Prompts & Gifts
Three creative writing challenges + free feedback.
In honor of the launch of my first online, self-paced course (and the excitement of soon launching more), this month I’m writing three fun creative writing prompts (below!).
I’m also offering a promise:
Any subscriber to this newsletter who writes a poem using one of the below three prompts may send it to me for free, professional feedback, same as I would do for my clients.
Here’s how I see my role of poetry mentor/editor:
I always base my feedback in encouragement, rather than in criticism.
My responses generally include:
Enthusiasms! I love poetry. I don’t sneer at any style, level of experience, or approach. I appreciate it all.
Questions galore. Much of my mentoring and editing work revolves around making sure the writer is fully aware and certain about all of the choices they’ve made in their poem, and checking that they’ve considered any alternatives. I also ask about the writer’s intentions—especially, what they ideally hope a reader will walk away thinking or feeling after reading their poem.
Challenging you to push farther. I often point to areas that could have potential for more impact (PMI for short!). By this I mean sections, lines, or even words that could be written or presented in a more effective way that would better serve your goals for the poem.
Reading suggestions. Reading is a huge part of writing well. So I might offer poems or poets or even other types of artwork (plays, music, visual art…) to check out, which could inform your own particular creative practice.
Subscribers only, please (it’s free to subscribe); one poem per subscriber. :)
Directions for how to send them are at the bottom of this newsletter.
Now on with the prompting!
~ Elisabeth
Alterations & Impossibilities
Quick thought experiment:
Imagine if hospitals were completely different—so different that when people got sick, they looked forward to going. Instead of saying, “I have to go to the hospital,” people would say, “I get to go to the hospital!”
Hospitals where:
All the staff are well-rested and well-supported
All the patients are given free care, feel empowered, and enjoy uninterrupted rest
Friends and family may live alongside the person being treated, to better support them in their healing process
Patients have access to luscious indoor & outdoor gardens, herbs, beauty, community, delicious food, good company and conversations, opportunities for solitude, and free wellness activities like therapy, stretching, massage, meditation, exercise, and napping.
There are spaces, facilities, and (voluntary) opportunities to create art, play sports and games, and offer assistance to others. (I believe it’s vital to our wellbeing to feel useful and valuable to our community, no matter what our abilities may be.)
At first, this radically different concept was difficult for me to imagine, but then once I got going, I couldn’t stop. Just the process of imagining it unleashed copious ideas and fully engaged my creative thinking.
Prompt #1: Turn something on its head.
There are two steps to this prompt:
Choose something and change it utterly.
Write a poem within the backdrop of that new, changed reality.
To be clear:
Once you’ve picked what you’ll radically change, do not write a poem describing that change.
Instead, inhabit the change in your imagination, and write a poem with that radical change as the backdrop reality—just as today we write poems against the real world’s backdrop reality.
For example, on a normal day, if you write a poem about your child, their backdrop reality includes their education and cultural activities. So even if it’s a poem about a conversation between you and your child, it might still peripherally involve that backdrop. Perhaps the conversation happens on the way to school, or interrupts religious services.
What if this conversation happened against the backdrop of an alien ruling class, or a world without wheels, or a culture where the town clock ticked the seconds as loudly as it clanged the hours?
Even if your poem is more abstract and experimental, it’s still being written within the context of known poetic forms and known poetic movements. What if your formally experimental poem were written in the context of a fictional poetic movement wherein all poems were written only to be erased? Or a world in which literary history sprang originally from ancient peoples studying the lullabies of pigs?
The re-imagining of possibilities is employed to great effect in science fiction, fantasy, and, notably and powerfully, in Afrofuturism.
The technique of creating a backdrop reality within which to set a work of art (rather than writing directly about a strange or wondrous thing) is known in filmmaking and fiction writing as worldbuilding.
But both of these techniques—reimagining possibilities and worldbuilding—are excellent techniques for poetry, too. For example, it’s a huge part of writing a persona poem, where we step into a fictional or real person’s shoes, and act as their voice.
If you’re feeling stuck, here are a few examples:
Imagine you loved someone you actually despise. What would a (sincere) love poem to them look like?
Imagine everyone in the world received a Universal Basic Income. What might be a teenager’s thoughts as they attend a Career Day event at their high school?
