How to Write from Prompts

Overview

Prompts can be used for any genre of writing—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, whatever.

You can write about yourself in the first person (“I”) or you can use the prompts to give voice to your fictional characters (or even to inanimate objects, if you feel like being playful!)

Let the prompt spark the writing. No need to follow it literally. In other words, don’t think about what the prompt means; don’t try to force your writing to be “about” the prompt. Try letting the first image that pops into your head be your cue, your guide. Then simply begin. (Famous Allen Ginsberg quote: “First thought, best thought.”)

The point isn’t for you to cleverly use or write about the prompt. The point is for you to write about what you care about and what you want to write about. If the prompt is helpful, great! If it gives you a fun or interesting or unexpected connection to a subject you want to write about, great. But if you don’t need it, that’s fine too.

Take a minute to center yourself before you start to write; see what rises to the top. What subjects or topics or thoughts or feelings have energy right now? If you feel a strong energy, follow it. You don’t necessarily need to know where you’re going. Energy without any strong content can sometimes be more compelling (and fun to play with) than content without strong energy!

Still, try to make some sense and achieve some focus. Daily writes are not meant to be pure stream-of-consciousness. Pure stream of consciousness means you write down every single thing that comes into your head, non-stop, even if it makes no sense and you compose no actual sentences. Try to go one or two steps beyond that.

Remember, there is no right or wrong way to write from a prompt. A prompt is a “nudge” to help you get going. That’s all.

Tips and Strategies

Use the prompt at a slant. Look at the prompt “sideways.” Let your mind slip into associations. Let yourself drift into a first thought, image, or feeling.

Don’t think about it for too long. If you’re sitting there thinking, you’re not writing. Unplanned, unedited writing can key you into a moment. Go with whatever is happening in the moment of writing.

Don’t reject the prompt out of hand. Plunge into it even if it doesn’t float your boat. See what happens. You will often be pleasantly surprised.

Let go of expectations. Allow yourself to be surprised by yourself. (Find out what you have to say in the act of saying it.)

Write against the prompt. If you hate a prompt, write against it. Use sarcasm, ridicule, frustration. Turn a prompt into its opposite. Or reject it all together.

Peek ahead at the prompt. You have the prompts ahead of time. Look at the prompt the day before or in the morning and let it float in your mind for a while, perhaps for the whole day. Walk around with it. See how it changes.

Use the prompt as the first word or in the first sentence of the write.

Change the tense or point of view. For example, if the prompt uses the pronoun “you,” feel free to change the pronoun to he or she or they, or to use a fictional character’s name (or a real person’s name). Or feel free to change the tense. Do whatever you want to do. The prompt is here to serve you; you are not here to serve the prompt.

Try to write about what you care about, about what matters most to you, what’s truly on your mind. This includes passions, obsessions, and preoccupations. The topic can be lofty or mundane. What matters isn’t the topic itself, it’s how YOU handle it, in your own voice, in your own way . . . bringing all of your personal experiences and history and SELF to bear.

Don’t stop to read (or edit, rephrase or ponder) what you’ve written until your timer goes off.

Be open to surprise. A prompt leads in unexpected directions, but only if you let that happen.

Sample Prompts and Writes

The examples below are all strong writes demonstrating different genres, styles and approaches.

Emily Zimmerman

Anisha Desai

Elisabeth Miller

Sameer Siruguri

All lines descend into the valley

I’m determined to understand how the other side thinks, instead of mindlessly demonizing them prior to investigation. Therefore, I enrolled in an online class at Hillsdale, a conservative Christian college founded in the 19th century, on the topic of the American Left.

First I vetted Hillsdale a little bit. I found an article in the New Yorker magazine profiling their current president, Dr. Larry Arnn, and investigating Hillsdale’s agenda to influence American education and politics, their effect on Ron DeSantis’ governance of Florida, the fact that almost all students who enroll there are white, and so forth. On the other hand, they do not appear simply to be a front organization for Christian Nationalists. But on the other hand, Dr. Larry Arnn sent me an email insisting that President Biden had used Easter to celebrate Transgender Day of Visibility. I wrote him back, saying “I’m sure that as a college president you would not want to spread disinformation.” I explained that the date of Easter moves around, pegged to the lunar calendar, and that Transgender Day of Visibility is on March 31st every year, and that President Biden had no power over the scheduling of either. Dr. Arnn did not reply.

The course on the American Left turned out to be surprisingly interesting and informative. For the most part, the instructor, a bald man named Slack, was clearly well educated on his topic, and, while obviously biased toward conservatism and against the Left, all his lectures cited verifiable facts of American history. I learned a whole bunch. I hadn’t known the difference between Progressivism and FDR’s New Deal Liberalism, and the changes that occurred with the Neoliberalism of Bill Clinton and his ilk.

But in the end, the whole thing turned out to be a huge disappointment when Mr. Slack defended Trump. Jeez.

No one saw me  

I’ve inherited the kind of face and accompanying features that will allow me to blend into even the most homogenous of crowds. Perhaps it is the sheer amount of real estate that my cheeks have always taken up; they connect me to strangers and babies, in a way that suggests a kind of benign friendliness that will neither elevate nor dampen the mood. My nose, impervious to the precision and slope of a typical person from my father’s region, instead favors the soft, nebulous creep and curvature of my mother’s side.

I listened for years, as patients guessed at my father’s ethnicity. Whatever they wanted to see, he was. For the vast majority of the town’s white folk, they knew someone named Sureshchandra Desai was certainly not one of them, but he sure did make an effort, by their measures. He had very light skin, hair smoothed back into a thin mini pompadour, and a fashion wardrobe that featured varied colored Sansabelt pants, JC Penney dress shirts with coordinating ties, and a fragrance wardrobe that pulled the whole look together. When he worked at the New Horizons facility on Midway Road, he served the truckers, who hoped that he was white or Latino, like them. On alternating Wednesdays, he’d be at the private psychiatric hospital in the neighboring town, and it was beneficial for him to be identified as Indian. It was a kind of status symbol that ended up being mutually beneficial by everyone’s calculus.

My mother, taller than my father, and with visibly darker skin, was impossible to miss. It wasn’t her striking appearance or a loud voice that compelled you to stare at her; it was her overwhelming dour face that never shifted in intensity no matter the occasion of sorrow or glee.