“I was born on the banks of the Rukarara, but I have no memory of it. My memories come from my mother and her inconsolable nostalgia.” In the first pages of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Murmurs From the Hills: Rwandan Tales, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and published by Archipelago Books in November, the author recounts a genre-defying collection of stories reminiscent of an oral history. Blending mythology and memoir, the stories recount the horrors of the Rwandan civil war and genocide along with other memories lived and passed down by family members. In this hybrid form of storytelling, Mukasonga creates a retelling of history—and therefore a retelling of the present and the future—with contributions from a complex range of voices with layered knowledge. Write a lyric essay that braids some of your early memories with stories passed down from your ancestors. Allow yourself the freedom to invent your own mythologies.
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 the anthologies What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2019) and What My Father and I Don’t Talk About (Simon & Schuster, 2025), editor Michele Filgate collected over a dozen essays by authors writing about their struggles in communicating with parental figures. Write your own essay about something you have always felt like you could never talk about with your mother, father, or other guardian. What were the barriers to honesty, and what do you imagine could or would have helped you break your silence? Was it more about what you didn’t want to say or what you perhaps didn’t want to hear back in response? You might bring in your personal reflections about honesty and vulnerability in other relationships to shed insight on your parent-child dynamic.
In a 1988 issue of the Yale Review, an essay titled “Making Contact: Encounters With Readers” by Annie Dillard, who passed away earlier this month, consists of a series of short segments recalling the letters, notes, and items she had received from readers who felt compelled to write to her. Dillard recounts readers who sent her missives about their lives, short stories they had written, existential questions, religious objects, medical journal articles, a marriage proposal, pamphlets about God, dead insects, and numerous bits of ephemera. Taking inspiration from this form, think about memorable things that you have received in the mail or in person over the years. Compose a chronicle of people who have given you these letters or objects, and write short reflections that explore both the content and the context of these interactions. How might the collection reveal something about the role you play in others’ existences?
What books do you turn to when you need a bit of consolation? Comfort reads are books that readers return to again and again; knowledge of the trajectory of the story providing a bit of a warm and fuzzy feeling and relief from stress or melancholy. Whether you’re feeling downtrodden because of a dreary time of year, a recent crisis, an illness, or general distress, a comfort read—even if just reading a few pages or excerpts—is liable to restore cheer from its well-worn familiarity. Write a personal essay about some of your favorite comfort reads, whether novels, poetry collections, memoirs, graphic novels, or even children’s picture books. Recount your earliest reading of the book and other times when you have turned to it again. Even if you have found different things to value in subsequent readings, what are the reliable elements that continue to provide an uplifting feeling?
“To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return,” says Jhumpa Lahiri in her 2021 Sebald Lecture “In Praise of Echo.” In the lecture, Lahiri invites readers to think of translation in broad terms, as not simply restating something in another language, but as a “miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.” Spend time with this idea of translation as transformation and write a personal essay about an experience in which you metamorphosed an experience, an emotion, or yourself into a different “language.” This language might be a visual art form, music, a different genre of literature, or another form of expression.
Music often has the ability to evoke a strong sense of nostalgia, whether it’s favorite songs played over and over during a certain phase of life or heard on the radio for a season. Songs can be introduced or recommended by loved ones, and lyrics might remind us of a particular person. Music could have even been sung along to during childhood road trips with family or become the perfect soundtrack for a specific town or city you’ve visited or lived in. Jot down a list of several songs that bring you back to a certain someone, someplace, or sometime. Write a personal essay composed of a series of vignettes about each song and the sense of nostalgia and associated memories that arise when you listen to the music. As you write, you might want to listen to the songs and incorporate lyrics into your essay.
In Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy film The Christophers, a young Black artist takes on an assignment to forge a series of paintings by an elderly, white, formerly renowned painter, whose earlier works are worth millions. The older painter’s grown children hope that the eventual sales of these forged earlier works will provide them with an influx of wealth as the painter has not produced noteworthy pieces in decades and has since been “canceled.” Initially an antagonistic relationship between an older artist and his supposedly hired-out-of-nowhere assistant, the two eventually warm toward each other and develop a bond through their exchanges about the value and legacy of art. Write a personal essay about an instance when you forged an unusual bond with an unlikely stranger or acquaintance, despite significant differences in age, identity, and temperament. What conversations and ideas brought you two together?
In Amy Gallo’s essay, “Forever Faithful to a Single Story: An Ode to Monogamous Writing,” published on Literary Hub, the author writes about her decades-long commitment to a single manuscript and how she adamantly avoided juggling multiple writing projects in the process of publishing her first book. “I couldn’t move on because I was still spoken for, I suppose, my consciousness occupied by the single story closest to my heart,” writes Gallo. Write a personal essay reflecting on your commitment to an essay or manuscript you’ve been working on. Do you tend to focus on one project at a time or do you enjoy taking breaks with something new?
Jérôme Lindon by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti and forthcoming from Archipelago Books in September, is the story of the author’s decades-long friendship with his publisher, Jérôme Lindon, who directed the renowned French publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit for over a half century. “It begins on a snowy day, on Rue de Fleurus in Paris, January 9, 1979,” writes Echenoz. “I’ve written a novel, my first. I don’t know if it’s only my first; I don’t know if I’ll write another. All I know is that I’ve written one, and if I could find a publisher for it, that would be good.” The book’s final page concludes twenty-two years later, after Echenoz receives news that Lindon has died. Write a memoiristic account that chronicles an important friendship with someone you have worked with professionally, beginning with your first meeting. Reflect on their admirable qualities along with their less-than-perfect traits to provide a tribute that encompasses their humanness.
In a recent interview published on the Creative Independent, author and editor Naomi Falk talks about the importance of ritual and her daily morning habits of cooking, meditation, walking, and dream journaling. “I adore the morning time,” she says. “Between the hours of six and nine, everything that I do is just for myself.” Write a personal essay that takes a look at how you like to start and end your day, including the type of atmosphere and activities that help you ease into the morning and how you like your night to wrap up. Where might spirituality or dreams come into play? Does exercise or body movement contribute to a sense of warming up or cooling down before and after the day’s events? Consider how your relationship to patterns and repetitive habits say something about where you are in your life.
Ships and boats, clocks, bird cages, Black dolls, antlers, and masks. Artist Betye Saar, who passed away last month at the age of ninety-nine, was renowned for her assemblage works created with found objects that she gathered in her studio over the course of decades, objects she used to explore social issues of racism, stereotypes, femininity, and spirituality. “I’ve always felt that old objects hold a power,” Saar stated in a 2024 New York Times interview. “They’ve survived, and they have a sense of the previous owner. They have a spirit.” What objects have you collected over the years? Jot down a list of old objects, perhaps the types of everyday items you might find at a garage sale or antique collectibles shop. Then, write a lyric essay with short reflections, experimenting with how to put the objects in play with one another thematically when you consider their spirit and who owned them previously.
In her 2024 memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, published by Penguin Life, Glynnis MacNicol lists the items in her suitcase when packing to live in Paris for a year and reveals that Joan Didion was a source of inspiration. “In The White Album, Joan Didion famously wrote down her packing list, radical at the time—Tampax!— and revealing in its intimacy and simplicity,” writes MacNicol. “As a storytelling device, it was admirable in what it told the reader about the writer, about her life, and about what it meant to be a woman in the world, without seeming to say much.” Write a personal essay anchored by a list of your belongings—whether it be from a suitcase, grocery tote, or any other bag. Consider using certain items as entry points into memories and experiences, using them like pieces of a portrait, each adding another layer to you in that moment.
