I invite you to establish a daily and weekly writing practice in your Writer’s Notebook. Find just 15 minutes for daily practice and just 90 minutes for weekly practice.
We are living history during this COVID 19 pandemic. Many of us are working from home, homeschooling, and suddenly spending a lot more time in general on the homefront. I wish for you to capture your unique experience through your writing.
However, many of my students have shared that they have no writing inspiration at all. I know how they feel. I should be writing more, not less, right? I mean I have all this time on my hands. Except I really don’t. Not only do I feel busier than ever, I also cannot seem to settle.
One of my students wrote in an email, “I can’t let myself get too immersed in a project for fear the world will disappear when I’m not looking.”
Exactly.
How can we create the sense of safety we need to write? Here are some prompts that might keep you going. But if you find that you would rather read mystery novels, watch “Tiger King,” or listen to ’80s rock on full blast, please know that’s OK, too.
Daily, weekly, or any frequency that strikes your fancy
Poetry: Keep a list of words and phrases you see in random places (bumper stickers, graffiti, signs, posters, art) that catch your eye. Use these words in your weekly writing time to make a poem.
Creative Nonfiction: Choose a verb and make its action something you complete every day. Then write about it. For example, I am working with the verb “mending.” Throughout the day, I am mindful of the things I do that could be regarded as some sort of mending. I write about that during my practice.
Fiction: Day 1. Set the pandemic scene using specific details. It can be your scene or one you imagine. Include a main character, and choose a point of view. Each day add a literary layer to it.
Day 2. What does your character want?
Day 3. Who or what is in the way? (Antagonist)
Day 4. Something your character didn’t see coming
Day 5. The only one who could help
Repeat
Here’s one of my favorite poems to keep you you going.
All genres: Each day, write down a scrap of conversation you overheard on a small piece of paper, fold it up and put it in a can or jar. During your weekly practice, do one of two things (or make up your own): 1. Pull one scrap of paper from the container and develop it as an essay, memoir piece, or beginning of a short story or poem. 2. Dump out all the scraps and assemble them into a whole piece, fiction, creative nonfiction or a poem.
Permission Granted
You do not have to choose the bruised peach
or misshapen pepper others pass over.
You don’t have to bury
your grandmother’s keys underneath
her camellia bush as the will states.
You don’t need to write a poem about
your grandfather coughing up his lung
into that plastic tube—the machine’s wheezing
almost masking the kvetching sisters
in their Brooklyn kitchen.
You can let the crows amaze your son
without your translation of their cries.
You can lie so long under this
summer shower your imprint
will be left when you rise.
You can be stupid and simple as a heifer.
Cook plum and apple turnovers in the nude.
Revel in the flight of birds without
dreaming of flight. Remember the taste of
raw dough in your mouth as you edged a pie.
Feel the skin on things vibrate. Attune
yourself. Close your eyes. Hum.
Each beat of the world’s pulse demands
only that you feel it. No thoughts.
Just the single syllable: Yes …
See the homeless woman following
the tunings of a dead composer?
She closes her eyes and sways
with the subways. Follow her down,
inside, where the singing resides.
Raye S. Leonard 