Writing Prompts & Exercises

The Venice International Film Festival in Italy is the world’s oldest film festival and is a marker for the year’s most celebrated accomplishments in cinema. There is always glitz and glamour on the red carpet, but this year the media focused on rumors of tension between the costars of the film Don’t Worry Darling, harkening back to old Hollywood and the gossip and alleged rivalry between stars such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Marilyn Monroe. This week write a short story in which gossip creates tension between your characters. How will your characters react once they become the talk of the town?

On August 29, 1952, American composer and music theorist John Cage premiered his most famous and controversial piece 4’33”, a three-movement piece written for any instrument or combination of instruments in which the score instructs silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. In an interview that appears in Richard Kostelanetz’s 1988 book Conversing With Cage, Cage says of the audience for this first performance: “There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement.” Write an essay inspired by this iconic piece of music. Try listening to the natural and ambient sounds of your writing environment and explore the moments in your life in which silence has been meaningful.

“Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again,” writes John Murillo in his poem “Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop,” which appears in his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), in which he directly quotes from and expands upon Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art.” Using his own perspective, Murillo explores the theme of loss and uses intimate life details to make each event feel distinct, sometimes measuring one against the other as Bishop does in her poem. He writes: “Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s / crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through prison glass.” This week, write a poem that directly responds to a favorite poem of yours. Try writing a variation of a line or directly quoting from the poem to get started.

In a recent thread on Twitter, author Rebecca Makkai begins a discussion on words that make prose awkward in fiction, starting with the use of “as” in a sentence such as: “‘Hey there,’ I said as I got up as I turned on the lights.’” Other awkward words Makkai lists include “temporal hinge words” like “after” and “while,” the overuse of “that” in a sentence, and the use of gerunds, especially as dialogue modifiers. The last tip Makkai offers is a useful one: “I promise you, if you control + F through your work just on the words ‘as’ and ‘that’ and take out 90% of them, you’ll be so happy.” Try using this advice to revise a draft of a short story you’re working on. Remove some of the narrative devices listed in Makkai’s tweets and see how the rhythm of your story’s language changes.

In this week’s installment of our Craft Capsules series, Nuar Alsadir taps into her experience as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, arguing that “the most direct way for others to connect with your writing is by connecting with the emotion you feel in relation to the work.” Alsadir shares a lesson she learned while attending clown school as research for her book Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation (Graywolf Press, 2022). As a woman on stage described her love of eating chicken feet, the class laughed “because we could sense the enjoyment she felt as she imaginatively enacted the process on stage.” This week, write an essay in which you describe an activity that truly gives you pleasure. Allow the genuine emotion you experience to guide the language of the essay.

In a world run by technology, now more than ever, it can be rewarding to unplug, go outside, and look to the natural scenery around you. In Louise Glück’s poem “Sunrise,” the narrator reflects on the still, beautiful landscape in the hills and the ways in which nature is always there, persisting, even through life’s ups and downs. “And if you missed a day, there was always the next, / and if you missed a year, it didn’t matter, / the hills weren’t going anywhere, / the thyme and rosemary kept coming back, / the sun kept rising, the bushes kept bearing fruit,” writes Glück. Write a poem inspired by the beauty and perpetuity of the natural world that surrounds you. Think about the simplicity of a blade of grass or a flower petal, and how every detail is a life of its own.

The beginning of the fall season is marked in late September by the autumnal equinox, which signals the shortening of days and lengthening of nights, and by the harvest moon. Although dependence on the moon has waned in modern society, farmers once looked to the bright, early moonlight to help harvest their summer crops. In many East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, including Cambodia, China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, the harvest moon is still honored through annual celebrations that include moon gazing, eating moon-shaped desserts, and lighting lanterns. Inspired by this rich history, write a story in which a protagonist relies on the harvest moon. How will you build the stakes for a story that depends on a lunar phenomenon?

“The confessional booth felt like every other confessional booth I’d ever been in. The wood of the bench was so dark and uniformly grained that it looked fake, and the once-plush cushion atop it was now dingy and flat,” writes Isaac Fitzgerald in his memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury, 2022), in which he recounts the experience of confessing his sins to a priest when he was twelve at a church in Boston. In the passage, Fitzgerald both describes the physicality of the experience—the breath of the priest filling the confessional, hearing his disembodied voice—and maintains the intimacy of the first-person perspective, making the memory itself read like a confession. This week write a personal essay in the form of a confession. Does writing in this perspective change your narrative voice?

“When in danger the sea-cucumber divides itself in two: / one self it surrenders for devouring by the world, / with the second it makes good its escape,” writes Wisława Szymborska in “Autotomy,” which appears in her collection Map: Collected and Last Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak. In the poem, Szymborska reflects on the creature’s process of autotomy, casting off a part of the body while under threat, through the lens of survival and mortality. She writes: “It splits violently into perdition and salvation, / into fine and reward, into what was and what will be.” Write a poem inspired by an animal’s unique behavior, perhaps the molting of a snake or the colorful courtship habits of a bowerbird. What does this behavior symbolize for you?

In an essay excerpt published on Literary Hub, which appears in Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature (Graywolf Press, 2022), Charles Baxter writes about an exercise he would assign to his students in which they are asked to compile ten facts about one of their characters, encouraging them to consider “particularized details.” He writes: “For example, you can say, ‘She likes chocolate,’ but almost everybody likes chocolate. It’s better to say, ‘The only chocolate she will eat is imported from Mozambique.’” Try out this exercise and compile ten things you know about a new, invented character. Then, write a short story with this character at the core. How do these details inform the personality and actions of your protagonist?

As heat waves strike around the globe, many flock to beaches and parks for refreshment and recreation with friends and family. Although being out in the hot weather requires sunblock and stamina, weekend excursions ultimately provide an opportunity to disconnect from work life, day-to-day duties, and the overall stress that comes with modern society. Think back to a time you visited a favorite place to relax on a weekend. Was it a quiet spot under the shade of a tree, a nearby body of water to dip your feet into, or a hiking trail with an incredible view? Write an essay that explores this experience at your favorite place. Try telling the backstory of what was happening in your life to color the essay with context and depth.

In Seamus Heaney’s poem “Oysters,” which appears in his 1979 collection, Field Work, the speaker faces an internal conflict in which he relishes in the “perfect memory” of eating oysters with friends while also dealing with the anger and “glut of privilege” that allows him such refined experiences. In the final sentence, as if avoiding the lingering guilt, Heaney writes: “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.” Write a poem in which a moment of pleasure is met with guilt or shame. Bring both feelings into focus, digging into the complexity of the scene.