts of life—those that remain true to our desires, that we choose to pursue, in whatever form they take—might be called freedom.” Compose a series of vignettes that look back on several past jobs you’ve had. What do they say about your work-life balance?
“Sometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions. Had it stolen her old mind and given her a new one? Had she been able to start over from scratch, a chance afforded to very few people?” Patricia Lockwood’s second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, forthcoming in September from Riverhead Books, chronicles a young woman’s hallucinatory descent as she navigates a loss of self during a global pandemic. Think back to the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic and consider the ways in which the rapidly changing world reconfigured your idea of self and your mindset as you dealt with social distancing and lockdown, sickness and death. Write a short story encapsulating a character’s loss of self during a period of social upheaval that catalyzes a gradual distancing from known reality. Whether your character sees this as a chance to start over or a moment to stand their ground, what do these actions reveal about their personality?
Sparrows have appeared in poetry throughout time—from Catullus writing about Lesbia’s pet sparrow to works by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles Bukowski. In Susan Howe’s Penitential Cries, forthcoming in September from New Directions, the concluding poem, “Chipping Sparrow,” with its clipped pacing and sound, as if to mimic a sparrow’s, illuminates a clear-eyed but lyrical notion of time as well as the physicality of life as experienced from the eighty-eight-year-old poet’s perspective. “Left the body // Drowsd a little / Done with soul / – // What to think / Dusting up crown // Garment mirror / Pull me close / – // Quietness and calm / Rest and rejoice // No more doubt / Astonishing!” Spend some time browsing through poems that mention this ubiquitous bird and note the range of symbolism: eros, love, humility, fragility. Then write your own sparrow poem that commemorates where you are in your life.
Think of an ordinary object you see almost every day: a chipped coffee mug, a frayed doormat, or the traffic light you always catch red. Write an essay that treats this object as if it were a silent witness to one chapter of your life. Give this object a voice and allow it to narrate this portion of your history in fragments, in terms of what it has seen you gain, what it has seen you lose, and the small, private moments it holds for you. Allow the object’s “voice” to reveal something about you that you rarely admit to others.
In Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (Atria Books, 2017), Hollywood icon Evelyn Hugo is hailed for her beauty, glamour, and sensational public life, and after announcing to auction her famous gowns to raise money for a breast cancer charity in honor of her late daughter, she grants a last interview to unknown journalist Monique Grant. During their conversations, Evelyn reveals the sides of herself often kept from the public—her relationship with her dutiful daughter, her heartbreaks, and her one true love—and the two connect in an unexpected way. Craft a scene in which the protagonist of your story hides behind a persona. When the facade falters, what is shown to be concealed?
In her elegiac poem “the rites for Cousin Vit,” Gwendolyn Brooks captures the aliveness of a loved one as she lays in her casket. Brooks writes: “Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss, / Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks / Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks.” Write a poem that captures the vibrant, unmistakable presence of someone you remember vividly, whether they are near or far, alive or gone. Focus on the small, lively details that make them unique: their gestures, their voice, the habits that linger in your memory. Consider how these fragments—imperfect, intimate, and raw—keep that person alive in your mind.
The Freaky Friday franchise, including the recently released film Freakier Friday, consists of film and theater productions revolving around the premise of a contentious parent-child relationship and a subsequent body swap, through which each character gains understanding and sympathy for the other as they are forced to live in each other’s shoes, and their relationship is strengthened. This week write a personal essay that considers how you would respond if given the fantastic ability to switch places—and bodies—with someone you are close to in your life. Perhaps begin by thinking about friends and family members whom you wish you understood better. Provide illustrative examples of the specific elements of this person’s life for which you seek clarification and understanding, and ultimately, a closer connection.
Last month, new research published in the Review of English Studies presented findings from a pair of scholars that solved a centuries-old mystery in Geoffrey Chaucer’s writings. A typo was discovered in a transcription of a twelfth-century sermon referencing a long-lost, and once popular, poem “The Tale of Wade” in which the word “wolves” was mistakenly written as “elves” and “sea snakes” written as “sprites.” In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Canterbury Tales, he referenced the poem and this same bumbled transcription appeared through the centuries, perplexing scholars as to why Chaucer would include mythical creatures in his stories of courtship with knights and ladies. Write a short story in which a typographical mistake results in a cascade of consequences for those who interpret the language in unexpected ways. Is the mistake eventually rectified or does the story conclude without anyone knowing?
