A Short History of Writing Prompts
(and 31 bespoke prompts for January and beyond)
Dear Friends,
Last January, I posted a month’s worth of writing prompts (see revised version below for paid subscribers). This year, I thought I’d look into the history of writing prompts (nerd) to see if I can find something worth sharing with you. While the term "writing prompt" may be relatively new, you won’t be surprised to learn that writers have always relied on prompts to stimulate their creativity and that these prompts have taken fascinating forms over time.
My own approach to writing prompts is this: I like a prompt that is flexible enough to serve any literary form and one that invites creativity that isn’t programmatic. Ideally, a prompt will get me closer to that quiet voice and knowing that’s an undercurrent to the conscious mind. We’re not pouring language into a mold. 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.
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 by helping catalyze new circuits in your language. That sounds lofty, but it’s really not. We know that the right question can unlock even the knottiest problems.
And now, a short history lesson. In ancient Greece, rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata were used to teach public speaking and writing and included prompts for paraphrasing, amplification, and description. The medieval period used exempla, short narratives or anecdotes with moral or instructional purposes, to prompt writers to address a theme in their own works. In the 20th century, Surrealist artists and writers (think André Breton) embraced automatic writing, a process designed to bypass conscious thought and tap into the subconscious mind. Those exercises most nearly resemble the sorts of writing prompts we recognize today.
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. The mind is a much more strange, wily, and surprising place than that. Writing a poem is not diagraming a sentence or replicating a set of emotional chess moves. 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.
I believe good writing begins in free writing. So, below, 31 days of writing prompts I generated last year and revised for this year. 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). I hope they will help you generate writing throughout the first month of the year (though, more realistically, you might try one per week!). Even if you’re not actively writing, they will, I hope, introduce you to new writers and excerpts.
Happy writing, friends. Please share any writing that comes from these prompts. I will reply with my favorite lines.
xM
Other resources:
January Workshop (sold out)