Imagine pogo sticks were more popular than bikes. What might a nurse rant about in the break room?
And in case you need to hear this:
You can write a serious poem. And alternatively, if you wish, you can be playful. Humor and playfulness are legitimate, valuable qualities in a work of poetry.
Some of us (and I include myself here) tend to forget this, in our striving to be taken seriously as artists.
The Next Volume of Your Life
Similar theme-world but also very different!
Imagine if your life were sectioned off in the following way:
Everything you’ve experienced up until right now is Volume 1. (It’s hefty!)
The denouement or conclusion of your life is Volume 3. (It’s short. Couple of lines, if that).
But in between? That’s the green and growing frontier—Volume 2.
Whether you’re aged 16 or 85, there is some time (though we know not how much) between now and when you will have bought the farm, cashed in your chips, joined the great majority, hopped on the last rattler, popped your clogs.
(Maybe you’ll enjoy this list of death euphemisms as much as I did…)
Prompt #2: Look back on your future.
Another Thought Experiment:
You’re long gone—in fact, it’s been one hundred years ago since you departed this plane of existence.
A very nerdy and creative scholar is fascinated with your life, and has been writing your biography in verse.
They’ve just gotten to Volume 2. It’s going to contain biographical poems about all the stuff that has yet to happen in your life (except the ending stuff).
For this prompt:
Pretend you’re a future poetry biographer looking at the period of your life that is, in reality, your upcoming future.
Write a poem about some part of volume 2 of your life, from their point of view.
How should you approach writing a biographical poem?
It’s like any other poem about any other topic. It’s just a poem about a thing that happened. The only difference is you’ll be imagining looking at your life from an outside perspective, from a nerdy perspective, however you might interpret that. (I’m a full-fledged nerd, so I mean this in the most endearing of ways).
Try to stick to the 3rd person (they/he/she) and past tense, since you’re describing it in a pseudo-biographical style.
How should you write about your future?
The answer is, however you want. Absolutely anything goes—from silliness to envisioning your hopes and dreams coming true. From completely out-of-character tales to simple depictions of enjoying future morning coffees.
Examples, if you’re feeling stuck:
A poem examining an unexpected welcome surprise turn in your life. Maybe a simple hobby (bread-baking, whittling, scuba diving) led to a breakthrough, a wildly successful business, or a life-saving moment.
A poem about that time you fell into an open manhole and lived to tell the tale.
A poem about your future child/grandchild/great-grandchild’s entrance into the world, and how you felt about it
A poem about your conversion to a new faith
Tips and tricks:
Use biographer techniques!
Quote from friends and families’ letters, emails, social media posts.
Quote from your own future diary entries.
Quote from your own future poems and books.
Bring up debates among scholars (some say you liked wallpaper with horse designs because horses reminded you of your mother; others note evidence for a questionable past involvement in horse race betting)
Use footnotes and endnotes to explain, expand, or reference things.
Vintage Ekphrasis
For this third and final prompt, here again is the trio of photos I put at the beginning.
These are three random vintage snapshots from my collection—collecting photos has been a hobby of mine for over 20 years. I get these kinds of photos from flea markets, junk shops, antique shops, eBay, and the like. Occasionally they have some info written in longhand on the back, but most of the time they have no provenance, no names, no dates.
Ekphrastic poems are poems written about an image or work of art. Originally, ekphrasis referred specifically to a vivid description of an artwork, but the term has gotten more expansive over time.
Prompt #3: Vintage Snapshots
Write a poem “about” these three photographs. You can describe them, you can create a story, you can use them as points of meditation or as starting points for associative poems.
Do anything you like, just include (somehow) all three photos in the generative process.
Send me one of your prompted poems!
If you write poetry in response to one of these three prompts, you are welcome to send them to me at lullabiesalarms@gmail.com. I’ll read them all, but please choose just one for me to provide feedback for.
Include a sentence or two about your process (how’d it go for you?), and a sentence or two about what you’re hoping to achieve (what you’d like the reader to feel or think or do after reading this poem). Your answers will help me cater my feedback more specifically to you. You can also, if you wish, write a little about yourself and/or point me to your website/bio/social media.
I’m really looking forward to reading and responding!
~ Elisabeth
I appreciate this format and look forward to engaging!
thank you Elisabeth!