Greetings, writers—
Happy 2025 to you all! Somehow it doesn’t feel like the new year yet—probably because school’s still out and I’m not back to my work routine, which means I haven’t even started trying to keep any of the resolutions I made out of habit and a mild sense of obligation two days ago.
They’re generally modest, in any case—drink more water, even though it tastes so boring; write more actual letters, etc. Of course I want to finish drafts of Book A and Book B, but the more important something is to me the less likely I am to write it down as a New Year’s resolution.
Are you a resolutions person? Have you made a resolution you’ve kept to this day? If so, I’d love to hear about it and I bet other Good Ideas readers would, too.
I’m going to offer two prompts today. One is from the first days of this Substack, and I put it here because it’s appropriate for the season. The other’s brand new and is just supposed to be weird, random fun.
Prompt 1
Read the poem Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shahib Nye.
Now, thinking about one of your characters (which could of course be you), answer one or more of the following questions:
What would your character burn (literally or metaphorically) if they could?
Write a scene in which once “there was something” and now, suddenly, there isn’t.
Write a scene that involves a fire.
Write what your character didn’t do.
Prompt 2
The first step of this prompt is to find a piece of writing the internet that’s especially weird and wild.
Not an essay or a short story—I’m talking about a Facebook post, an Amazon review, a tweet thread, or a comment on a YouTube video. You’re looking for something with voice, with strangeness, with that special kind of je ne sais quoi we might also refer to as WTF. This should not be hard at all.
It’s important to set a timer for this—twenty minutes tops—because otherwise you run the risk of falling into a YouTube k-hole and reemerging four hours later with your eyes going in spirals.
When you find the voice, the story, the wildness, adopt it as your own and write from it. I’ll give you three examples of things that struck me.
I am 6th generation sensitive which means that I have been in the presence of ghosts and spirits and orbs and all kinds of things that go bump in the night for my entire life and I have never truly been scared of any of them I feel a kinship with them basically and I can feel what they need or want and sometimes I can appease them or give them what they need and sometimes I can’t. I have gone to Savannah Georgia and dared to trespass upon a voodoo priestess’s doorstep and been possessed by her guardian Spirit demon spirit which came home with me. It took me three months to rid myself of this thing and it left me with a permanent calcified knot on my forehead from passing out and hitting my head on the bathroom tile it is not something I will ever do again in my lifetime but it was an experience.
That was a Facebook post from four years ago, which was the last time I was on social media. (I don’t remember doing it, but apparently I copied and pasted the post into a word file, which I discovered this morning.)
This next one is from a three-hour YouTube video of a hair dryer. Really. It’s from the same era.
When i was 3-4 i would hide under the table in the corner of the living room, where it was dark and hide under the cover from the sofa, when mum hoovered every day. This is pure kryptonite. I did ok boxing in the Navy but i used to joke that if the other fighter came in to this noise as their song, i would be fucked lol
In the first example, I would use—in addition to the subject matter—the writer’s fondness for long and run-on sentences and their disregard for commas, which is probably what drew me to the piece in the first place. Punctuation, or its lack, fascinates me.
In the second example, there isn’t so much of an identifiable voice, but there is great story material. What if you were about to fight in a boxing match and your opponent really did have white noise as his fight song? Maybe we’re veering into George Saunders territory there, but that seems like a really fun place to be for a writing exercise.
And finally, there’s this delightful review of a book called Where is Baby’s Belly Button?. In this case, I’d steal the writer’s voice and write with offended incredulity about something extremely obvious.
So, be off! Scour the internet for its delights and then use them in your prose. Or write about what you’d burn.
Happy New Year, happy writing—
Emily
Is the ghost part for real? Love it!
Resolutions? Finish Christmas presents!
Here's to a hopefully sane 2025.
Love ya!
So thankful of years of your Friday prompts. Often learned something or got a lift from your spirited, relentless hope that we can——.
No resolutions for me. I have to surprise myself into betterment.
Have a good , fulfilling 2025.
Best, Dominique