Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts from the May 12th group meeting a try:
I put my faith in you…
It was the worst birthday he’d ever had…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously? Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
It depends on if you believe in luck…
Her father’s favorite stories to tell at dinner were a series of unfortunate events:
The donkey at the Grand Canyon, who, fur matted and eyes glazed, had decided on his 197th return trip up the steep canyon walls to take his rider on a much shorter suicide mission off the path, plunging to the depths of the canyon floor.
And then,
A med student in his final year of residency at Chicago’s Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital, driving his BMW Z3 convertible, bought with the promise of money he’ll surely soon be making, who drives under a highway underpass at the precise moment a slab of rough concrete looses itself from the bridge above.
And then,
A first time skydiver, too terrified to jump solo, who dives tandem with an instructor who has a heart attack.
And then,
His colleague’s brother, backpacking in Europe, drinking in a pub with a group of friends in Berlin, who steps off the curb of an almost deserted street at 2:17am and is hit and killed by a taxi cab.
He tells the stories to demonstrate how random the world is, how wild. She has so many questions, at first. What if the resident had slept at the hospital that night? What if the brother had stayed for another drink? What if the tourist had chosen a different, less suicidal donkey?
That’s not the point, her father had said. It’s just luck. Bad luck, good luck.
She’s not even sure if he really believes that-to this day, she can’t drive over a bridge without thinking about what she’d do if it collapsed. Her father had drilled her with preparation for these extreme scenarios since she was a child. Try to roll the windows down. Expand your lungs by taking deep breaths. Take off your shoes.
It wasn’t just collapsing bridges-what should she do if there was a shooter at school? A stranger at the door? An assailant in a parking garage?
20 Minute Timed Prompt-Anonymous Submission
Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts from the March 17th group meeting a try:
Pretty much the only thing she knew about Ireland…
It depends on if you believe in luck…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously? Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts from the March 3rd group meeting a try:
If her mood were a t-shirt, it would say…
Little boy, torn page, store, money…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously? Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts from the February 18th group meeting a try:
I saw it on TV…
I’ve had a lot of wasted moments…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously? Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
Greetings, South County Writers!
Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts from the February 4th group meeting a try:
If Memory Lane was an actual place, it would…
Getting older made us reckless…
Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.
Want to submit anonymously? Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.
Happy writing!
Greetings, South County Writers! We hosted our first meeting in our new home at the Peace Dale Public Library yesterday. It was good to see both new faces and familiar ones, and we were all able to write and respond to three outstanding prompts, which I will list at the bottom of this post.
I’m taking a little of my inspiration for today’s post from one of our prompts on Thursday: “It’s so easy to be faithless…”
It’s not surprising that a prompt about faithlessness would inspire themes of religion, sin, confession, and morality. But one of our writers created a character whose version of faith(lessness) had nothing to do with religion. Instead, she created a character who is trapped by monotony. Her faith is in bad luck, a job she hates, and people who take advantage of her good nature. As a casual listener, I was intrigued. That’s the kind of character who makes me want to ask more questions. Why does this woman believe that her luck is so bad it will never change? What makes it impossible for her to make changes herself? Will someone else change her mind? Will unexpected circumstances jolt her from her routine? In only a few lines, I was hooked. I wanted to know more about this woman: what made her who she is? Will she change?
Responding to prompts is not about perfection. With a timer counting down 20 minutes (try it-truly, 20 minutes goes by faster than you’d think), part of the writing process is simply trying to get ideas on the page fast enough to build something that might be worthwhile later: a promising phrase, the seeds for an intriguing character, the premise for an opening scene, or a scrap of dialogue that makes you wonder about a larger story arc.
It may be antiquated, but so far, everyone in our group writes their prompt responses by hand. I think there’s something about the scratch of pen on paper that’s still deeply satisfying, especially when our group is sitting in the near silence of the library and pens on paper is our only soundtrack. I can’t deny that I have an occasional flash of frustration at not being able to type and erase my thoughts as quickly as I do in my daily life-writing an email, for example. But I also can’t help but feel that writing by hand creates a pathway to thinking differently-planning my words and creating more carefully than I might if I was working on a computer, as I am now.