“I often think of poetry as something that is beyond the true and the false,” says poet and critic Michael Leong on what he feels is true about the art of poetry in a Literary Hub interview with Peter Mishler. “Poetry’s strangeness is so tied up with how it productively messes with what we previously thought were stable truths and stable falsehoods.” Taking inspiration from this notion that poetry exists in a space that is “beyond the true and the false,” write a poem that explores a seemingly stable truth or falsehood, one that you may be interested in interrogating and undermining. Experiment with using surrealist imagery, playing with expanding far out into the white space of the page to stretch further into the incongruity of your subject.
In a recently published article in T Magazine, artists, including John Waters, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Khaled Hosseini, Geraldine Brooks, Art Spiegelman, Kate Bornstein, and Dread Scott, were interviewed about how censorship changed their work and lives. “The censorship does the opposite of what it wants to do,” said playwright and director Moisés Kaufman. “It makes people really think: ‘What are the issues in the play? Whose stories get to be told?’” This week write a personal essay that focuses on either a work of art, literature, or performance that has endured censorship at some point. Describe the work and the themes within the work that provoked censorship. How did this banning affect your ideas of the role of an artist?
The Last Showgirl is a 2024 drama film directed by Gia Coppola starring Pamela Anderson as a veteran Vegas dancer in her fifties who finds herself becoming obsolete as the revue she has headlined for three decades prepares to close. As Shelly considers other job prospects and a lifetime invested in and shaped by outmoded notions of femininity, eroticism, and glamour, she is faced with confronting the people in her life: the stage manager who remains at the venue producing a new show, her estranged daughter, and an old friend who works as a cocktail waitress and has alcohol and gambling addictions. Write a short story in which your main character is confronted with the harsh realities of social expectations as they age, particularly those around gender, beauty, and worth. What are their personal values around these concepts and how do they navigate the resulting tensions?
“If the dandelion on the sidewalk is / mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep / is an image because it moves when her body does,” writes Rick Barot in his poem “The Wooden Overcoat,” published in Poetry magazine in 2012. The speaker of the poem draws a distinction between a “detail” and an “image” defining the latter as something connected to a larger context and personal history that is “activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.” Compose a poem that experiments with this distinction, perhaps incorporating both a “detail” and an “image” so that each functions in an intentional way. You could consider beginning with an item and slowly shifting the reader’s understanding of its significance as the poem progresses. Look to Barot’s poem for inspiration on form and use of space.
“The Chelsea was like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive,” writes Patti Smith in her award-winning 2010 memoir, Just Kids, recounting her time living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City during the golden, gritty chaos of her youth. Inspired by this image, write an essay about returning to a place that once held deep meaning for you. It might be a childhood home, a first apartment, a rehearsal space, or a street corner that once felt like the center of your world. Explore what it feels like to stand in a space that is both familiar and changed. How does memory overlay reality? Do ghosts of your former self or others linger in the corners?
Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel, A Little Life, centers on the complex relationships between four college friends: Jude, Willem, JB, and Malcolm. JB, a painter, begins a new series of portraits based on his friends, working from memory. When he paints Jude, his enigmatic friend with whom he’s grown distant, he claims it’s a tribute. However, the portrait depicts Jude mid-stumble, highlighting the distinctive walk caused by his lifelong injuries and trauma, and the image is widely seen as exploitative by their friends. This moment marks a betrayal and demonstrates how attempting to capture another person’s essence, even someone you love, can sometimes be dangerous. Write a story about a narrator trying to understand someone they were once close with, perhaps a sibling, friend, or lover. What image do they want to believe? What truths remain unseen?
Many poems are written in the heat of falling in love with someone or something, with descriptions of desire, first touches, and breathless beginnings. But what happens after the crescendo when routine replaces urgency, when glances no longer surprise, and when love becomes less about being seen and more about staying? Write a poem about what it feels like to love someone or something after the rush. You could write about a partner, a city, a craft, or a version of yourself. Focus on the quiet gestures, the dailiness, and the things you no longer say out loud. How does love change when it no longer needs to perform?
