Hi writers,
Before we get to the prompt for January, I wanted to outline a new service I’m offering in 2024. I’m calling it Creative Nonfiction Writing Life Consultations.
Borrow my brain for an hour to get clarity on your creative nonfiction process. I bring an MFA in creative nonfiction and nine years of experience in the writing and publishing space. This is a great option for:
Nonfiction/memoir/personal essayists who want to brainstorm everything from career questions, book concepts, essay ideas, ideas for where to submit their work, etc, but don’t need written feedback.
Nonfiction/memoir/personal essayists who aren’t sure whether an MFA is an appropriate next step.
Nonfiction/memoir/personal essayists who generally feel stuck on their work in progress or in their writing life and want help exploring what might get them unstuck.
Nonfiction/memoir/personal essayists who want to gain clarity around their goals.
Nonfiction/memoir/personal essayists who need help being directed to resources that can help them meet their goals.
If you’re interested in hiring me for a creative nonfiction writing life consultation, please fill out the contact form for rates and more information.
Each month, toward the middle of the month, I offer a writing prompt for my paid subscribers. Prompts may seem like a modern thing, but they have been used by artists of all kinds for centuries.
In a recent newsletter, poet and academic Maya C. Popa, wrote:
In ancient Greece, rhetorical exercises known as progymnasmata were used to teach public speaking and writing and included prompts for paraphrasing, amplification, and description. The medieval period used exempla, short narratives or anecdotes with moral or instructional purposes, to prompt writers to address a theme in their own works. In the 20th century, Surrealist artists and writers (think André Breton) embraced automatic writing, a process designed to bypass conscious thought and tap into the subconscious mind. Those exercises most nearly resemble the sorts of writing prompts we recognize today.
If you haven’t worked with a prompt before, my writing prompts are sentences, phrases, questions, objects, colors, shapes or media that are meant to jump start creative thinking in your writing practice. Because we never know what the prompt will be, we aren’t meeting it with any expectations, which means that sometimes we end up surprising ourselves.
My writing prompts are crafted with the idea that they will be used by writers of memoir and creative nonfiction, but they could prove useful to other kinds of artists too, particularly visual artists and dancers.
When you’re working with these prompts, don’t worry too much about “finishing” a piece of writing — instead, try to think of it as an opportunity to spend a few minutes with your creativity and perhaps to unearth some new ways of thinking.
Let’s begin:
Let’s take three minutes — and no more than that — for prep. Before we work with prompts, especially if we are working outside of the classroom, we should take time to prepare. This pre-writing process is important because it sets the stage for the writing you're going to do.