Person on the Page

In my previous post, “Wondering What to Write About? Try These Prompts,” I listed ten writing prompts that I have offered my creative nonfiction writing students to help them overcome their anxiety as they approach a blank page. Sometimes writers need a nudge from outside of their own minds to get them started. A prompt such as the ones I listed can awaken a sleeping memory or spur a thought that leads to productive writing. 

I call those kinds of prompts synthetic, meaning that they are introduced into our minds from the outside, allowing us to write as if the idea had popped into our thoughts spontaneously, as memories normally do. Using synthetic prompts is an excellent way to get people in a class or writing group engaged with the page, but they can also be a gift to the lone writer working in solitude who feels stuck. Writers can take ownership of the prompt and synthesize it into their own thought processes. Whether we receive them in a group setting or find them online or in craft books, synthetic prompts are introduced to us purposefully by others.

But our world, our environments, and our immediate surroundings also offer us writing prompts if we are open to receiving them. I call these organic prompts, meaning that they present themselves naturally to us from within our individual experiences. 

For instance, you are sitting in a coffee shop. You overhear some snippets of conversation that remind you of an argument you once had with someone important to you. Was it over politics? Or did it have to do with wanting more, or less, out of the relationship? The memory of that argument calls up the tension you felt between you and that important someone. That tension becomes the impetus for your writing.

Or, you take a walk around your neighborhood. You see your neighbor’s well-tended rose bushes. They remind you of the roses that your father cultivated lovingly when you were a child, the ones of which he seemed so proud. You recall the look of disappointment in his eyes when he sensed that you were not as enthusiastic about the vibrant color and sublime scent of his roses as he was. Your regret that you didn’t take more interest in your father’s passion for roses when you had the chance prompts you to write. 

Organic prompts are exciting because they let us imagine that our surroundings offer up material freely for our writing.  They inspire us to feel that the world around us wants us to write.  They urge us to begin.

Recently, I encountered two organic prompts in the course of my daily routines that energized my writing.  I was reading Anne Lamott’s book Almost Everything: Notes on Hope. In her introduction, which suggests that hope presents itself even in our chaotic, trouble-fraught current world, she confesses that she suffers from an impulse to jump off of tall buildings. She is neither suicidal nor depressed, but the urge to escape the painful and the tragic in her life persists nevertheless.

Lamott’s confession led me to acknowledge that I, too, have suffered a lifelong impulse. Since the day my father died when I was twelve, I have carried within me a longing for rescue, a vain hope for help to arrive, even when I’m not in need of any help. The recognition that this longing has shaped the way I view my life and the world led me to begin writing. I now have an essay in the works that examines a few episodes over the past few decades in which this desire for rescue revealed itself and shaped the way I responded to my experiences. Lamott’s description of her self-destructive impulse served as an organic prompt for my writing.

A second prompt presented itself when I was home alone one evening and decided to stream CNN’s docu-series The Many Lives of Martha Stewart on Hulu.  As I watched, I was taken back to 1992, the year I bought Stewart’s debut book Entertaining. That was also the year that, as a young wife and mother, I moved into our newly built first home.  CNN’s examination of the trajectory of Stewart’s career led me to realize the negative influence that she and her marketing of a perfectionistic level of domesticity had on my early experiences as a homemaker.  Recognizing that allowed me to begin writing about it. Thanks to that organic prompt, another essay is now developing.

Sometimes we may feel that we have run out of subjects for our writing. That is inevitable, I suppose. But when we feel this way, we can turn to writing prompts to help us begin to fill the page again. Some prompts are offered by writing coaches and workshop leaders. For the next ten minutes, write about this  . . . . Some prompts arise out of our everyday experiences, those momentary occurrences that prod our memories, those observations we make as we pass through our days that cause us to reflect. Either way, they are there for us, synthetic and organic prompts, inviting us to keep writing.