“My essay on tigers started with the question of whether Blake, when he wrote ‘The Tyger,’ had ever seen a real tiger,” says Eliot Weinberger in an interview by Srikanth Reddy for the Paris Review’s “Art of the Essay” series. “That got me looking into the mythology and image of the tiger in the West.” Stemming from a deceptively simple question, Weinberger’s celebrated essay “Paper Tigers” investigates the complex history of tiger iconography and fascination with the wild animal. Write an essay that begins with a simple question and draws from a piece of mythos, whether cultural or private, that is present in your life. What associations and symbolisms does your subject conjure for you?
In “The Revenge of the Philosophy Majors,” a recent article published in the New York Times, Benjamin Wallace writes about philosophy scholars who have found themselves high in demand in the burgeoning field of AI ethics and this growing trend of hiring philosophers with AI training. “One of humanity’s oldest disciplines and one of its newest inventions feel distinctly made for each other,” writes Wallace. “A.I. presents a fresh way for philosophers to ask ancient questions...of truth and belief and knowledge (epistemologists); of reasoning (logicians); of mind and consciousness (philosophers of mind and consciousness).” Write a personal essay that explores your own ideas about the potential benefits and detriments of the increasing presence of artificial intelligence in all aspects of life. What ethical or moral issues come to mind when you reflect on how we should interact with AI?
In the film Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, a science teacher is sent aboard an interstellar spacecraft to investigate a star that may hold the key to fight off a celestial parasite damaging the sun and threatening mass extinction on Earth. As the sole survivor of the three-man crew, he must attempt a “Hail Mary,” a last-ditch effort to save humanity. Think about a time in your past when you attempted a Hail Mary, whether in a sporting game, in an interpersonal relationship, or in the context of a relatively mundane task. Write a personal essay that tells the story before, during, and after your efforts. At what point did you decide that there was nothing left to lose, and that the only solution was to throw caution to the wind with a long shot?
In an interview published in the Paris Review’s summer 2026 issue for their “Art of Fiction” series, Jeremy Tiang speaks to Yan Lianke, noting that throughout the course of their conversations, the author would “slip into the third person, as if describing himself as a character in his fiction, or sometimes into the second person, as if addressing his past self.” This week, write a personal essay about the city, town, or region where you grew up and your experiences there. Experiment with slipping between different points of view while still retaining your personal perspective. You might decide to start in the first person, and then address your past self in the second, before zooming further out into third person, or toggle multiple times between narrative points-of-view as befits the sense of distance you desire.
In “The Tally,” an essay by Anne Enright recently published in the New Yorker, the author thinks back on a childhood memory in which her mother returned to a grocery store to settle the difference because she had been undercharged for a Christmas turkey. Enright explores her feelings of indignation at her family’s morality in the face of “corporate interest” and “predatory capitalism,” but then concludes that “integrity is also a way to hold the self together” and that “honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.” Write a personal essay that reflects on how your own stances around honesty and integrity have been shaped by how you were raised and what your family valued. How has your point of view on honesty evolved over the years, whether maintaining consistency or broadening to a more open-minded flexibility?
In her translator’s preface to The Narrow Road of Oku, a new edition of Matsuo Bashō’s seminal haibun diary published by New Directions in June, Meredith McKinney notes that though it is possible to read the work “as a straightforward, episodic travel diary of a seventeenth century Japanese poet and his companion,” the haibun form of prose writing followed by poetry “asks the reader to slow down, to pause and focus.” Spend some time jotting down notes and memories of a significant trip you have taken. Try your hand at writing in a similar style, interspersing travel journal vignettes with brief, poetic observations of a singular moment or image in time that distills a particular sensation. “I make the cool / my lodging / lounging at ease,” writes Bashō after one particularly long journey. Consider how the slowed-down pace of short, poetic lines might balance each episode’s narrative.
