Writing Prompts & Exercises

In a recent interview with George Saunders by David Marchese for the New York Times Magazine, the author, whose novel Vigil is forthcoming from Random House this month, talks about examining the concept of death and the afterlife. “Death is the moment when somebody comes and says: You know those three things that you’ve always thought of? They’re not true. You’re not permanent, you’re not the most important thing and you’re not separate,” says Saunders. “I think about it a lot, but I find it a joyful thing, because it’s just a reality check.” Spend some time thinking about what Saunders refers to as a “trio of delusions”—that is, the delusions of one’s permanence, self-importance, and separateness. Jot down any memories or anecdotes in which you recall seeing one or more of these delusions play out. Write an essay that considers how it is that these might actually be fallacies, and why it is that we hold onto these concepts.

“i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to / anymore, maybe my gut— // maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.” In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” by Renée Nicole Good, a poet and mother who was fatally shot by an ICE agent earlier this month, the speaker contemplates a struggle between science and faith. Good won a 2020 prize from the Academy of American Poets for the poem, and guest judge Rajiv Mohabir spoke about what resonates with him in a recent Newsweek article: “What does it mean to define something until there is no wonder left? The poem asks me. The speaker in the poem has no answers, just experiences that illuminate the tensions that arise when trying to reconcile wonder against brutality.” Write a poem that is situated between the opposing tensions of wonder and brutality. Is there a point at which definition and description are overwhelming?

One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, has been lauded by many film critics for managing to blend tones of absurdist comedy with a moving depiction of familial bonds and an examination of larger themes around revolution, fascism, and contemporary politics. Taking inspiration from this mixture of registers and tones, write a short story that revolves around a consequential aspect of current world events, whether real or imagined. Allow yourself the freedom to bestow your characters with zany personality traits and idiosyncrasies, and to veer off into the cartoonish and absurd. How might incorporating some questionable details into the world of your story imbue it with a feeling of realism?

“I notice a weird thing about Zoom: In order to give people the impression that you’re making eye contact, you have to look not at them but at the camera lens,” writes Anne Fadiman in her essay “Screen Share,” which appears in her collection Frog: And Other Essays, forthcoming in February from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “Their images are lower down. If you look at them, you won’t look as if you’re looking at them.” In the essay, Fadiman recounts shifting from teaching in-person classes to learning a new technology during the pandemic, as well as the social and practical challenges she and her students faced. Write a personal essay about your relationship to a specific technology, whether it be smartphones, apps, navigation systems, chatbots, or streaming media. What is revealed by the technology you choose to use when it comes to your values and relationships?

Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, currently on view at Dia Beacon in New York’s Hudson Valley, is the first U.S. retrospective covering the Taiwanese conceptual artist’s performance works. Each of his projects, which last an entire year, pushes at the boundaries between life and art: 365 days spent locked in a wooden cage, or living on the streets of New York City, or punching in on a time clock every hour on the hour in his studio, or tethering himself with a rope to another artist. “My art is doing time, so it’s not different from doing life or doing art, or doing time. No matter whether I stay in ‘art-time’ or ‘life-time,’ I am passing time,” Hsieh said in a 2019 interview for the Believer. How is the passing of time connected to your sense of observation as a poet? Write a poem that reflects the distinctions or similarities between your “art-time” and “life-time.”

In the 2019 coming-of-age comedy film Booksmart, directed by Olivia Wilde, two best friends who have spent their high school years studying and pursuing other bookish activities in order to get into Ivy League universities are shocked to discover that their peers have also gotten into prestigious schools despite their hard-partying ways. To rectify the injustice of this, they decide to attend a party on the last day of school, the night before their graduation, which sends them on a wild and chaotic adventure. Write a short story that takes place during a brief, contained period of time—perhaps just a day or two—when a character attempts to infiltrate a tight social group after feeling left out. How does an outsider’s perspective bring about new realizations of what’s important in life? What kinds of interactions unfold that impact your characters?

In a recent essay published on Literary Hub, Jean Chen Ho writes about spending an academic year as a visiting assistant professor in upstate New York and the isolation she experienced as an Asian American in a predominantly white neighborhood. Throughout the piece, Ho mixes her reflections about daily activities—visiting a museum, exercise, meeting colleagues, dating, and going to a local bar—with observations of her environmental surroundings and the violence and devastation in Gaza, as well as allusions to Louise Bourgeois, Jane Hirshfield, and Milan Kundera. Write a personal essay that meditates on a time when you have felt particularly alone. Where were you and what were the circumstances that contributed to your feelings of isolation? How did the environment around you, and the art or writing you connected to at the time, reflect your state of mind?

Clunky metaphors, the use of em dashes and the verb “delve,” and the rule of threes. These are some telltale signs that you’re reading prose created by artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT, according to a recent New York Times Magazine article titled “Why Does A.I. Write Like . . . That?” by Sam Kriss. AI creates a certain supposedly distinctive voice that is markedly strange, yet one which is foundationally based on how humans articulate themselves in language. This week write a poem from the persona of an AI bot that is commenting on its own algorithm and how it mines language from novels and textbooks to create what humans request through their prompts. Play with vocabulary, punctuation, and style to mimic the voice of AI. How does your AI persona’s own “consciousness” push it to create hallucinations?

