February was a hectic month (trying to annotate all of books from the Brooklyn Library system before moving to Queens! settling into a new apartment! applying for things! ), but we are so back, & I’m excited to share the prompts from a generative writing session I faciliated this past week.
This multi-part exercise works best when done without reading all of the different parts ahead of time.
Part I: Guided Freewrite
Set an interval timer for every two minutes (10 minutes total). Begin freewriting, and introduce/incorporate each of the words below into your freewriting every two minutes.
- Diction
- Fog
- Yank
- Vertice
- Tense
Part II: Language Bank
- 3 things you can admit, 3 things you don’t want to explain
- Yet the root of ____ is ____.
- What did I know of ____ but ____.
- 3 words you have pronounced wrong
The fill-in-the-blanks come from lines in WHEREAS.
Part III: Prompts
Drawing from Parts I & II, circle at least one line or idea you want to expand. Choose a prompt (or combine two together).
- Write a poem in which the title is a question and every line is an answer OR the title is an answer and every line is a question.
- Long Soldier writes, “I express commitment to reveal in a text the shape of its pounding.” Consider what you circled and sketch the shape of its pounding. After you have a form, write inside or outside of it.
- Write a poem that acknowledges the plural you you’re a part of. Consider where the I is located within this you, and experiment with using brackets/footnotes/blackouts/etc. to articulate their relationship.
Leave a Reply