When asked in an interview published on Creative Independent whether there is a common thread throughout the works that he’s translated from various languages, Max Lawton mentions that there is usually “an element of transgression, whether that’s on the level of language or on the level of content” and that “shocking movies, transgressive music, loud music, not as a form of real rebellion, just mischievousness” are what brought him into art. Taking inspiration from this prioritization of transgression and mischief, write a personal essay that uses language in a shocking way or recounts something shocking in its content. Allow yourself to experiment with syntax in a way you’ve never tried before, or to write about a memory you’ve never dared to touch. How can you strike a balance between a playful sense of mischief and an intense subject matter?
While the late Keith Waldrop described his 1993 book, Light While There Is Light: An American History, reissued by New York Review Books Classics in May, as a “fictional memoir,” Dalkey Archive Press, which reissued the book in 2013, referred to it as an “autobiographical novel,” and elsewhere it’s been described as a “poetic memoir.” This week, compose three short pieces about one single memory, each one to be described by one of these hybrid labels. How does your fusion of fiction and nonfiction shift when you’re thinking about the genre of your work in a different way? What kind of permission is granted when you add on a more imaginative modifier, such as “fictional” or “poetic”—and how does the “autobiographical” prefix work in tandem or in tension with a fictional element in place?
In her debut memoir, Everything I Know About Love (Penguin Books, 2018), Dolly Alderton recounts her twenties through the lens of friendship, romantic confusion, and the gradual shedding of illusions. Along the way, she questions the stories she grew up believing about what love should look like, how adulthood should feel, and what it means to be fulfilled. “I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years,” writes Alderton. Write about an expectation you inherited about love, success, marriage, adulthood, or happiness. Who set that expectation and how did it take root? Describe a moment when reality didn’t live up to your expectations and how this shifted your understanding of what you truly want.
How has community served you? Whether literary community or a community found through hobbies and activities, or racial, ethnic, cultural, gender, and sexual identities, there are many ways in which these communities provide the support and resources missing from one’s life. In Parul Sehgal’s recent interview with Sarah Schulman published in the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction series, she says: “My whole life has taken place in community, in the gay community. Community saved my life. It’s the official structures, family and all that, that have been my problem.” Write a personal essay that explores various communities you participate in. Compare and contrast what you have found valuable in them versus the social and institutional structures imposed upon you via family, government, economy, education, and religion. With whom has your life taken place?
“I told a friend that I had missed a flight to Europe (again) and she assured me that it was just my ‘queer relationship to temporality.’ I did not really know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it,” writes Stephanie Wambugu in her essay “Running Behind,” a meditation on her relationship with lateness and punctuality, recently published by Granta magazine. Consider your own habits of showing up early, on time, or late to meetings, appointments, shared meals, and other assignations. Wambugu writes that on one occasion, her lateness was “an act of passive resistance” and “an expression of my disdain.” How would you characterize your priorities when you arrive late? How might your relationship to temporality be based on how you were raised or your intentions to subvert certain cultural norms?
“When you mention music, you want that music to do the atmosphere work for you. But it’s really tricky,” says Sophie Strohmeier about linking music, compositions, and instruments to the characters in her novella All Girls Be Mine Alone (Joyland Publishing, 2025), in an interview for the Creative Independent. “It was more like creating a material palette with the evocation of what each instrument might convey.” Focus on infusing a scene in either a new personal essay or a work-in-progress with music. Allow the music to do the work of adding a fresh dimension to the atmosphere and recollection of your memories. You might recall the types of songs that would have been playing in your setting or brainstorm the sounds and instruments that most effectively convey the mindset or emotions of the people present in your retelling.
Can we learn how to avoid conflict by studying the behavior of other animals? A recent New York Times article reported that in the last decade or so, a group of chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda experienced an unprecedented uptick in large-scale violence, prompting scientists to question the origins of this civil warfare and consider whether these types of violent conflicts are a part of human evolution. Compose a personal essay that reflects on your thoughts about conflict, whether it be a large-scale conflict in the country you live in or more intimate between friends and family. How can sorting through your own beliefs and emotions help you reach new understandings about human social relations and behavior?