Before I arrived to open the library and get ready for the group meeting, my day was filled with professional correspondence. In my ‘Sent’ email folder right now, I have 13,189 emails. I spent time composing, editing, and polishing each one of those emails. I’ve been proud of some of them, and could even argue that some of them were really, really important-either to me, or to the person who read them.
I can’t even begin to imagine how many words those 13, 189 emails contain. I can tell you, however, how many words I managed to squeeze into my first prompt response on Thursday night: 396. That was as many words as I could write in 20 minutes for a prompt I felt really good about. Is my response perfect? No way. There are words and phrases crossed out. I’m confident there are spelling errors in it. The writing itself isn’t outstanding-it’s a little “stream of consciousness” to hold up on its own-but there was a sentence in there that made me think about the kind of girl who could fall asleep in one decade and wake up still herself in another decade. And then in another, earlier decade. And then suddenly it’s 1921…
Writing is itself a kind of faith: we put words down on the page in an effort to connect, or to see what we’re thinking. We write to imagine something different, to dream a better outcome. We write. And write. And write. We write without knowing if what we’re writing will have purpose, or direction. One of the writers in our group asked how I keep from “writing myself into corners.” It was a great question, and the answer is that creatively, I write myself into corners all the time. If I’m interested in getting out of those corners, there’s really nothing better than prompt writing- sloppy, funny, amateur, imperfect and unplanned, raw-to restore my faith that there’s more to be said.
Happy snow day, South County Writers, and happy writing.
Prompts from the January 21st Meeting:
20 Minute Prompts:
If I woke up in a different decade…
It’s so easy to be faithless…
10 Minute Prompt:
He could sweet talk anyone…
Greetings, South County Writers! We hope the New Year is treating you well. We thought it worth posting our most recent prompts and our “suggestions of order” in advance of tomorrow’s meeting, since we will have a wonderful mix of new and returning writers.
Prompts from the January 7th Meeting:
You don’t even know who I am…
The universe wants to be recognized…
We’re currently borrowing our “Suggestions of Order” from other writing groups like ours:
If you’d like to try a prompt ahead of time, our writers chose the two excellent prompts listed above at random during our last meeting. Give them a try!
Feel free to share your responses by posting them in the comments section, or, if you’d prefer to remain anonymous (mysterious), you’re welcome to email your response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com
We will look forward to seeing you tomorrow!
In honor of those of you who head “home” for the holidays, I’ve been doing some thinking about the intersection of geography, memory, and (of course!) writing.
I spent most of my childhood in a very small town, where the landscape became deeply familiar and where very little changed over the years. I knew the houses around every corner, the best hills for sledding, and the secret, wooded places to hide out in my neighborhood. I navigated by using my friends’ houses or our schools as markers; I navigated by beaches and by parks, by the distance a new location was from one I already knew.
Going home after years spent away is a little like that old French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The landscape has definitely changed: trees cut down, portions of the shoreline beaches eroded or changing shape, new developments popping up in what used to be cornfields or wooded space.
The high school has a new edition, although the smaller brick box maze I attended is still in place. The bookstore where I fell in love with reading just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The ice cream shop I visited in childhood has been replaced with another, and my favorite tea house has changed locations three times. There are food trucks that park near the town green now, and next to the green, the elementary school my childhood friends attended, the one whose doors I walked through for our graduation processional, sits empty. But behind that building is the field I played softball on for eight years, and the swings I used to swing on at 10 o’clock at night, after getting ice cream from a shop that no longer exists (because, small town. We got creative with our fun.).
