A word about writing prompts

What do you do with them besides answer them literally? This.

You got your writing prompt, you wrote a thing, and now you have a wall of words and aren’t sure what to do with it. I get it. Here’s a shortcut that will help you clear out the backlog of your writing and get it in shape to get it out in the world, and it’s dead-simple. Ready? Write until it’s useful to and in service of others. Ask yourself: how am I helping anyone with this?

With fiction, I would tell you differently. But, we are dealing in non-fiction here at WPFWT and entirely too much of non-fiction is languishing in a place between navel-gazing and useless. (If nothing else, you can always count on me to shoot straight with you.) Non-fiction should have no lesser standard of literary quality than fiction, and it has the additional task of having to have a clear purpose.

More specifically, if you’re writing an op-ed or any other type of persuasive work, you can’t very well stop at “this is a problem because it is.” You‘ve got to first explain why people should listen to you about the issue, bolster your argument with a little bit of data, and then you have to name what you want them to do about it. As we used to explain when I worked with The Op-Ed Project, you have to make your conclusion “specific and doable.” It’s the difference between “someone’s got to do something!” and “here’s what you can do.”

With personal essays, it can be a little trickier, but that’s where the answer to this question will save you: why am I telling this story? And lean into that lesson or purpose in the story and do it by showing not telling. That can be the difference between writing a travel essay about that one time you went on a trip and were delighted by your own adventure (“this happened, then this and it was so fun, then this happened…”), and writing a travel essay that leaves the reader with a sense of the place, with a sentence like this one Peter Ackroyd wrote in Views From Abroad:

Each Nordic country is cold in its own way; in Oslo, it is a rural cold, the cold of surrounding landscape. An urban cold rises from Stockholm, from the streets and public buildings. In Helsinki it is an elemental cold, a cold which invades the body and leaves it stunned. At midday you gaze at the sun without blinking; all things turn to ice. It is like the coldness of God. To travel here from Sweden is to move from light sleep to a harsh and sudden consciousness.

Ackroyd serves the reader not in a utilitarian way, but in a literary and experiential way. (Rolf Potts has a great guest post on his site on this point, which also quotes the Ackroyd piece.)

By all means, write it out in service of yourself and get your words down on the page, but then, when you return to it, lean into knowing the purpose of the writing, of what you want to say with it, and what you want to give to others with it.

I refer to this often in these prompts in a sort of shorthand with phrases like “and write until you bring it around to a current event” or “keep writing until you can connect it with something currently in the news.” You get the idea.

So your task today is to revisit some of your previous work that is sitting, unfinished, and decide what you want from it, and what you want to convey to others through it.