What might someone whom you’ve just encountered for the first time never guess about you? What do you think your loved ones associate most with you? Consider these questions and write a lyric essay that consists of two parts: a speculative section with your own musings about how your outward appearance or demeanor might drive people to assume certain characteristics about you, and how those expectations might be subverted. And a second part in which you either choose one person who knows you well and consider the ways they would describe your most distinctive propensities, or meditate on a number of people who are close to you and create a chorus of their lasting impressions of you. Do these two parts make a whole?
Literature has a long history of narratives that are built around fictionalized letters and correspondence—Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from the eighteenth century, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the nineteenth century, and more contemporary novels such as Stephen King’s Carrie, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. This week compose an epistolary short story incorporating letters, postcards, e-mails, texts, social media posts, news articles, receipts, and other tidbits of written documents. How do these disparate elements work together to create a story that has to be puzzled together?
In their poem “In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in 2023, Andrea Gibson, who passed away on July 14, wrote about a newfound gratitude for life while being treated for terminal cancer. “Remind me / all my prayers were answered // the moment I started praying / for what I already have,” wrote Gibson. Write a poem that expresses gratitude through confronting the mortal nature of being human. What do you already have in your life that you might be taking for granted? Perhaps begin by listing some of the beautiful things you saw today.
The rate at which the Earth rotates has been gaining speed, and as a result, days have been slowly getting shorter over the last ten years, according to a recent New York Times article. Yet, for many millennia before, the days were gradually growing longer, with a T. rex living through days that were only about twenty-three and a half hours long. Though these incremental changes in time are too tiny in scale for us to register, time can certainly feel like it moves at different rates. Write a personal essay that recounts a situation from your past that took place either over a seemingly expanded or contracted span of time. Experiment with how you speed up or slow down your retelling, either mimicking or contradicting the essay’s pacing with how the experience felt.
In the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure directed by Ruben Östlund, a family on a ski vacation in the French Alps has a scare when a controlled avalanche threatens the lodge where they are staying and the father runs away from the oncoming snow, leaving behind his wife and two young children. All remain safe but the event causes tension in their marriage. Over dinner with friends, they discuss how in moments of crisis one would hope to do the heroic thing, but one never really knows until something actually happens. Write a short story that begins with an intense and startling event and build your story around each character’s response. What sorts of personality traits are revealed in the aftermath? You might play around with incorporating different characters’ perspectives or versions of what happened to provide tension.
In a recent interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series by Chloe Garcia Roberts, the late Fanny Howe, who passed away on July 9, spoke of a revelatory experience writing “with the environment” at Annaghmakerrig, an artists’ retreat where she wrote her 1995 collection, O’Clock. “It was complete solitude, and an actual attempt to write, for the first time, with the environment,” says Howe. “Instead of sitting and looking out of the window, I just sank into the weather and the trees, dancing around in the environment of Ireland, which I know by its smell.” This week, find a spot outside as close to nature as possible, perhaps simply a location with trees, and try to sink into the landscape. Write a poem that captures the feelings of your surroundings, meditating on minute sensory details and the emotions that the environment evokes.
In a recent New Yorker article about the past, present, and future of Brooklyn’s popular Green-Wood Cemetery, Paige Williams writes about a tour guide who “urged her audience not to leave a decision as important as eternity to others” and a cemetery employee who has already decided the guest list, what beverages to serve, and the playlist for his future funeral. Write a personal essay that meditates on your thoughts about your own post-death wishes. Whether it’s something you’ve thought about and planned meticulously already or something you mostly avoid, take the time to consider rituals, traditions, and funerals you’ve attended, as well as the array of options to choose from as technology and trends evolve. How do you envision your eternal send-off and resting place?
Neuroplasticity refers to the ability of the brain to adapt, grow, and evolve throughout our lives by forming new neural connections. But what about actual plastics in the brain? While past studies have presented findings that our bodies are increasingly becoming filled with microplastics, more recent research has shown that a significant amount of these plastics are accumulating in the brain—possibly an average of an entire spoon’s worth. This week write a short story that postulates on the effects of this biological issue. The premise may lend itself naturally to a dystopian, apocalyptic story of sci-fi horror, but are there other elements and genres that you can experiment with, such as satire, romance, or mystery?
