by Amorak Huey
The prompt is a thoroughly entrenched part of the pedagogy in creative writing courses from kindergarten to college. “Here’s a topic,” the teacher will say, “here’s a challenge, an idea, a form to try.” In return, students dutifully respond with a piece of writing that conforms to the instructions as best as they can manage. Perhaps because these kinds of exercises are so associated with “school writing,” prompts may for some writers carry a stigma as something “real writers” don’t use, as a trick or gimmick, as a crutch for beginners.
It need not be so.
For many poets, the prompt can be an essential component of an active writing life. The first step to using a prompt successfully is not to think of it as a school assignment that must be followed to the letter. A prompt should be a launching pad for your poems, not a leash that ties them down. The best prompt gives you a quick shove off the edge of a cliff you might not have even known was there—and then disappears as you negotiate the fall yourself.
One of the best things a prompt can do for a poet is to eliminate that most difficult of questions: What do I write about? Much of the world has this notion that poems are mystical gifts from the muses, words bestowed from on high to the poet who waits patiently for inspiration. That sounds nice, and while there’s certainly something mysterious and intangible in the creative process, sitting around and hoping for some external inspiration is not a recipe for getting much writing done. Perhaps it worked for Wordsworth or Byron, but my guess is that even the poets we study in literature classes got more accomplished by sitting down with quill in hand than by waiting to be granted some divine gift.
Writer’s block is usually some blend of anxiety and self-doubt combined with the many things that demand time in our daily lives. An excuse, in other words. A writing prompt can be just the trick to get past that excuse. It frees you up to write without waiting for inspiration; it also removes some of the pressure we all place on ourselves. If the piece of writing doesn’t live up to your hopes, you can always blame the prompt.
T.S. Eliot famously said: “When forced to work within a strict framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost, and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.” Think of the blank page (or these days, the blank Word document). It’s intimidating, that scary expanse of whiteness, all the emptiness, infinite possibilities. Where to start? How does anyone ever write anything? The answer is in the Eliot quote: You need constraint. A framework. Some limitation: steel against which you can strike the flint of your imagination. That’s what the prompt is for. Poet and professor Dean Rader says, “Novice poets tend to rely on abstractions and bigness, so I try to give exercises and prompts that force them to be concrete and specific.” The prompt, in other words, shrinks the world, narrows the infinite down to the possible.
For student writers, the prompts given by their instructors might feel restrictive, frustrating, a burden weighing down their creativity. Yet once you’re writing outside of the classroom context, all that freedom can be a little dizzying: you can write what you want, when you want, if you want. One of the most common things former students say to me is that they miss having writing prompts. I’ve had students e-mail me years after graduation asking for some new prompt to kickstart their writing again. Here’s a secret, one of the tricks of the poetry trade: Poets have to invent prompts for themselves. As Diane Thiel says, “All writers learn by reading and by setting themselves exercises.”
We all, we writers and poets, set ourselves language challenges every time we sit down with our (metaphorical) quill in hand. Write a five-line poem about X. Use this newspaper headline or that Facebook status in a poem. Write a poem in which the letter I does not appear. Write a sonnet. Write a sestina. Write a villanelle. The entire concept of formal poetry is itself a kind of prompt, an artificial constraint in the sense Eliot referred to: Write down your feelings about love, only do it in 14 lines of iambic pentameter following a particular rhyme scheme. Even the very choice to write a poem is a prompt. Why not write a short story, a novel, a journal entry, a blog post? A poem makes a particular kind of demand on your creativity, suggests certain things about form and focus in the same way a prompt suggests things about subject matter or approach. Poet and professor W. Todd Kaneko says, “Often the prompt has less to do with topic and more to do with restraint—do something specific with time or rhyming action or sound—anything to help me get something moving on the page. … I think writing prompts are most useful when they are based around an element of craft.”
Even if you don’t have a teacher to spark your writing with a ready-made syllabus full of assignments, you can always come up with them on your own. Invent whatever restrictions you like. Think of it as a game. (And if you want outside assistance, check out the many prompts provided in the sources at the end of this article.)
