Writing Prompts

“Write your first draft with your heart. Re-write with your head.” —From the movie Finding Forrester Can you describe your own writing process? What is your relationship to your own deep creativity and your internal editor?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”—Albert Einstein It’s the last day of your life. From the vantage point of your deathbed, what five questions have informed your life?

“Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen. Only the line never moves, and the other people are always coming in ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away until

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” —E.E. Cummings Tell us about a time someone

“I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all the places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to

“Instructions for life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” —Mary Oliver Tell me about a time you were astonished by life in a wonderful, life-affirming way.

“The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it as incorruptible as a child who,

“You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sandcastles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander.” — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life When I let my imagination wander . . .

“There are two kinds of daily life: the life in time, and the life in values: something which is not measured by minutes or hours, but by intensity, so that when we look at our past it does not stretch back evenly but piles up into a few notable pinnacles, and when we look at

“As women we’re told that approval is oxygen, but approval can be suffocating.” —Naomi Wolf, address at San Miguel Writer’s Conference, 2/12 Tell me about a time you stopped needing someone else’s approval.

“Anesthesia and amnesia are the two greatest sins of our culture. We forget and we go numb.” —Francis Weller Describe a time you numbed yourself (anesthesia) or forgot (amnesia). How have these forces impacted your life?

“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which (s)he has overcome.” —Booker T. Washington What do you consider the most important obstacle you have ever overcome? Tell us about that obstacle and how you overcame it.

“At the end of the day people won’t remember what you say or did, they will remember how you make them feel.” — Maya Angelou Describe someone who made you feel loved. Make the description so vivid that the reader feels loved, too.

“It got so cold in the house that icicles hung from the kitchen ceiling, the water in the sink turned into a solid block of ice, and the dirty dishes were stuck there as if they’d been cemented in place. Even the pan of water that we kept in the living room to wash up

“Whenever another loved one dies, all the others that went before her rise up to be counted.” —woman in an online support group for people with cancer Tell me about your dead. List their names, write an essay about them, or paint a portrait of one particular person you loved who has died.