In many holiday movies and holiday-themed episodes of popular TV series, a clashing of traditions stands as a focal point: the combination of Christmas and Hanukkah in The O.C.’s “Chrismukkah” episodes; the tension between older and younger generations in Home for the Holidays; attending extravagant and polished parties while withholding truths in Metropolitan and Happiest Season; and the uncomfortableness of houseguests in The Family Stone and Happy Christmas. Write a short story in which these differences come to a head because of a newly enmeshed relationship, whether that be between housemates, a romantic couple, in-laws, or different sides of the family. How do your characters’ personalities reveal themselves over the course of the narrative? Consider the ways you might craft the story to demonstrate how multiple layers of power dynamics operate in both blatant and subtle ways.

’Tis the season for spending? The end of the year is often associated with spending money on last-minute gifts, groceries for parties, travel and outings with family and friends, and holiday sales for your own treats. This week write a personal essay on your traditions and philosophies around holiday spending. How have they evolved over the years? Do you have memories or anecdotes of extravagant purchases or of thrift-savvy techniques? You might reflect on how seasonal cultural traditions influence spending and how those traditions are maintained, broken, or might even evolve. What are alternatives to conventional modes of consumption and capital?

In a tribute published in the Yale Review to Ellen Bryant Voigt, who passed away in October, executive editor Meghan O’Rourke writes: “Through her, I learned to read like a poet. Not to identify themes, as I’d been trained to do as an undergraduate at Yale, but to attend to effects.” This type of close examination included describing poems by how many medium-length lines and periods were in a poem, and how many lines a sentence takes up. “Her rigor taught me how to read my own work as I’d learned to read others’: closely enough to see what it was resisting,” writes O’Rourke. Revisit a poem you’ve written and consider what the work may want to be, and what it might be resisting. What about its syntax or grammar might lead you to these conclusions? Explore reworking the poem a little or a lot to shape how it arrives at its desired effects, or resists them.

In Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Tooth,” a woman’s bus ride to the dentist dissolves into a haze of pain, exhaustion, and an uncanny encounter with a stranger. Write about an ordinary trip on a bus, train, or rideshare that is unsettled by your character’s physical state, whether they’re experiencing hunger, sleeplessness, or an illness. Let the journey shift gradually into unease, or perhaps, an altered sense of connection with others. Focus on moments where tension arises from vulnerability and misconnection, and consider how travel reshapes your character’s sense of self and destination.

What’s the story behind the story? Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, the new biopic directed by Scott Cooper, relays a behind-the-music creation story of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 acoustic album Nebraska, which was composed and recorded in a New Jersey bedroom. The album represents the singer’s desire for pure art that is free of the constraints and adornments of being a superstar in the music industry. Think about the story behind one of your own stories, perhaps a personal essay you wrote years ago that sprang from a sense of urgency. Write an essay that recounts the story behind this story describing in detail the emotions that played throughout the creative act, where you worked on it, and how the subject matter dictated the process of its writing.

In “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a new survey exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among the many works on display are over fifty of the artist’s “rayographs,” photograms made in the early twentieth century by placing objects on or near light-sensitive photo paper that is then exposed to create dramatically silhouetted images with high contrast. In these works, everyday objects—a comb, bottle, lightbulb, eggbeater, key, and wrench—become defamiliarized through Man Ray’s manipulation of placement and movement, capturing what poet Tristan Tzara described as the moment “when objects dream.” Browse through some of the rayographs and select one image that particularly resonates with you. Compose a poem that imagines the dreams in your chosen image. In your deciphering of the objects, ask yourself what do they dream?

Justine Triet’s 2023 drama film Anatomy of a Fall chronicles the aftermath of a mysterious death as the protagonist’s husband falls from the window of their Alpine chalet’s attic. Their eleven-year-old visually impaired son finds his father dead from the fall. Amid questions of the possibility of an accident or a suicide attempt, the protagonist is indicted on charges of homicide and a trial follows. Throughout the film, it is never made clear what exactly happened. Instead, the narrative meditates on themes of biases inherent in individual subjectivity. “Sometimes a couple is kind of a chaos and everybody is lost,” says the main character. Write a story that revolves around the chaos caused by the unknowability of a dramatic situation. Perhaps it’s a classic case of he-said-she-said or an incident with no direct witnesses and only bits and pieces overseen or overheard. How do your characters deal with the fallout of never knowing what truly transpired?

What ever happened to opening a bar tab? A New York Times article from earlier this year reported on a trend of Gen Z bargoers opting to pay for each drink separately instead of opening a tab even if they’re ordering multiple drinks throughout the night, a phenomenon that can result in higher credit card fees paid by the bar, wasted time on a busy night of cocktail concocting, and a diminished sense of camaraderie when friends each pay for a drink separately instead of taking turns buying rounds. Write a personal essay that examines a social behavior that has dissolved over the years and reflect on the wider ripple effects. Consider how you’ve participated in or avoided certain types of etiquette and why you may have followed the trend in the past.

