Writing Circle: Prompts

Don’t try to keep up. Write what resonates for you.

Prompt #14: Mess. Write about a great big mess in your home or your yard or your life.

A friend of mine has one room in the house where her family dumps everything they don’t want to deal with. Another friend has ‘the drawer.’ My friend’s daughter had a ‘rat’s nest’ – a terrible tangle in the back of her long hair that she wouldn’t let her mother comb out. In my home, it’s my husband’s office – aka my nightmare (so messy that I hate even walking through it).

Tell me about your mess: Describe the mess. How did it get that way? How do you feel about it? Why is it still there? What stops you, if anything, from cleaning it up?

PS My friend, Alison Nazarian, has a whole book about her mess

Prompt  13: List ten things. Choose list a or list b – or invent a list of your own. Have fun.

• a) Ten soul things. Things which, when you encountered them, made your soul whoop with recognition. Ten things of the soul: the experience that opened you; the person with whom your mind instantly melded; the image that drenched you with awe; the adventure that challenged and stretched you; that particular quality of light, color or energy that makes your heart ache with recognition.
• b) Ten openings. Ten things you want to open to in the coming year. List the people, experiences, challenges, risks, ideas, places, projects, activities, questions, parts of your life, pieces of the mystery…

Prompt #12: Other Gifts. The presents have been opened, the dishes washed and put away. What other gifts have the holidays delivered?

Yesterday, I drove my mother to visit my father in the nursing home. There, she presented him with one of her paintings. I watched his eyes fill with tears. I watched her face, lit with the surprise of his response. I watched these two people who’d been married for so long – and then, divorced – meet again.

I saw that it is possible for a woman of 82 to continue to bloom, to grow, to discover. I saw that it is possible for a man of 84, who can barely move his body, to feel and express a love so wide and deep.

Later, I sat in a Thai restaurant lit with colored Christmas lights watching carved wooden mermaids and angels twirl from the ceiling, and eating Pad Thai and curry with my ‘children’ and the man that I’ve loved since I was 18 and received, again, the true gifts of the holiday  - the gifts that are always there and which, every now and then when something like a holiday slows me down, I manage to receive.

Prompt #11: Three Soul Questions.

You’ll find today’s prompt in my guest post for Tiferet Journal  http://tiferetjournal.com/2011/12/19/knew/

Prompt #10:  List ten things you’d like to give up/stop doing this year. 

Feel free to expand on the ‘list’ by shaping it into an essay, a conversation, a one-act screenplay, a journal entry…  Think about what giving up these things would give you; think about what NOT giving them up would cost.

Prompt #9: Link your vision to your daily life. 

You’ll find your prompt in my Inspiration Friday post: http://amyoscar.com/inspiration-fridays/inspire-yourself-reclaim-your-planner-by-infusing-each-moment-with-vision-and-meaning/

Prompt #8: Original Face. 

The original face is a concept out of Zen Buddhism. It originates in the following koan (as quoted in Wikipedia): What did your face look like before your parents were born?”

Keeping with this concept, consider: What does the real you look like? Where is s/he now? What is s/he doing? What kind of house does s/he live in? What name does s/he use?Who are you, when you are not pretending to be you but are, rather, at rest inside of yourself?  What does your original face look like?

Prompt #7: Paris.

When I was 20, a junior in college, I spent one semester in Paris. The moment I arrived, I knew I’d found my soul city. The old world architecture, the after-midnight music spilling from the jazz ‘caves’ beneath the city. The thick sweet drag of a Gauloise cigarette. The weird symmetry of sipping French wine in France! I was very impressed with myself.

Almost 35 years later, I still have my first Plan de Paris, stuffed with billets from Metro jaunts to tourist spots – and hidden haunts.  (I wish I still had the white linen nightgown I purchased at the Marche Aux Puces in Clingancourt.)

Write about a place that’s moved you, touched you, changed you. Maybe you have a ‘Paris’ of your own – a place that calls to you from the past – from the future. Is there a magical vacation spot that touched your life or your heart? Is there a fantasy spot that you visit in your imagination when things get hard?

Prompt #6: Presence.

On my desk, there’s a glass tumbler, embossed with bees which holds a book of matches, a mechanical pencil that one of my grown children left behind; and three magic wands.

I inherited the first wand when my daughter outgrew it: a long plastic cylinder, filled with clear liquid, bright glitter and tiny foil stars; the second wand is wooden, built of a knitting needle and a wooden star, the whole thing painted with silver paint, which has chipped into a pattern that looks like a slice of a map of the world.

The third wand was built by nature; it’s 12-inches long, one inch across: a white striated crystal given to me by a magician. We used to meet at a cafe called Temptations to take apart the universe over tea and apple pie. This was not a romantic affair – but I did fall in love with him. I fell in love (and in envy) a lot back then. It was the only way that I knew to get the secret key to enlightenment. (You know what I mean: the key that ‘evolved’ people wear, suspended by invisible strands of unicorn hair, just under their shirts.)