In a 4Columns review of After Words: Visual and Experimental Poetry in Little Magazines and Small Presses, 1960–2025 (Granary Books, 2025) edited by Steve Clay and M. C. Kinniburgh, a catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Grolier Club in New York, Albert Mobilio lists a few of the unconventional poetry forms from the show: “A cardboard box stuffed with crumpled slips of paper; a book in which each line of text appears on its own sliver of a page; a series of poems printed on what look like business cards; knotted lengths of wool stenciled with verse.” This week think beyond words on a page and conceptualize a new poetry project that makes use of different pictorial and material elements. How might you split up words, lines, or stanzas on a variety of surfaces?
“Their romance has started in earnest this summer, but the prologue took up the whole previous year,” writes Susan Choi in the beginning of her 2019 award-winning novel, Trust Exercise, in which two high school freshmen fall in love and experience an intense love affair until they return to their performing arts school the next fall. When other classmates and teachers get involved, the outlines of their burgeoning relationship begin to seem less clear as the realities and complexities of group social dynamics come into play. Write a personal essay that chronicles the subtle or dramatic shifts of a relationship you’ve had in which your dynamic with the other person encountered some sort of transformation when the setting or surroundings of your relationship changed. Did issues of power, control, or social expectations have an effect? What questions arise when considering performance of the self in private versus in public?
Written and directed by Celine Song, Materialists is a film about a matchmaker at a high-end agency in New York City and her own trials of love. She interviews and maneuvers her clients who have very specific demands for their potential dating partners, testing the mechanics of worth and value, and seeing people through the lens of market capitalism. Characters are bluntly forthcoming about age preferences and job salaries, an honesty that may seem surprising when considered against old-fashioned social norms which deem it vulgar to talk about money. Write a story in which one of your characters is uncommonly direct about financial matters—whether about having a lot or a little, or how much they spend, earn, and save. How does bringing money into the picture illuminate issues of class between your characters?
Summer is often a season of extremes with scorching pavement and icy drinks, painful sunburns and soothing shade, chaotic activities and calming stillness. Write a poem that explores the tension or intimacy between extremes. Consider a specific, concrete pairing, such as a cold popsicle melting down your wrist in 100-degree heat or the boisterous laughter at a backyard barbecue countered by the silence of an abandoned porch swing. Focus on how contrast sharpens a sensation and can uncover deeper emotional truths. Try to avoid naming the opposites directly, instead, evoke them through details like textures, temperature, tone, and movement. You might also experiment with form to reflect duality by including couplets or mirrored stanzas.
In Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang and forthcoming in August from Riverhead Books, the protagonist Yu Ling works as a nanny for a wealthy couple and their young son in China, after initially taking on duties assisting in the art studio of her employer, Qin Wen. In a flashback, Yu Ling recalls a remark by Qin Wen about an artist she admires: “Do you know why Alice Neel liked drawing mothers and children so much? It’s because she abandoned her own child.” Compose a pair of short lyrical essays, one that originates from loss and one that begins with a thing achieved or acquired. You might start with your instinctive responses to personal losses and gains, whether physical or more abstract. Do your attendant essays mirror each other or diverge?
“It was all so different than he expected. / For years he’d been agnostic; now he meditated. / For years he’d dreamed of being an artist living abroad; / now he reread Baudelaire, Emerson, Bishop. / He’d never considered marriage … / Still, a force through the green fuse did drive.” So begins Henri Cole’s poem “At Sixty-Five,” which appears in The Other Love, forthcoming in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a collection in which Cole reflects on the shifting observations of a person as they age and gain new perspective on the passing of time and the accumulation of memories. Write a short story from the point of view of someone older than you, which begins with the sentence “It was all so different than I expected.” Is your inclination to plot out key milestones in your character’s life before you begin writing or to simply see where the character’s meditations take you?
In the essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda and published by New Directions in June, Yoko Tawada explores various aspects of life, communication, and art through a lens of linguistic and cultural hybridity. In “Paris: This Language Which Is Not One,” Tawada writes about a poem by Paul Celan in which the German words for dwindling (Neige) and snow (Schnee) appear in adjacent lines, pointing out that Neige means snow in French. “To me, Celan’s poems have a multilingual structure akin to a magic net that even captures Japanese, a language he never knew,” Tawada notes. Write a poem in which you deploy a “magic net” that allows you the freedom to play with associative, expansive thinking, capturing any basic knowledge of words in other languages or dialects or registers. What unexpected connections can be made?
