Monday, 07 June 2010 16:01 Written by Lezlie Laws

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself. — Chinese proverb

I give a lot of writing prompts. As a facilitator of writing workshops, it's my job. Every week, I spend time with writers who seek inspiration and support from each other. And they also seek new and provocative topics to respond to. “Where do your prompts come from?” a workshop participant asked me not long ago, after we had grappled with a particularly challenging lead. I had to think a minute because it was sort of like asking someone how she keeps breathing. “I don't know,” I said, “but they just keep coming.”

But of course I do know where writing prompts come from: they come out of my life. Almost all of them. Now I may be revealing more than I should here, but there you have it. You could go back through all the prompts I've created over a period of time, like an investigative anthropologist almost, and discern the dilemmas and issues of my life. Don't do it; I'm just telling you.

Some of my clients say they can't think of topics to write about and ask me if I will provide more prompts for their daily journal writing. Sometimes I suggest one of the many books of prompts available today, but this request may indicate a problem in the way I've asked writers to think about their daily practice. If you're in writing mode, topics for writing should present themselves all the time. If you are, as Henry James advised, "the kind of person upon whom nothing is lost," topics for writing will literally inundate you. Everything you see, hear, and feel should be the source of more prompts than you could possibly address in one day:

- Your observations of behavior—a friend’s eyes fill with tears as she talks about mundane events of her busy morning.  Why the tears? 

- Your worries and obsessions—Is it really necessary to clean the refrigerator before you start writing? You notice your powerful resistance to getting still.

- Your conversations and conflicts—At a party, a friend interrupts your explanation of a relationship challenge to say, “It’s all a mystery, Lezlie.  Some things you can’t figure out.  Just stop.”

-  The tiniest details and events of your life—You observe a cat sitting on top of the fence underneath the tabebuia tree, staring intently at the upper limbs, body coiled for action.

          It's all fodder for the writing mill. Learn to note what’s alive in you in each moment. Be aware of who you are, where you are, and what is happening to you and in you. It's all material!

Discerning what wants to be written comes, in part, from being honest and vulnerable. The writer must first and foremost see herself truly. The poet Mary Oliver asks, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" I like that line. It's a great call to self-awareness. Who am I? What is possible for me? How shall I spend my time? The writer must be present with the big questions all the time.

But I might suggest a slight change in Oliver's inspiring phrase: "How do you plan to be in your one wild and precious life?" This re-phrasing suggests that we think about being in the world in a certain conscious manner, that we be aware of nuance, gesture, and impulse—those subtle factors that determine both character and action.

As we become more aware of who we are, we have more and more occasion for shaping, experiencing, documenting, analyzing, understanding ourselves (and others). That is, we have more facility for telling the stories of who we are and what we are about. And that, my fellow writers, is exactly what a prompt is!  It is a call to see and depict what is before you; it is an appeal to slow down and reside with a feeling that arises, seemingly unsolicited; it is an invitation to unravel the complications and rich layers of life.  This is what aspiring writers do.  And you don’t need a teacher to help you do it.

If this is true, you may be asking, why have you written a book of prompts?  Well, to tell the truth, this book is as much for me as it is for you. Each one of these prompts comes out of my life experience, my fears, my problems, my joys and small satisfactions. They are, in a sense, mini-essays, small explorations into my daily perceptions and understandings. They are my own attempts to pin down in words the very nature of my experience in the body, mind, and heart that seem to make up a “me.” In them, you’ll see evidence of books I’ve been reading, activities I’ve engaged in, emotions I’ve grappled with, people I’ve adored, disappointments I’ve endured. Life seems like an answer to a whole series of cosmic questions these days. So though this looks like a book of prompts, it’s really an odd sort of autobiography. When you read these prompts, you are reading me.

That being said, the purpose of these prompts is to help you probe your experiences.  You will find yourself remembering stories from your childhood, and you may find yourself creating new stories that are only tangentially related to your real-life experience. And those stories, real or not, may help you see yourself in new ways. They may help you gain insight into how you feel or why you behave the way to do.  A good prompt will inevitably lead the writer to healthy self-reflection. 

And too, the writing that emerges out of your self-reflections will sometimes be just for shear pleasure.  Like the artist with his sketchbook of experimental drawings, you may want to write simply to enjoy pushing words around on a page—making a list or pinning down a good image or exploring questions and paradoxes can be good, clean lexical fun.   It’s important to let yourself play and experiment with your writing.  If these prompts do nothing more than bring you delight and satisfaction in the words you’ve put down, then that is plenty enough!

So, who knows what shape your responses will take.  Don’t think you have to write gut-wrenching autobiography or high-minded literary fiction. We all know that once the writing starts, the form (and even the purpose) of the writing is up for grabs. Don’t limit yourself by putting rigid expectation on what you should produce. E-gad, that’s a sure-fire way to close the doors of perception. And as the title of the book implies, my hope is that these prompts will fling open the doors of perception and lead you to new spaces of experience. Feel free, if you want, to tell your true stories in response to these prompts. But also feel free to let your words run wild. Write stories or poems or vignettes or dialogues or prose poems or rants or lists or free-wheeling, out-of-control, genre-bending novels!

My goal as your guide is simply to open a door. You, dear writer, must enter by yourself.