Note: Last week’s prompt was #011, which means I’ve posted five more of my past prompts on Good Ideas, should you be inclined to check those out.
Greetings, writers—
First things first: Rupert the owl was treated at DoveLewis and released into the care of a wildlife rehabilitator yesterday. The woman I talked to at DoveLewis wouldn’t give any details about his condition—“we aren’t authorized to do that anymore,” she told me—but she did say that while in general, people should try to leave wildlife alone, she believed Ian had done the right thing by bringing him in. Rupert, get well soon!
I’m not going to write a spur-of-the-moment essay about what happened yesterday in front of my downtown Portland workspace, because readers who don’t know me might start to think that I’m a magnet for weird and upsetting things, which I promise I’m not.
Instead, today’s newsletter is simply an exhortation to (re)commit to your regular writing practice, whatever that may look like.
I’ve kept up the 1000+ words/day deal, five days a week, in my quest to bang out a novel draft. Emphasis on bang: I’m typing as fast as I can, and almost all of the sentences are terrible. But I’m not letting that fact bother me yet. As I gleefully exclaimed to my family the other day, “I’ve never not hated writing like I’m not hating writing now!”
Why is writing so (comparatively) fun these days?
1.) Committing to writing 1000 words a day means I don’t need to decide again, each day, to do the work. I just have to do it because it’s the rule.
2.) I’m learning about the book as I write it, which feels exciting. The plot swerves, the characters go from faint outlines to slightly more opaque shadows (a long way to go still on that front), the themes reveal themselves.
3.) In this discovery phase of writing, anything can be material: a line from a novel, from a newspaper article, from a conversation overheard in the hall. Not to sound too woo-woo or anything, but sometimes it feels like the universe serves up exactly the thing you didn’t know you needed.
4.) Every day I clear that low bar (it’s not that hard to type 1000 shitty words), I win, and winning is fun.
What writing commitment might you make for yourself? What would you like to accomplish by, let’s say, next Friday? Set the goal, and make sure you tell someone about it. Put it in the comments below even. Accountability is crucial.
Okay! On to today’s prompt, which asks you to take a line from a poem and run with it.
Run in any direction: write your own poem with it; put the line in the mouth of one of your characters; use it as a journal prompt; argue against its premise in an essay.
The poems these lines were taken from are all found on the Academy of American Poets website. They appeared when I put the word “silence” in the search bar, you’ll find links to all of them below.
Many of these excerpts are downers (sorry), but honestly, they were the best lines. Here they are. Italics are mine:
It can end now, but not in the way you imagine
Before us
are the disasters we make
of our lives.
Everything
I do not know
about myself
has been buried
with you.
If I pull the fog away like theater curtains, what then?
I’ve been thinking
about how the world is actually unbearable.
You know what it is to be born alone
relish the silence
as you’ll relish tomorrow
You both seem bored still.
It’s fine.
Happy writing,
Emily
P.S. An earlier prompt asked you to consider what your mother went through. I found a poem that kinda relates.