In award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan’s debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home (Avid Reader Press, 2025), she explores themes of loss and exile in conjunction with her experience preparing for the arrival of a new baby through surrogacy after years of struggling with infertility and miscarriages. While looking forward to the birth of her daughter, Alyan reflects on her family’s history with immigration and her childhood moving around Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, the UAE, Texas, and Oklahoma, and examines the roles of heritage and matriarchal storytelling. Write a personal essay that looks to the role of storytelling in your own family and childhood. What stories were told to you by parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and elders in your community? How are these stories and myths connected to your cultural inheritance and your formation as a writer and storyteller?
Double-booking can be a hilarious premise for comedy, as in the wedding rom-com films Bride Wars and You’re Cordially Invited in which two weddings are booked for the same venue on the same day, or a terrifying setup for horror, as in the 2022 film Barbarian in which a woman arrives at a rental home already occupied by a mysterious guest. This week write a short story that revolves around a reservation error that results in characters being unexpectedly forced into sharing a space. Do the opposing parties know each other or are they complete strangers? You might consider playing with narrative perspective and incorporating portions from opposing characters’ points of view or experimenting with a fragmentary structure to evoke suspense and disorientation. Is your story a comedy or horror of errors?
To write their latest book, People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (Columbia University Press, 2025), Tom Comitta used data compiled from a specially designed national public opinion poll on literary preference and composed two novels: a formulaic, fast-paced thriller and an experimental epistolary sci-fi romance with elderly aristocratic tennis players as protagonists. Responses to the poll included preferences and aversions to attributes such as characters’ identities, genre, verb tense, setting, and point of view. Taking a cue from this project, jot down a brief list of what you would guess to be the most and least desired attributes of poetry, including rhyme, length, diction, and imagery. Write a “Most Wanted Poem” and “Most Unwanted Poem” based on your list. How do your own idiosyncrasies and thoughts around literary taste infiltrate each piece?
In the comedic documentary series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder helps ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations they may be dreading by creating precisely replicated environments and hiring actors to prepare for each scenario. The elaborate sets include a fully functioning bar with patrons, a household with a child actor, and an exact reproduction of a Houston airport terminal. Compose a personal essay about a necessary conversation that has been weighing on you and write out several vignettes exploring potential ways the exchange might play out given your knowledge of your own mindset as well as the person you’re confronting. Consider incorporating thoughts about how some reactions or behaviors may be impossible to predict. How might this rehearsal of sorts help calm your nerves or provide an understanding of your own social tendencies?
Can a typo inspire a story? In the opening paragraph of Anelise Chen’s memoir, Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025), the narrator recalls a text message from her mother wherein the phrase “calm down” has been transformed, whether through a typo or autocorrect, into “clam down.” This cryptic mistake becomes the premise for a story of metamorphosis and connections, withdrawal and closing up, and family history, as Chen weaves in mollusk science and explores a long-ago period of her father’s retreat from the family. Spend some time observing words and language you see in your daily life from text messages, signage, advertisements, and labels. Select a phrase that has the potential to be interpreted in an open way and leads you into writing a new story, perhaps one that incorporates science, the natural world, and elements of the fantastic.
The poems in Charity E. Yoro’s debut collection, Ten-cent Flower & Other Territories (First Matter Press, 2023), largely circle around the political history and her personal experience of the Hawaiʻian islands. Her poem “postcard from rome” takes on the feeling of a postcard that arrives unexpectedly in the mail—a surprising and sudden intrusion of an exotic locale. This week, write a poem titled “Postcard From…” and think back to your memories of visiting a new place. Try to reach far from what’s currently at the forefront of your mind, as well as the themes and topics you typically explore in your poetry. Allow this poem to drop in to your current body of writing like a short, evocative glimpse of another time and place—a gentle disruption to your usual flow.
“The price of the ride was listening to people talk.” This sentiment is expressed by the young narrator of Joe Westmoreland’s 2001 coming-of-age autofictional book, Tramps Like Us, reissued this week by MCD, to describe his hitchhiking adventures in search of queer belonging and identity. The novel portrays a wide range of characters Joe comes across, befriends, works with, sleeps with, and sometimes loses on the road and in various cities. Compose a memoiristic piece that recounts a cast of characters you’ve met in the past, perhaps only briefly as you traveled from one place to another, who had colorful tales about lives very different from your own. Incorporate snippets of dialogue, trying as best as possible to recall any idiosyncrasies in their speech or vocabulary. Reflect on what you learned from listening and why these stories have stayed with you through the years.