Here’s another secret about poetry: Every poet is, in some sense, a beginning poet. Every poem is a fresh start. Sure, some aspects of the craft might grow easier over time, with years of experience in reading and writing, but each new poem offers a new opportunity for discovery, for experimentation—and for failure. Yes, some (much? most?) writing fails. But of course failure is an essential part of writing; as Samuel Beckett said, “Fail again. Fail better.” It’s easy for a writer to focus too much on product and not enough on process, to see failure as an endpoint instead of a necessary detour on the writing journey.
The best way to think about prompts, then, is to see them as more about process than about product. They are intended to provoke you, to put you into situations that you have to find your way out of, like one of those reality shows where you’re dropped on a desert island and have to figure out how to build a hut before it rains. A prompt offers both a challenge and a learning opportunity. Cindy Hunter Morgan says prompts offer a writer “framework and focus.” Chris Haven says, “I think poets should think of our writing as responding to an implied assignment. We report on news from worlds that resemble ours or don’t, real ones or imagined ones. A prompt allows us to get outside of our own requirements and widen our scope of what readers might require.”
But of course, process is not the only thing that matters. In the end, we do want to create meaningful poems—work that appears to have been hand-delivered by the muses even if it wasn’t. It might seem that prompts are an artificial way to achieve this kind of writing; that is, writing from a prompt might feel more contrived than natural. And it’s probably true that most published poems probably don’t come directly from prompts in the sense of the prompts you were given in your writing classes: What did you do on your summer vacation?
The key to getting beyond any sort of artificiality goes back to the idea that a prompt should not limit but inspire your work. The prompt is a starting place, not the destination. Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, in the introduction to The Practice of Poetry, an excellent book full of exercises and prompts, write:
A good exercise serves as a scaffold—it eventually falls away, leaving behind something new in the language, language that now belongs to the writer. … Exercises can result in a new understanding of the relation of image to meaning, or a way into the unconscious, perhaps a way of marrying autobiography with invention, or a sense of the possibility of different kinds of structures, ways to bring a dead poem to life, a new sense of rhythm, or a slight sharpening of the ear. Exercises can help you think about, articulate, and solve specific creative problems. Or they can undermine certain assumptions you might have, forcing you to think—and write—beyond the old limitations.
A scaffold that eventually falls away—it’s the perfect metaphor. Here’s another: A writing prompt is not a box that your poem must fit into, but a pot that the poem grows out of. Start in the direction your prompt suggests, but if the poem seems to lead somewhere else, follow. If writing about your most recent summer vacation leads to a memory of some youthful July week spent at your grandmother’s lake cabin which in turn leads to a memory of your first crush and you wind up writing more about the crush, so be it. Even if those early lines about last summer disappear entirely from the final piece, they have served a purpose.
Not every prompt will lead you to your favorite poem. Some prompts will be easy. Some will seem hard. Often it’s the hard ones you should look at more carefully. Ask yourself: What makes this hard? What in particular am I struggling with here? If you really, really hate a particular prompt, try to figure out why. Try to learn something from the difficulty. One of my goals in every creative writing class I teach and with every prompt I assign is to push students outside their comfort zones and away from their assumptions about themselves and their limitations. Writing should be challenging, every time.
Here are five tips for using prompts effectively:
In the end, to paraphrase Richard Hugo, you owe a prompt nothing and the poem you’re writing everything. A poem will never be measured by how well the poet grappled with the prompt that started it. A poem must be measured by its own internal standards, by its music and language and the way it both creates and reflects the world we live in. You won’t get to walk around with your poem explaining how the prompt influenced this line or that image. The scaffolding, necessary though it may have been in the composing process, must fall away. Your poem must stand alone.
There is no shortage of prompts in the world. A Google search for “poetry writing prompts” yields more than 180,000 hits. If you’d prefer a more curated list, here are six sources of thoughtful, helpful prompts:
AMORAK HUEY, a former newspaper editor and reporter, teaches professional and creative writing at Grand Valley State University, where he assigns all kinds of writing prompts to his students. He is author of the chapbook The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl), and his poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2012, Poet’s Market 2014, The Southern Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rattle, and many other journals.