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Writing Prompts. Love them? Hate them?

Most writers can point to a project that started or developed with a prompt.

Prompts prove useful when casting about for fresh writing projects. After all that prompt-based writing, however, steel yourself for slogging through the rubble to find gems.  

Revision work may be where prompt-based writing shines. Approach prompts with an ongoing project in mind. Seek material that deepens your text without sending the project on tangents. The results can be satisfying.

Escaping into the Open

Among the prompts worth visiting (or revisiting) are those in novelist Elizabeth Berg’s Escaping into the Open: The Art of True Writing. The book, which is nearing its 25^th anniversary, includes a full chapter of prompts that shows “thinking less and writing more can become a very good habit.” While the book’s publishing industry advice is a bit dated, Berg’s encouragement and guidance on using details to bring writing alive continues to be timeless.    

Field trips

Berg recommends field trips or rather “plunking yourself down in a different environment” and writing about “everything you see and hear and feel, if only to make a list of sensations.”

Documenting the people, as well as your senses, can yield characterizations, such as “nose-ringed teenagers” and “pastel-cardiganed grandmothers,” to replace stickier, clunkier lines.

In terms of setting, Berg recommends focusing on ambient sounds that “can help your readers visualize a place.” For example, tune into the sounds after a church’s prayer vigil or lunchtime at a local diner.

On field trips, seek the details, updated metaphors, and memories (yours or your characters) that give weight to your words. In doing so, run through your senses of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Speaking of taste and that field trip to a local diner, what would your character crave or try under duress? There’s a special place for food in both fiction and nonfiction writing, especially cuisine linked to a particular setting.

Red Flannel Hash

The opening paragraph of Pam Houston’s short story “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” from The Best American Short Stories 1999, does a lot of work and refers to a specific food:  

“A perfect day in the city always starts like this: my fiend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann’s where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.”

Red Flannel Hash? Beets?
Beyond Pam Houston’s story, I explored this new-to-me way to eat beets, one of nature’s so-called superfoods. I recommend this recipe from Taste of Home: https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/red-flannel-hash/ The Red Flannel Hash recipe, which includes vegetarian options, calls for corned beef, but I used four slices of bacon to match the description in Houston’s story.

To “prime the subconscious pump,” try some prompt-based drafting and take writing-focused field trips. Consider the following prompt from Berg’s book to get you started:

“Describe five completely different types of people placing their order for coffee with the same waitress. Describe these people in appearance, movement, and speech. If you like, also describe the waitress’s reaction to them.”