In the dystopian world of Hon Lai Chu’s novel Mending Bodies (Two Lines Press, 2025), translated from the Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, a Conjoinment Act has been passed by the government wherein people are encouraged to have their bodies surgically joined to another person, creating couples who purportedly become more fulfilled beings while providing improvements for economic and environmental states. The novel’s structure alternates between sections detailing the narrator’s struggles with her own thinking and decision-making around “conjoining” and sections of her dissertation on the program’s history, including case studies and the origins of bodily “conjoinment.” Taking inspiration from this format, create a dystopian premise in which a society’s government has instituted an optional, controversial policy. Write a short story which intersperses bits of fictionalized research within the in-scene action for a touch of surrealism.
Asked where great poems come from, Alice Notley, who passed away last month, responded in a 2024 interview for the Paris Review’s Art of Poetry series: “I think the real answer has to do with suffering, and how you perceive things after suffering. You might just freeze, but if you don’t, other worlds open to you.” In remembrance of Notley, write a poem that considers how your perceptions may have shifted in subtle or substantial ways after a time of loss or sorrow. Notley spoke of “hearing the dead” in dreams and receiving advice. What new worlds have opened up to you as a result of this difficult experience? How can you use lyric form to give voice to your emotions?
In the 1997 film Face/Off, an FBI agent survives an assassination attempt that kills his young son and is out for vengeance and justice. To foil this criminal’s next plot to bomb the city, the agent undergoes a secret surgery to replace his face with that of the criminal, only to have him surgically don the agent’s face, effectively creating a mirrored switch in physical identities and an epic showdown. Notable for its flabbergasting premise, another aspect of the film’s cult popularity is director John Woo’s signature style and trademark motifs: balletic action sequences, doves and churches, deadlocked gunfights, and coats blowing in slow motion in the wind. Write an essay about a dramatic situation from your past in which you insert small details and observations of physical description that complement the tone of your piece. How might you translate a slow-motion effect in cinema to a slow-motion moment in your storytelling?
“This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T. S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” described in his obituary in the New York Times as “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” When considering the ending of something enormously consequential, the expectation might be that the external drama of that conclusion match one’s internal turmoil, however the sorrow of Eliot’s sentiment comes through in the idea of ending not with something explosive and abrupt, but with something much smaller, anticlimactic, and quiet. Write a short story that revolves around an ending of some sort—whether it be the world, a war, or a relationship—and include some portion of these last four lines of Eliot’s poem.
In storytelling, the narrative strategy of beginning in medias res is to launch into the middle of a plot. Frequently applied to the composition of contemporary novels and films, such as Fight Club, Forrest Gump, and Raging Bull, the storytelling device can be traced back to Homer’s Greek epic poem The Iliad, which opens at the tail end of the Trojan War. This week write a poem that begins in medias res. Think of a story you’d like to recount in narrative verse and then select a starting point that may be much later than the logical or conventional beginning of the action. Sprinkle in flashbacks and recollections of memory to fill in any necessary pieces of context that allude to earlier events.
In her latest book, In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin, 2025), poet Heather Christle explores her past and her relationship with her mother through the life and work of Virginia Woolf. Christle reflects on the difficult, and sometimes painful, writing process for the book in an essay published on Literary Hub: “There’s a line from a Tony Tost poem I often think about: ‘I don’t know how to talk about my biological father, so I’m going to describe the lake.’ I had so many lakes. I began the process of draining them.” Spend some time jotting down a wide-ranging list of inspiring works of art, geographical locations, and cultural touchstones that are of interest to you. Then, begin an essay by describing something from your list that is seemingly disconnected from a difficult subject matter from your life, and inch your way toward it.
“Nothing happens without a reason. Everything was determined by something prior.” In Devs, a 2020 science fiction television miniseries written and directed by Alex Garland, the viewer is presented with heady questions around determinism and free will as more and more is revealed about a quantum simulation project at a cutting-edge tech company that appears to have the ability to simulate the world at any and all places and times, past and future. Write a short story in which you examine these ideas through characters with opposing opinions about the freedom to change the course of one’s life. You might choose to delve into science fiction or fantasy, or develop your story around a romance or a comedy of errors. What events in the past lead each character to their respective ways of thinking?