Friday Writing Prompt #010
On good days and bad days. Also: imagining what your mother went through
Greetings, writers—
Though I’m keeping my “I write these prompts just before I send them” promise, I’m slowly getting some of my older prompts up on Substack. (I started emailing Friday prompts in 2020, so there’s a substantial backlog.) Rather than bombarding you with emails, though, I’m just publishing them to the site, which is why last Friday’s prompt was #9 and the week before’s was #6. I’m still figuring out how I want this newsletter to look and work, so maybe I’ll start naming prompts by the date they were written, or maybe I’ll take the numbers off entirely, I have no idea. This Substack—my book—my own self: we’re all just works in progress, people!
Speaking of WIP, last week I signed up for Jami Attenberg’s Mini-1000, which asks you to write 1000 words a day for six days. I totally recommend the experience. That being said, days 3-5 were terrible for me. I made the word count, but only by the skin of my teeth, late in the evening, with a sense of resigned and exhausted obligation. And what I wrote was complete trash.
Day 6, though—yesterday—was amazing. I passed the 1,000-word mark, wrote a new post for this site, did a bunch of research, and read Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments (“Think of this a short book composed entirely of what I had hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages”).
Why was yesterday so great when the days before it sucked? Because—and we all know this, but a reminder never hurts—that’s just how writing goes. A lot of times it doesn’t work very well. Then, on some beautiful days, it does. The important thing is to keep showing up for it.
And now, without further ado, here are today’s prompts, which are inspired by lines from 300 Arguments (Thank you, Sarah).
“You'll never know what your mother went through.”
Many, many possibilities for this; here are three:
-Use this as a line of dialogue in a scene. Who is saying this to your character, and why are they saying it?
-Change who’s being talked about: “You’ll never know what I went through.” Or Jesse had no idea what Tom had gone through. Then write that scene.
-Imagine what your mother went through.
“‘I didn’t do it for the money,’ says my friend who appeared in a pornographic film. ‘I did it for the shame.’”
-Write a scene in which your character does something for a very counterintuitive reason.
“Like a vase, a heart breaks once. After that, it just yields to its flaws.”
-What was your character’s first heartbreak? Or yours?
Happy Friday, happy writing—
Emily