31 Writing Prompts That Work

...because they draw from the "great lake" of writing

Dear Friends,

A poem is not a game of Mad Libs. We’re not pouring language into a pre-existing mold. My approach to offering students writing prompts is this: the prompt should be flexible enough to serve any literary form and invite creativity that isn’t programmatic.

Ideally, a prompt will get us closer to that quiet voice and knowing that pulls us along like an undercurrent when we sit down to write. I think, at its best, a good prompt will teach you how to think about what you’re doing by deepening your own self-questioning and helping catalyze new circuits in your language. I often find myself reminding students to look beyond “gestures” in poems, beyond rhetorical shorthands that can be identified and replicated. This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in the value of learning through imitation, but that I’m aware that there’s a risk our ear will begin to place someone else’s logic above our own.

Writing a poem is not diagraming a sentence or replicating a set of emotional chess moves. Poems are not formulas—they are fixed in language, yes, but they come from—and answer to—someplace beyond it. Writing is an act of self-discovery and transformation. Of excavation and building. If you listen, truly slow down to listen, the shape of the poem reveals itself to the language. It’s not an act of manufacturing language but of letting language move through you.

Here are 31 days of writing prompts I generated some time back for your purposes. Each prompt is based on a small literary excerpt, a fun etymological fact or linguistic curiosity, or a feature I noted in a larger work. Because of this, they can easily be adapted to fiction, non-fiction, or even journaling. I hope they will give you a starting place that feels natural and expansive to you, that draws you in and makes you feel a part of the great lake of writing (Jean Rhys). At the very least, they might introduce you to new writers and works of literature you may not have come across.

Please feel free to post your writing as you go; I will always read/comment back!

And if these prompts help you, please consider sharing them. I would love for them to serve as many writers as possible this year.

xM

#1 — Eugène Ionesco wrote, “The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”

Prompt: Free write until you land upon a memory that allows you to explore this duality. What is remembered clearly, and what is dreamed up to fill in the blanks? Allow the language of the poem to make no distinction between the two, remembered or dreamed, real or imagined. Explore what happens as you write with this quality in mind.

#2 — In “Consider the Lilies of the Field,” Christina Rossetti writes:

The rose saith in the dewy morn,
I am most fair;
Yet all my loveliness is born
Upon a thorn.

Prompt: Beauty and difficulty often present together (the loveliness of the rose juxtaposed against the stem’s thorn). Write a poem that complicates the beautiful by focusing on less appealing or obvious aspects of its beauty.

#3 — In “Praise the Rain,” Joy Harjo writes:

                       Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we’re led.     
                       Praise the roads on earth and water. 
                       Praise the eater and the eaten.
                       Praise beginnings; praise the end.
                       Praise the song and praise the singer.

Prompt: What in your own life would you like to praise? Write a praise song, filling it with your own particular and unexpected images and details.

#4 — The Welsh word hiraeth means “A homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was. Formed from “hir,” meaning long, and “aeth” meaning sorrow or grief.

Prompt: Let the energy of this word be your inspiration. What does hiraeth bring up for you? Write a poem (or whichever form feels right today!) that seeks to evoke that feeling.

#5 — In “How Far Away We Are,” Ada Limón writes:

                        I want to give you something, or I want to take
                        something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
                        the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
                        and the ear holding on to it.

Prompt: Write a poem that explores an exchange between two individuals. Focus on sensory experience (remember, you have five senses). Aim to include each sense at least once.

#6 — In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman writes:

                        Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged.
                        Missing me one place, search another.
                        I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Prompt: Write a poem in which something is either searched for, found or not. Try to capture the feeling of “missing me one place, search another,” that energy of perseverance.

#7 — In “The Bingo Palace,” Louise Erdrich writes: “We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

Prompt: Write about the heart of another (try someone familiar to you), focusing on description and imagery (the adage “show, don’t tell”). Focus on exploring what isn’t fully known or understood.

#8 — Nepenthe (Ancient Greek) is a medicine for sorrow, or a person/place/thing that aids in forgetting pain and suffering.

Prompt: Find an example of a nepenthe in your own life. Free write on this subject for 20 minutes, then read back what you wrote. Use this as the starting point for your poem (though this subject also lends itself particularly well to creative nonfiction).

#9 — “Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, as without light, nothing flowers,” wrote May Sarton.

Prompt: Explore how this duality has proven true in your own life focusing on one or more moments or anecdotes. If you’d like a formal challenge, try compressing the poem into eight couplets (two line stanzas).

#10 — In a letter to Mrs. J.G. Holland, Emily Dickinson wrote: “I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

Prompt: Approach the prompt figuratively. What does it mean to be out with a lantern, looking for oneself? What comes to mind? Write a poem that imagines what that search looks like.

#11 — In Orlando, Virginia Woolf writes: “What she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—”

Prompt: Inspired by Woolf’s glorious descriptors, describe a person using an unusual set of features or resemblances. Use this list as an opportunity to craft striking similes, “like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—”

#12 — “Anything that we think we’ve learned, / we’ve learned in the dark,” writes poet Charles Wright. The dark is associated with many feelings and states, though somewhat less often with learning.

Prompt: Write a poem that enacts Wright’s sentiment—what have you learned in the dark?

#13 — In “Change of Season,” Audre Lorde asks: “Am I to be cursed forever with becoming / somebody else on the way to myself?”

Prompt: Write a poem for your future self. Include details from today, and find a way to weave in your hopes and anxieties in your address to this future version.

#14 — In “Eros the Bittersweet,” Anne Carson writes: “Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.”

