The Art (and Science) of the Writing Prompt

Why do certain prompts work and others don't?

The most successful writing prompt I used in my classes, bar none, began like this: Imagine a room you spent a lot of time in as a child. This could be a bedroom, a basement hideout, or your grandmother’s kitchen. Writing in the present tense, describe everything you see, hear, smell, or touch. Be as concrete as you can and write as fast as you can. For example,

I am sitting at the small Formica table at one end of the galley kitchen in my grandmother’s country house. Through the window is a pear tree with splashes of white blooms. It is Sunday, and on the stove is a large pot of dark pasta sauce, which simmers quietly. The rich smell of the sauce fills the kitchen and mingles with my grandfather’s cigar smoke…

This initial prompt rarely failed to produce a furious burst of writing. The second step followed seven or eight minutes later: Let’s think about what you just wrote. I’d like you to finish the following sentence in your notebooks: As I look back on this now, I realize that… Follow that sentence for as long as you can until the writing dies out.

Though these prompts didn’t always lead to essay drafts, the class discussion that followed the activity was always lively and insightful. “I’m amazed at how much I could write about a room!” Other writers confessed that they couldn’t stay in the room but ultimately found their way to other places and other material that was even more interesting. There was also discussion about how the writing triggered by each prompt differed. Most agreed that the first step, written in the present tense, was more richly detailed and infused with feeling than the prose prompted by the second step, which tended more towards reflection and abstraction. The first prompt produced writing that rendered and the second writing that explained.

I would introduce this writing exercise very early in my classes because it laid a foundation for understanding the intellectual work of essay writing. The two prompts nicely introduced the idea that personal essays involve two narrators—the remembered self, and the remembering self, or the then-narrator and now-narrator—and that these are often in dialogue with each other as writers work towards an understanding of their subjects. This movement between narrators also helps to explain how personal essays are structured.

Why do some writing prompts like this work so reliably while others often fall flat? Partly, their success depends on things that have little to do with the prompt itself. This should be private writing, shared only voluntarily. It is preliminary work that should free writers from the need to perform. It also helps when writers feel comfortable with “bad” writing. The prose produced by writing prompts is often raw stuff; it can be awkwardly composed, unfocused, and disorganized. These are first thoughts, after all, that may become coherent later. Fortunately, Natalie Goldberg, Peter Elbow, Anne Lamott, Donald Murray, and others helped to establish the usefulness of writing badly to write well.

But even if the conditions are right, some writing prompts still flop. There are many reasons for this. Writers might not sense that a prompt has promise, that it might not open doors that are worth walking through. However this isn’t always apparent. My students often had little faith that they could write for eight minutes about a room, and when they did they were much more receptive to generating material this way. Prompts that seem to invite general responses—”Define fear”—typically die out after a minute or two. Writers who fail to see a relationship between the material generated by prompts and subsequent drafts may start to lose faith in the method altogether.

But when prompts work, they can be rich in surprises. The poet Richard Hugo wrote about how “triggering subjects” often lead to the real subject of the poem or essay, and that these “generated subjects” may not be found any other way. Prompts are the gateway to this kind of discovery. But what are the ingredients of a prompt that might give it this power?

Consider a prompt like this: Describe the smell of summer and its association with a certain time and place in your life. Describe that place. Smell is a sense often associated with memory. This is sometimes called the “Proust phenomenon,” a nod to the famous reference in Remembrance of Things Past about how the smell of a tea-soaked madeleine triggered a flood of memories for the narrator. Most of us have experienced this. Neuroscientists suggest that “odor memory” is so powerful because it has direct links to portions of the brain linked with emotion and memory, and that such remembering is “unusually resistant to decay” over time. We don’t forget how it smelled and where we were when we smelled it.

Researchers in “autobiographical memory” offer additional clues about why some prompts work especially well. When Brown and Kulik (1977) introduced the idea of “flashbulb memories”—or unusually vivid recollection of a shocking public event—it helped to explain why a prompt like this is likely to work so well: Describe your memory of the 9/11 attacks. Where were you? What were you doing? What effect did it have on you?

Though “flashbulb memories” are usually associated with shocking public tragedies, they would seem to apply equally well to personal events, especially those that are remembered with strong emotion—a death in the family, a difficult break-up, or an unexpected success. This may be why it’s so helpful to identify evocative categories of experience when designing a prompt. For example, some researchers suggest that “firsts”—first kiss, first serious relationships, first encounter with loss—are potent triggers for remembering.

However, emotion isn’t the only factor that prompts us to remember. One of the challenges of being human is our need to establish a personal identity, a sense of self that feels continuous despite many life changes. Scholars who study personality development suggest that one way we do this is to develop “life stories,” narratives that help us to understand how we came to be who we are. We add episodes to these stories when we sense that they shaped our personal identity; some researchers call these “life-event connections.” This may be why “turning point” prompts can be powerful for some writers: Write about turning points in your life. First consider life events that are usually associated with change—a sudden loss, graduating from school, a first job, marriage, having a child, discovering one’s sexual identity, experiencing discrimination, etc. Choose one turning point and write fast about it for eight minutes. Whenever possible, tell stories, describe scenes, and include other voices. Look for opportunities to analyze why this episode has turned out to be significant to you.

This turning point prompt is similar to the “imagine a room” prompt that opened this essay. Both invite writers to bring two minds to the material—one that is open-ended and exploratory, and the other that is interpretive and analytical. This is the basic machinery of thought that produces meaning. We generate and then we judge. This is the insight that most informs my writing prompts. In the room prompt, the two steps make this shift in perspective is explicit. But most experienced writers instinctively make this move from rendering experience to evaluating it, often moving back and forth between the two.

When they work, writing prompts yield the unexpected. Sometimes they generate a burst of writing. Sometimes they produce a line that shimmers with meaning. Occasionally, they point to an unwritten draft that is waiting in the wings. Whatever prompt I try out with my students or myself, the first question that follows is always the same: What surprised you?