What's the point of random writing prompts?
By popular demand, new Prompt of the Week session on Thursday afternoons!
Join us tomorrow (or today as you read this) for an hour, and see for yourself! We start at 3 pm PT / 6 pm ET. Here's your Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYodOGrrDkpHN05pMbS6HcNCy62tbFGLnfS
So, what is the point of random writing prompts? Well, because they're random.
Let's say you're writing about a beach, and you're running out of steam. You think, aha, I'll use a prompt to get me going! You go to your bathroom and get a shell from a dish of shells you collected. It reminds you of the beach where you found it, so you get a little bit of juice. But not much, because you've already wrung most of the beach experience out of yourself. If you're me, you're tempted to smash the shell (but you don't) and go get a cookie (which you do).
Fortified by chocolate chips, you google images of beaches. That one looks interesting! Surely it will inspire you. It's on message. It’s in the sweet spot. But it’s no better than the shell, maybe even worse. Hard as you try, you can’t unstick yourself from the beach in the picture—which has no sound, no smells, no cool breeze or dancing sunlight or humid air (or bitter wind or razor-sharp rocks or viciously slippery seaweed). You're trying to be imaginative, but the words you put on the page feel forced and lifeless.
Clearly, it's time to wash the dishes.
Now, different scenario. That beach is still waiting to be written about, but you're not in work mode right now. You're in play mode, so you’re not caring about the result. You’ve bought into the idea of exploring, surprising yourself, writing what you don’t know. Today's prompt is the homepage of Falcanna, a cannabis operation owned by falconers:
You write a random list of words for two minutes, along with everybody else. Then everybody contributes one of their words to a group list—like a kids' party where every kid brings a toy to play with, or a dress-up box built from many people's closets. And then you write for 10 minutes.
You start with some random word, but that naked arm with a bird sitting on it has stuck in your imagination. What if there's a seagull on the beach? They're big birds with big beaks and probably big talons. They’re aggressive and they’re not afraid of humans. What would you do if one landed on you? What would someone else do? Calmly drag on a smoke?
Or what if the prompt was this picture, taken in a brickyard in India:
It might make you think of infinity, the infinite grains of sand. Or solitude. Or a sandstorm. Or mist. Or toil. Maybe you’d remember the man who single-handedly cleaned the trash from a beach in Bombay; it took him years. Might there be trash on your beach?
This is the value of random prompts: they open up side doors into the scene. When you write what you know, you enter through the usual door and everything looks the same. When you write what you don’t know—in other words, you don’t have an agenda about what you’re going to write—it’s like opening a door you didn’t even know was there. There’s different stuff at the back of this room. The light falls differently. It’s the same room (the same scene you’re writing about), but from this angle it’s new and intriguing.
Now, this isn't to say that every prompt will feed in to your "real" writing project. Much of the time, a prompt is just a prompt. A plaything to have fun with. A piece of imaginative gym equipment, to stretch and strengthen your creative muscles. Think of it as like going to yoga class, without the yoga.
If you go to yoga class with the yoga, you might be doing Warrior Pose or Triangle Pose, or Crow Pose if you're adept. (I could almost do it once.) You're not going to suddenly drop your hands to the floor and balance with your knees on your elbows as you go about your days! But working your physical muscles energizes you, makes you feel strong, and probably prevents you from putting your back out when you bend over to pick up a watermelon in the supermarket.
What will you write if you come tomorrow/today, or any other Thursday? Who knows! You'll create something that didn't exist before, and chances are it will have at least a few gems in it: arresting combinations of words or images, new insights, unexpectedly powerful metaphors. A few days ago, regular Imaginative Storm writer Paul Johnson wrote about "going back to the red." He never said what the red was, but it wasn't white. It was in the past: something to get away from, something frightening, something that had to be faced, something with the potency of destiny. It packed a wallop.
Maybe you’ll write throwaway, as I usually do (though occasionally I get a throwaway piece I like, such as “All things come from me, glittered the devil,” which I posted a while back). Maybe you’ll write poems that get accepted by journals with no editing, as Lou Faber does, repeatedly. Or maybe you’ll build up a book brick by 10-minute brick, as June Kinoshita is doing. Whatever prompt we offer, it opens a new door into a scene in 19th- or 20th-century Japan:
All she wanted, all she ever needed was that love that never fades. She a mother, he her chosen child, in a gossamer embrace, a fragile foam more powerful than the destructive forces of the world. We are in this together, a family hovering, two birds in hand, refusing to drink the poison. The doves of morning gurgled softly outside her window. We are here. You must hold it together. You. You. It is all up to you and the strength of your heart. All the pain that you must endure and overcome. You hold it all in your hands.
He dreamed that he was young again, standing on the dock in Kobe, about to board a steam train. This mechanical dragon had reached these shores only twenty years earlier. He had read how Japanese scholars had carefully sketched these machines that the Americans had brought on their gunships, to impress upon the Japanese the benefits of trade and technology. In a few years, Japanese engineers had built their own steam engines and laid a thousand leagues of iron rails from Tokyo to Kobe. He boarded the train. The seats were a rich blue velvet, so soft and inviting. A stranger boarded the train, his figure concealed beneath a long black traveling cloak. He had with him a trunk. It was impossibly large, like a house, but somehow he got it onboard. The trunk shrank until it was no higher than Ben's knee. Open it, the stranger commanded, prodding the trunk with a walking stick. No, said Ben. He knew something dangerous, fateful, lay inside the trunk. He was determined not to let it out. Open it, insisted the stranger. No. No. Ben tried to speak but nothing came out of his throat. And in spite of himself, he touched the brass lock of the trunk. The lid creaked open and a plume of smoke rose out of it. Ben gazed at his hand and watched the smooth, strong hands shrink into gnarled claws, the rosy skin turn yellow, the hands of an old man.
Please join us! Here's the Zoom link again. We'll start promptly (ba-boom) at 3 pm PT / 6 pm ET on Thursday, February 1.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYodOGrrDkpHN05pMbS6HcNCy62tbFGLnfS