More of an editing prompt than a writing one:
Write a complete poem of your choice. It can be a personal narrative, it can be political discourse, it can be a persona piece in the voice of that turtle that stole your favorite pen. Once you've completed it, eliminate the resolution. That's right. Lose those lines that tied that pretty little ribbon of hope on the end of your poem. (last paragraph of instructions cut, due to them resolving the prompt)
0 Comments
One of the most common, trite, writing prompts is to write from the perspective of an inanimate object. This does usually succeed in getting an inexperienced/rut-trapped writer to not transparently write about themselves or The Human Condition. Sure, a little bit (or many bits) may come through but it's only the most narcissistic writer that comes out of this exercise writing a diatribe about how their overprotective mother is to blame for their failure to advance past the first round on Chopped.
But what happens to the inanimate object when it eases to be useful, or when it used to its capacity? Noel Fielding has a routine called The Teabag Dream, where he is a bag of herbal tea longing to be taken out of a cupboard only to witness what happens when a teabag is removed from the cupboard ("Only a teabag can hear another teabag scream"). As he, the teabag, is used for a creative project and not to make tea, he "survives" and returns to his cupboard bound comrades to speak of the horror that awaits them if they're ever selected. Write about the journey of another inanimate object back to its kind to warn them of the horrors of the afterlife, or lack of afterlife. Bonus points for not making it somehow about your ex.
Even though the relevance of the story about the Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton coin toss seems to have been misreported, this week's prompt asks you to imagine a circumstance where a coin flip would seem like an extremely unadvisable form of resolution, and then imagine how its use may have improved or worsened the situation.
|
Links
Write Or Die
Scott Woods's Twitter Prompts Rachel Mckibbens' Prompt Blog The 30/30 Prompt Blog Asterisk And Sidebar Prompts Archives
January 2020
Categories |