One night, I dreamed that he was flying me around in a biplane, overlooking the world, my white scarf flapping about behind me. Suddenly, he let go of the controls, insisting I pull them toward me. “You can do this. You know how to fly this plane,” he said. Then, he dissolved – leaving me to land the plane in this new life, with these new eyes and these keys.

Prompt: What is there, where you are? What place are you in? A room of your home, a cafe? What sounds are in the air – music, birdsong, the whistle of wind rattling the windows? Notice everything. What’s on your desk (or cafe table)? What objects surround you? Why are they there? What memories do they conjure? What magic?

Prompt #5: 400 words. 

I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t make lists – lists of characters, lists of settings, lists of story ideas. I love (and often list) colors of nail polish (Second Honeymoon, Sheer Bliss, Cha-Ching Cherry), sweaters from J. Crew (vintage champagne)  and Garnet Hill (pea pod,  glacier).

So today, inspired by Tanya Geisler’s Things I love in 400 words I invite you to make your own 400-word list.

What lights you up? What turns you on? What makes you shiver with resonance? List the songs, the textures, the flavors, the experiences. The place that you’ll never forget. The scent, the color, the time of day, the tree, the activity…

My list is here. Now, write yours.

400 words. Gush. Savor. Go.

Prompt #4: Flu. 

Today, I am skipping the long prompt to have the flu. As I post this note, however, I realize that even in that single word, ‘flu’, there is much potential.

Memories of snuggling beneath heaps of blankets for blissful daytime sleep; of mothering sick children, of banging pots in the kitchen, preparing healing brews and soups. Achy bones remind me of other things – most notably, that I HAVE a body. I spend so much time online that it happens that sometimes I lose track of it.

So, today, write about being sick. Write of self-care, of mothering or fathering a sick child. Write about caring for an aging parent. How do you care for those you love? 

Prompt #3: Interruptions. 

Today, at 8:09 am,  a film crew arrived at my house. I’d planned a quiet morning of reading and resting; hot tea with honey to soothe my poor sore throat followed by a power nap or two. I was happily nestled into the couch with the Mary Wesley novel I’m re-reading when I heard my husband’s alarm go off. A moment later, he ran in, blurry with sleep, to tell me they were coming. The next moment, they drove up the driveway. Five very tall college kids – really to make a film. I looked at the laundry heaped on the other sofa. I looked at the kitchen, piled with last night’s dishes. I blew my nose.

So much for rest and healing time.

Now, removed to a warm cafe – where I have my pot of tea, my plate of lovely sashimi and this bowl of brown rice – I caught myself trying to convince me that I really have too much going on to keep my promise to post a prompt for you today.

I am watching myself list all of the reasons – oddly, they’re the same reasons that arise whenever I have something important to do, something that requires me to show up. And I am writing this prompt anyway.

So that’s today’s prompt. What interrupts you? What comes up, just when you’ve managed to clear a bit of time and space in your life for you? What cars full of film students show up in your driveway? What gossipy girlfriends appear at your door? What videos appear on your Facebook wall that simply must be clicked on immediately?

Write about it your own way. Tell us about the time when ‘circumstances beyond your control’ got in the way of something important.Make a list of all the people, situations, regulations, symptoms, cataclysms and natural disasters that are currently keeping you from getting where you want to go. While you’re at it, tell us about what it is that all of these interruptions are distracting you from doing, from being, from seeing?

Prompt #2: Miracles/We don’t know anything.

Today, as I  was emailing my angel column to my editor, a small white feather swirled through the air and landed on my keyboard. In a restaurant.  Try to picture this. Don’t write it off. Don’t pretend to understand, scientifically, how this could happen. Don’t think about law of attraction. Don’t make it into a story of someone’s down jacket, happening to shed a feather as he or she passed my table.

Let it in. I am in the middle of a busy cafe. A white feather floats into my booth, up over my laptop, landing on my keyboard as I am writing about angels. (This has happened before.) Outside, a flock of seagulls whooshes by, flapping at the windows. Now you are ready for today’s prompt. Here it is: We don’t know anything.

There is a place between here and there, between mystery and science, between staying and leaving, between choice and becoming: a place where most of us do not want to stay very long. We want to name and explain everything. We want to understand, to know – so we can put things in their places.

And yet, sitting in this space of not yet, of “I don’t know,” can be the most powerful place of all. For it is here, having departed the familiar and not yet arrived at the ‘who knows where,’ that anything is possible.

Come and sit in the in-between for a while. Write from there.

Consider, from this place of becoming and dreams: what is moving toward you through the silence? What gathers at the edges of your life, awaiting entry? What clarity have you left behind in order to embrace the not-yet-formed? What is beginning to stir inside of you, not yet born but almost ready to emerge?

Prompt# 1: You will find the first prompt here.