Prompt: Think about time with a beloved past, present, future (imaginary or otherwise). Try to tap into what Carson means by this paradox: “they hate to wait; they love to wait.” If you’d like a formal constraint, try writing in a loose sonnet structure (14 lines, rhymed or not).

#15 — “The poet makes himself [or herself] a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses,” wrote Arthur Rimbaud.

Prompt: Write a poem that purposefully disorders the senses, or one that uses synesthesia (experiencing one sense through the lens of another—hearing a color, for example).

#16 — In “The Trial,” Kafka writes: “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it.

Prompt: Try creating a new poetic form. You can begin by choosing a form you know well, then adapting it slightly to make it strange to you.

#17 — In “Bird,” Danusha Laméris writes:

We were sitting on the couch in the dark
talking about first pets, when I told him how,
as a girl, I kept a blue and white parakeet I let
fly around the house and, sometimes, outside,
where he’d land on the branches of pine
and eucalyptus, balancing between seedpods
and spines.

Prompt: Write a poem that uses a pet as a metaphor or motif, or as the subject of a conversation between two people.

#18 — In “The Start of Something,” Stuart Dybek asks:

                      Why not end here, without answers?
                      Aren’t there chance meetings in every life that don’t play out,
                      stories that seem meant to remain ghostly, as faint and fleeting
                      as the reflection of a face on the window of a bus?”

Prompt: Write about a chance meeting or encounter in your own life that has remained with you over time.

#19 — “Sometimes absence can prove presence. That’s not exactly /
faith, I know. All day, everywhere, I feel you near at hand,” Patricia Traxler writes in “Last Hike Before Leaving Montana.”

Prompt: Write about someone, or something, whose absence is a form of presence.

#20 — “You’re a story,” Eudora Welty writes in “A Visit of Charity.”

Prompt: You’re a story. Write that story in a free verse block poem.

#21 — “At what point is something gone completely?” Mary Szybist asks in “The Troubadours Etc.” “The last of the sunlight is disappearing even as it swells—”

Prompt: Write about something on the verge of vanishing or something that only appears to be on the brink of being “gone completely.”

#22 — In “Dead Stars,” Ada Limón writes:

                       Look, we are not unspectacular things. 
                       We’ve come this far, survived this much. 
                       What would happen if we decided to survive more? 
                       To love harder?"

Prompt: Write a poem about survival. Approach the topic as widely as you feel inspired to.

#23 — “Summer? My memory flutters — / had I — was there a summer?” writes Emily Dickinson.

Prompt: January is an excellent time to revisit summer. Write a poem set in summer that somehow nods at winter (either forthcoming or past).

#24 — In “The Rebel,” Aimé Césaire writes: “I have made a pact with the night, / I have felt it softly healing me.”

Prompt: Write about a pact made with the night and the healing such a pact might offer.

#25 — In Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson asks: “What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward in a void. Memory depends upon void, as void depends upon memory, to think it.”

Prompt: Write about an experience that, as Carson writes, “connects what is lost to what is here.” This could be in the form of an object that links the two, or it might be figurative, drawing from memory to connect the present to the past.

#26 — In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell writes: “But every land should be a holy land. One should find the symbol in the landscape itself of the energies of life there. That’s what all early traditions do. They sanctify their own landscape.”

Prompt: Write about a landscape that is sacred to you.

#27 — In “Sonnet XL,” Pablo Neruda writes:

                        Green was the silence, wet was the light,
                        the month of June trembled like a butterfly.

Prompt: Write a poem that begins with a line of synesthesia, (green silence, wet light) followed by a simile (trembled like a butterfly).

#28 — In “Letter to a Lost Friend,” Barbara Hamby writes:

                        There must be a Russian word to describe
                        what has happened between us, like ostyt,
                        which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot,
                        but after you walk to the next room, and return,
                        it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something
                        so much over months and even years that when
                        you get it, you have lost the desire.

Prompt: Investigate a word in a foreign language. Read as much as you can find about it, looking at its etymology and history. Draw from whatever most inspires you to write your poem.

#29 — George Morrison writes: “I believe in going back to the magic of the earth and the lake, the sky and the universe. That kind of magic. I believe in that kind of religion. A religion of the rocks, the lake, the water, the sky. Yes, that’s what I believe in.”

Prompt: What do you believe in? Write your own credo. Begin every line with “I believe.”

#30 — “There is no poetry where there are no mistakes,” writes Joy Harjo.

Prompt: Write about a mistake, your own or otherwise.

#31 — In “Nocturne," Eavan Boland writes:

                           After a friend has gone I like the feel of it:
                           The house at night. Everyone asleep.
                           The way it draws in like atmosphere or evening.

Prompt: For your final January prompt, write about your house at night, imagining its rooms once they are empty for the evening. Describe that atmosphere. Let your speculations about what happens in that space lead you to unexpected places and leaps in memory.

✨ CWC Poetry enrollment is now OPEN. Apart from regular meetings with me, our guest teachers in 2025 will include poets Jorie Graham, Jane Hirshfield, Nicole Sealey, Maggie Millner, Chen Chen, Liz Berry, Kimiko Hahn, Sarah Ghazal Ali, among others. Join CWC Poetry here. (Please note that spots are limited; doors close when we reach our usual monthly quota for new members). ✨

✨ CWC Fiction enrollment is now OPEN. Lidia Yuknavitch is our writer-in-residence—all writers will workshop with her in small groups in January, February, and March. You can join CWC Fiction here. ✨