Prompting Stories

The creative magic of randomness

As a writing teacher, I often give students a prompt to spark a story and focus their imaginations. As a writer, though, I rarely write to prompts. I feel like I have enough story ideas already swirling about in my head.

That said, in the random times I have written to prompts, I’ve experienced the creative joy of … randomness. I’m always surprised by how a prompt can take me out of my head to new terrain in a somewhat effortless way.

I was recently pleasantly carried into new storytelling realms by the famous flash-fiction story prompter

Meg Pokrass

’s newsletter,

Prompts of Resilience

, which includes a Hall of Fame feature. The Hall of Fame feature includes stories by writers like Aimee Bender, Etgar Keret, Amber Spark—and now me, so I’m especially honored to be in the mix with that esteemed crowd.

Meg gave me a photo prompt—the photo above—and challenged me to use at least three of these seven words: Yawn, waxy, home, strong, butter, help, fancy, promise. I ended up using five.

Here’s what I loved about the experience:

1. I loved pondering this strange clown, his zealous joy, and his oversized derriere. His exuberance struck me as so pure and boundless, and therefore tragic. He haunts me (as a person and as a clown).

2. While writing the story, I glanced at the word prompts from time to time, so the story moved through the words, changing direction, finding a new groove, almost like a poem.

3. There was something about writing to the prompts that made the story less precious, less ponderous—in good ways. It was just a creative exercise to be playful with, and every time I write to a prompt I realize how I need to find ways to be more playful with my writing.

The word prompt means “an act of assisting or encouraging a hesitating speaker.” I’m going to add to that definition: a prompt is a means to get out of a creative rut. I’m going to write to prompts more regularly as a result.

If you want to write to a prompt, I suggest subscribing to Meg’s newsletter—and checking out 100 Word Story’s monthly photo prompt.

Here’s my story!

Roundelay

Everyone spoils the child, blames the clown. And yet I dance, I smile, I shake my caboose, and I scare children who are scared of clowns, but did I cause that?

Your name, a simple Diane. But there was nothing simple about you. So I called you Dionisia. But you said you were Diane. But you were Dionisia.

“I fancy you,” I said.

“I fancy that,” you said.

Everything you said felt like art. Even when you ordered a tuna sandwich.

When we passed each other in the kitchen, I’d spin you around and kiss you. I wanted to rub moonlight into your back. You wanted me to rub moonlight into your back. Our breaths next to one another. Our breaths one another.

I’ve heard that we’re all just trying to go home, not knowing where home is. Let me venture a theory: Home is being touched by another. Our hands together here. Love swooshing in, love swooshing out (except I only felt it swooshing in).

Why didn’t you look happier, I want to ask now. Why didn’t you trust me to take you to the places you wanted to go?

“Just butter my bread for once, darling,” you said. You yawned with your coffee.

I promised. You promised. I helped. You left. You thought I was a clown, and you were right.

But did you know that love is beyond language? Even though we are forever trying to find language for it? Did you hear me? Did you see my smile?

Love is this emotion, like radium.

I get mad at the world, as if the world can hear my anger. I ask for grace from a God I’ve never seen.

How to confess that my mind is full of vicious ballet instructors who practice fencing?

I wonder whether a suicide note is better handwritten or typed? My cursive is so hard to read. Where does one put a suicide note to make sure it’s seen?

I won’t commit suicide. I worry too much.

My soul feels so big, but the doctor told me it was normal-sized. What do doctors know?

You didn’t call for me, but I looked back again.

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Because a quote

“To be nobody but

yourself in a world

which is doing its best day and night to make you like

everybody else means to fight the hardest battle

which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”¹

― E.E. Cummings

I’m available for book coaching and editing!

I love working with writers, and I have some space on my Writing Consult calendar if you’re looking for help.

I help people develop books and projects from scratch and sometimes do larger edits on finished manuscripts.

Lately, I've worked on a few novels as well as some short story projects. I’ve also worked on helping people figure out what kind of writer they are or want to be, and which projects can help get them there.

Contact me to find out more about my one-on-one work with writers.

Because a photo

I’m so happy for my friend Gail Butensky whose cool photo was just featured in The New Yorker’s “Photo Booth”!

Gail and I waited tables together in the early 90s, and we’re teaming up on a photo/novel project that's coming out next fall. More to come, but the book features 30 or so of Gail's road-trip photos, each of them accompanied by one of my stories.

Gail's story in The New Yorker is below (sorry, the link is for subscribers only). Follow her on Instagram where your stream will be full of punk photos that bring the 80s and 90s back in edgy, flavorful ways.

Here’s The New Yorker’s write-up:

“In the early nineteen-eighties, Gail Butensky, then an undergraduate at Northwestern University, in Chicago, started taking photographs of punk bands for the Daily Northwestern. “I had pretty wimpy taste in high school,” Butensky told me recently. “But in the late seventies, when I heard artists like Patti Smith and Talking Heads, my outlook changed. I got much more interested. I met my first friend in college because he had a The Jam button on his lapel. Back then, that was how you found your people.”

“Butensky’s spontaneous approach to shooting musicians matched the scrappiness still inherent to punk and indie-rock, genres rooted in a kind of contrarian, D.I.Y. ethos—less “Fake it till you make it” and more “Fuck making it.” “If I didn’t have an actual press credential, I usually either knew the band or knew someone at the club,” Butensky said. “I never worked in a studio, never used lights. It was punk rock on the go. Even when I thought, Maybe I can do this for a living—which never happened—I always knew it would only be on my terms.”

1. So be a clown if you want to be a clown!