Recently, a discussion came up among some poets of my acquaintance about the value of prompts for writing. Having never given much thought to prompts, I found the discussion brought up some interesting points.
The first thing one must think about is how to define a prompt. I’ve been in workshops, both face to face and online, in which prompts were used to generate a writing exercise. Most of the time, I find this kind of prompt does not result in a fruitful outcome for me.
One exception is the course on poetry writing I took through the Iowa Writers Workshop last year. The prompts took the form, not of an object or a scene, but a writing technique that we were to use in the poem. These prompts worked well for me, motivating me to forego my usual style and incorporate some new techniques in my work. Doing so was difficult, mainly because of what I call lethargy, the tendency to go with what’s easy, what has worked in the past. However, trying new ways of writing energized me and I came up with some fairly decent poetry. In fact, one of the poems won an award in a contest.
When I taught English Composition I to college freshmen, I would often incorporate prompts into the instructions for writing each essay. Many of the students complained that they couldn’t think of anything to write about. To counter that problem, I made a list of suggested topics that fit the type of essay the class was to write. According to the common syllabus used by the English professors at Butler Community College, the six essays for the semester were to start with those based on personal experiences, moving to essay styles that increased in difficulty throughout the semester.
The personal essays were often the most fun to read. As I dog lover, I really enjoyed the essays about dogs. Those essays showed that, given something they found interesting to write about, most students developed well written, detailed pieces.
From there, we moved through the six essays. Toward the end of the semester, students were to write a process essay. I often got a good laugh out of what the students chose as topics. One semester, an older student wrote about the process she, her sister, and her mother had in place for Black Friday shopping. They had to prepare by making lists during the week before, then they set their alarms for 4 a.m. on Friday morning. Once they made it to their chosen stores, their plan really went into action.
It may seem that such a topic is insubstantial, but having to think about a process, any process, makes a person look at the processes involved in other actions or operations. All processes involve step by step thinking and once students understand that, they are able to extrapolate from there.
As for poetry, I find prompts for my poetry coming from everywhere when I least expect them. The scene out my front window during the changing of the seasons, the park where we take out little dog for walks, a song that takes me to another time and place.
For example, the other evening my husband and I watched a PBS special on John Denver. Because I’m older than my husband, I thought it was interesting that Denver’s music triggered different memories for us. We were living in a different space in our lives when that music filled the air around us. Yet, we both responded to the music with, “I remember….”
Years ago, when we were still living in Winfield, Kansas, and I was driving to Wichita State for classes, I saw a shoe by the side of the highway. That triggered something in me and I wrote about the mystery of the shoe, then, for some unknown reason, that took me the Chicago bus station where I had a layover when I was traveling to Port Huron, Michigan, to pack our belongings in order to get them back to Kansas. When I look at the poem now, I wonder what I was thinking, except that the sight of the man putting quarters in a pay TV set by his chair, a man who didn’t look like he was going anywhere, somehow seemed connected to that lone shoe.
One of the first poems I wrote came as I was reading a student newspaper article about a speech given by a retired CIA spy. He claimed to be the prototype for George Smiley, the main character in John LeCarre’s spy novels. That poem won me more money than any poem I’ve written since.
I do believe we use prompts all the time when we write. How can we not? Writing depends on sensory impressions impinging upon us. If we stay at writing long enough, we leave ourselves open to these impressions, or prompts, without even thinking much about it.
poetofacertainage 