“When does the box of a story—a painting, a sonnet, a name—limit, and when does it free? Can it do both? What do I tell, and what do I obscure?” asks Anne Marie Rooney in a brief description of her poem “Abstraction,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. This week, consider the parameters of a poem—the space on the page and the length of the line, the language, the type of poetic form—and write a poem whose subject matter interrogates the limitations of your chosen form. How can you play with freedom within the confines of this “box of a story?” 

Character names in stories do more than identify—they can resonate, offer foreshadowing, and sometimes mislead. The name Hester traces its origins to the ancient Greek language, where it acquired the meaning of “star,” and in Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne shines bright with strength and resilience amid public shaming and condemnation. The cold-hearted Ebenezer Scrooge of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol became so well-known that his name is synonymous for someone who is a miser and uncharitable. Remus Lupin of the Harry Potter series takes his name from the Latin word “lupus” meaning “wolf,” a nod to his werewolf heritage. Write a story in which you name a character with intention. Let the name echo inner conflict, irony, or destiny.

Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories, published by Transit Books in September, is divided into two sections: “Zoo Studies” and “My Kafka System.” The first section includes essays that meld accounts of various zoo visits with meditations on animals, ideas about enclosure and captivity, and familial relationships and motherhood for human and nonhuman animals alike. The second section examines various aspects of the life and work of the famed author whose stories have centered around an ape, a mouse, a dog, hybrid creatures, and, of course, a giant insect. Taking your cue from Zambreno’s wide-ranging pieces, write a series of short reflections on animals that progresses with associative logic. Allow yourself permission to go down any rabbit holes, as deeply as you wish. Take inspiration from the realms of science and other artistic mediums to include intriguing anecdotes and historical facts.

In the introduction to John Berryman’s Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs, forthcoming in December from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, editor Shane McCrae makes the case that Berryman’s The Dream Songs—a compilation of two books, 77 Dream Songs (FSG, 1964) and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (FSG, 1968)—is an epic poem, pointing to its stylistic concision. “The language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem,” he writes, “and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression.” Another feature of epic poems is the presence of a hero, although McCrae notes that Berryman’s Henry is an “unheroic hero,” variably charming, gloomy, facetious, and colloquial. Begin composing a series of poems that contain these two elements of traditional epic poetry. How does your hero or antihero function to create a binding narrative?

A single father living quietly with his daughter in a small mountain village in Japan finds his day-to-day routine and peaceful, self-sufficient existence disrupted by real estate developers in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2023 film Evil Does Not Exist. The collaborative systems of care and mutual exchange that characterize the villagers’ way of life clash with the corporation’s focus on capitalist profit, and the delicate balance of nature and civilization is called into question. This week write a short story that revolves around the disturbance of a balance between nature and culture. You might find it helpful to begin by brainstorming specific areas in your chosen setting where the natural environment and human-made spaces depend on each other or have had to adjust to make way for the other. What are the ramifications of a disruption to this balance?

The Gilded Age, the HBO television series created by Julian Fellowes, chronicles the lives of a cast of characters living in 1880s New York City, including servants and maids living and working in the garden-level quarters of brownstone mansions, wealthy inhabitants of Manhattan from both old and new money, and Black families living in Brooklyn who reach levels of affluence in the post-Reconstruction period. Together, the characters create a layered portrait of a city where diverse classes come into often conflicted interaction. Write a personal essay that examines your own class status, reflecting on how it manifests in your encounters in society with friends, coworkers, family, and others. How have financial matters evolved through past generations in your family to bring you to where you are today?

For the Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words” series, Suzanne Buffam writes about her poem “Trying,” which circles around the effort to conceive a child. “The poem became, in a sense, a meditation on effort, in which the suspension of effort was the aim of my efforts,” writes Buffam. “I gave myself one constraint. Each paragraph I wrote would have to contain some form of the verb ‘to try.’” Taking inspiration from Buffam’s constraint for her piece, compose a poem that explores your process trying to reach a goal, whether big or small, tangible or more abstract. Play around with different forms of the verb “to try,” or another verb that gestures at effort, paying careful consideration to how the word conveys a sensation of persistence over the course of time and through various obstacles and setbacks.

In Vaim (Transit Books, 2025) by Nobel Prize–winning author Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, one might search for certainty and stability in vain as the fishing village from which the novel gets its title is not a place in the real world, and perhaps not even a real place within the world of the book. Ania Szremski, senior editor of 4Columns, describes the novel as a “a book of amphibolous belief” with a protagonist who “wavers between ‘yes’ and ‘no.’” Write a short story that revolves around a character who inhabits a place that may or may not really exist. In Fosse’s book, the protagonist’s motorboat grounds the reader while the use of shifting points of view and lack of punctuation can be unsettling. How do you inject your own story with both stabilizing and destabilizing elements to create tension and momentum?