Week 8 ~ Writing prompts & where to find them ...

Sorry ... couldn't resist borrowing from a current movie title just for fun. If you're wanting to write, but don't know what to write about, it's always a good idea to have some prompts on hand.

As you saw in the last post, quite a lot of ground can be covered with just a single prompt, so you don't actually need many, but I wanted to give you some ideas to get you started on your own prompt collection, and share some of the bazillion prompts we all came up with during the class last week.

So ... where to start? How about trying some of these:

Paint Samples: Pick up paint sample strips at the hardware store. Cut them into single colour “chips”.

Exercise 1: Spread the paint chips face up on the table. Select five colours that “speak” to you. In your journal, briefly write about what emotion those colours make you feel, or a memory that comes to mind when you look at them. Do they make you feel warm? Cool? Angry? Hopeful? Do they remind you of a room you slept in as a child? Or a favourite sweater?

Exercise 2: Again, spread the paint chips face up on the table and select five colours that “speak” to you. Now look at the names of the colours. Choose one that brings up a memory for you. Don’t worry if the connection between the colour name and the memory seem a bit nebulous, just feel what you feel. For example, if looking at “Island Coral” makes you remember that as a child you were so angry with someone that you wanted to run away and live alone on a island, go with it.

Write “The Abecedarian of My Early Life”

In a small notebook you can carry with you, write out A to Z, one letter per page. Think about words from your childhood for each letter. For example: S for school, or sport or summer. L for lake. M for mittens. Fill the cards with as many meaningful items from your childhood as you can. Write in your journal about the ones that jump out at you.

Prompts That Jog Childhood Memories

• Describe one of your earliest childhood memories. How old were you? What bits and pieces can you recall?
• Who was your best childhood friend? Write about some of the fun things you used to do together.
• Can you remember your mom’s or grandmother’s kitchen? Use sight and smell words to describe it.
• Describe the most unusual or memorable place you have lived.
• Did you have your own bedroom growing up, or did you share with a sibling? Describe your room.
• Were you shy as a child? Bossy? Obnoxious? Describe several of your childhood character traits. How did those qualities show themselves? Are you still that way today?
• Write about a holiday memory. Where did you go? What did you do? What foods do you remember?
• Describe your favorite hideaway.
• Think of a time when you did something you shouldn’t have done. Describe both the incident and the feelings they created.
• Do you have quirky or interesting relatives on your family tree? Describe one or two of them.
• Books can be childhood friends. What were some of your favorites? Why were they special?
• Write about some sayings, expressions, or advice you heard at home when you were growing up. Who said them? What did they mean? Do you use any of those expressions today?

 This partial list of prompts is an excerpt from: writeshop.com/childhood-memories-writing-prompts/

During class we played around with a few ways to generate random letters, and then wrote shared lists of words from those letters. We used special multi-sided letter dice, and we came up with like a bazillion words. But you don't need dice to make this work. If you have online access, you can use a random letter generator, such as randomlettergenerator.com, or letterdice.

There are even random word generators online (of course there are). I like this one because it lets you choose what kind of word (noun, adjective, verb, etc.).

I thought I'd share with you all the words we came up with during class. There were quite a few. Not a bazillion, but it only took a few minutes and it was fun to do, so we could have got to a bazillion quite easily. You'll notice we have more words for some letters than others, while some letters are missing. That's the randomness of rolling the dice for you. We passed the cards around from person to person as well, so sometimes seeing a word the person before you had written would make your brain go down a different pathway as well. That's why it's good to share the word gathering process.