I sat on those swings with a dark haired girl I no longer talk to, who has her Ph.D. now and a family I don’t know, on the night before I left for college. I swung on those swings with a girl who was the soul equivalent of a firecracker, swinging higher and higher, laughing and yelling and crying, the night of our friend’s wake. I stood by those swings for a half a dozen Fourth of July celebrations when the whole town turns out for the Concert on the Green. I stood by those swings when I glimpsed my crush, returned from Europe and looking like all the sharp edges the world has to offer. I stumbled to those swings after I chickened out on my first kiss, pulling away from the soft brush of lips and mumbling something about having to find…my sister? My friend? Somewhere (anywhere) else to be at that moment?
My husband teases me because as we drive through my town now, I tell the same stories over and over: that’s the temple where my sister played Esther for Purim, this is the waterfall we would pass on our way home from church every Sunday, be careful at this intersection because the oncoming traffic doesn’t stop and once my brother was in a really bad accident here, this is the gazebo where I spent an entire summer of humid nights, hanging out with my best friends.
My map of home is memory, even if no one else in the world could plot the same course. In ‘A Moveable Feast’, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed…”
Geography and memory inspire our creative processes. We visit our old favorite places, drive on familiar roads, and it reminds us of people, feelings and experiences we don’t always think about, those that have been eroded or erased from the maps of our lives now. Whether we use these details of place to build something new or simply to try to share our memory maps with others, we’re inspired to create a written landscape.
Happy holidays, and happy writing.
Today’s Prompt: Create a map, in words, from memory. Start at your parents’ home, or your home, or any favorite or least favorite place, and take your reader for a walk.
Your map could be plotted with all the places/things that are no longer there (friends moved away, trees cut down), or by specific memories (the room you first tasted ice cream, the yard where you drank out of the garden house, the driveway where your brother almost got hit by a car).
Welcome, writers! Kristen and I are excited to share that the South County Writers group is growing, and with new people interested, we thought it worthwhile to share additional information about the group.
First, any level of experience is welcome. Right now, we mostly have folks who love to write but don’t always have the time to do it. We have some people who write for a living, and others who are doing something else entirely in their day to day lives. We have have teachers, moms, technicians, students…part of the fun in the group is hearing how people from different backgrounds and levels of experience all respond to the same prompt. (You might be surprised to see how themes develop, even without planning: at our last meeting, three of us wrote about snow even though the prompt had nothing to do with winter and it was almost sixty degrees outside.)
Second, we welcome all kinds of responses to the prompts: fiction, nonfiction, memoir, stream of consciousness, poetry…if you manage to write song lyrics in response to a prompt, we’d be truly impressed. Whatever the prompt inspires in you, we’re interested. It doesn’t have to be neat, and it doesn’t have to be long. Sometimes, even one perfect line or phrase is enough to get you writing again.
The goal, of course, is to beat “writer’s block” in all of its forms. Writer’s block is formally defined as, “the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.” (Less formally, some writers will say writer’s block is when their characters stop talking to them.)
What we found at our last meeting is that mostly, we all love to write-even if it’s been years since we last wrote anything creative. But we don’t always have the time, energy, or mental clarity to sit down, start writing, and simply get words on the page.
You may have noticed that our prompts may be short: a few words, or the start of a sentence or idea. The brevity is intentional, in part. If you can train yourself to write without too much direction, almost everything in your life becomes prompt-worthy. (Prompt: dog. Does the word make you think about your first dog? Your child’s first dog? Does it make you think about the dog sleeping at your feet right now, and the way you can hear his nose whistling while he sleeps? Does ‘dog’ make you think of loyalty? Fear? Allergies? Does it make you think about the English language, and how ‘d’ and ‘g’ are kind of weird sounds? You’re getting the idea…)
Happy writing, and we hope we’ll see you at the group.
Final Details:
Can’t make a meeting? Post a prompt response in the comments section, if you’d like your response to be attributed to you. Want to post anonymously? Email us your response at: southcountywriters@gmail.com
We’re currently borrowing our “suggestions of order” from other writing groups like ours:
southcountywriters 